The acquittance of Alternate Endings, a B-sides aggregation from Middle England post-hardcore bastions, Fightstar, raises a question: hardly how itchy do staunch devotees capture during that 'tween-album oblivion period? Evidently, enough to warrant this provisional record, just to keep the keenest fans ticking over until the next record album proper.
But, at the same metre, the fact that a band so prematurely pink-slipped have clocked up sufficiency material to put out an assemblage of this sort underlines that Fightstar are non a band to be miscalculated. And its parochial fan-focused characteristic suggests they're certainly non putting this out to make a quick buck, as is so ofttimes the nature of such anthologies.
The sequential development on display across Alternate Endings, while non laid forbidden chronologically, makes for a noteworthy expression to study - the earlier recordings see Charlie Simpson apparently knocking on 60-a-day to achieve a strained, grizzled croakiness (clamant credibility, go out?) while the later material carries a far more organic quality.
And though the more late material - Dark Star or Hold Out Your Arms, for instance, both B-sides from the One Day Son, This Will All Be Yours era - may not be a repay to choirboy trillings, they're a significant step on from the primary amalgam of desperate emo yearnings and noise for noise's sake. Deep amongst the echelons of Fightstar lurks some contact musicianship, patently only visible when the bravado is left at the threshold. A tasting of things to fall, one might hope?
And even, ready to subvert this theory with evil glee comes Where's The Money, Lebowski?, the lone specimen of brand new material on the compilation. Stale, strident and contrived beyond principle, it's a rapid excursion straight back to square one. That aforesaid, it's at least equipped with the element of surprise.
Acoustic offerings lifted from Colin Murray's Radio 1 roger Sessions provide similarly diverse extremes of timber. Where a stripped-bare rendering of Floods heightens the song dramatically and pays testament to the band's broad aptitude, a lumpen, oafish take on Waitin' For A Superman by the Flaming Lips quick undoes whatsoever display of artistry explicit during the aforementioned runway.
Still, Alternate Endings proves, if cypher else, that Fightstar ar far from transitory. Somehow, they let forged trine solid years' worth of a estimable career, escaping laughable boy band ties and gaining something in the way of insufferable acceptance, something which Alternate Endings cements deservingly. But, as a record in itself, the customary farrago omnibus scene confirms this not so much as an album, but as an article of merchandise strictly for the most active of fans.
More info
