Yeah That's Right wrote:Unsurprisingly I've thought about this topic before myself, and Play By Numbers is the album which always intrigued me the most. I think the cover art is very eye-catching, and like so many others here apparently are, I'm a sucker for shoegaze. My second choice would be Hooper Bay - it's the last of the purported releases so it's not unreasonable to expect it would have a more refined sound closer to the BoC we know, and if my suspicions of known tracks that are originally from the album are correct, it some great tunes.
Acid Memories is a given but it's not the one I'm most intrigued by. Closes vol 1 is kind of the black sheep, no known sample and little in the way of hints of what it was like, so I'd like to hear that, but like Opothecary says, I'm inclined to believe some of the tracks are found on R35TT. Catalog 3, for whatever reason, doesn't interest me too much. Being that it's their earliest release, I have to assume it would be a lot rougher and less progressive than their later work.
Well, we do have something from Closes Vol. 1 (if Napster/Soulseek from many years ago are to be believed) when there was a track labelled Godever floating around, which turned up as A14 on R35TT years later.
Since this was a long time before R35TT, and R35TT has been blessed by mdg as real, we just have to assume that A14 is Godever; if someone is going to leak something that was found to actually be legit years later, there's no reason to lie about the title at the time. If that's an accurate assessment, it's what makes me feel like we have a decent chunk of Closes Vol. 1. It's easy to imagine a lot of that tape being contemporary with the sound of that song.
Besides some Old Tunes cameos, the unknown material on R35TT seems divided by some slightly primitive material that is easy to imagine as BoC, and then the full band material which makes me think of Acid Memories or Play By Numbers. I've said before that I think the former is probably kind of "darker"/acoustic full band material (based on past interviews of what they explain their sound being like at the time) and Play By Numbers being more shoegaze leaning. Since we have samples of 4 (counting Godever) of the 5 releases, I think its easy to plug most of the material on R35TT into the ideas presented by those samples and the interviews I mentioned.
Like zeoevil said, there are supposedly "many" old compilations of music, but it's just easier to take an Occam's razor approach to the whole thing and assume that we know of most/all of the pre-Twoism material, because there's like, well over 100 songs when you add up those 5 releases and the 2 OT tapes. They might be prolific but they don't have an autogenerate music button (or if they do, I want one)