Roger C. Reale & Rue Morgue – The Collection. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

The forgotten don’t stay quiet forever, and for that it should be noted that resurrections come with the price of wonderful reveal, that we shake our heads at the moment of surprise and gasp that such a find was ever hidden from the public.

The myths of Egyptian royalty is such that omens and superstitions have become entangled with the prophesies of doom, an open passage way illuminating both history and the buried, the secret that everyone suspects, but cannot find the answers too without some sort of sacrifice; often that sacrifice is Time.

You cannot keep a good person down and whilst entropy may have nibbled at the edges of music’s pressure cooker of Punk and associated groove, Time has remembered, and for Roger C. Reale & Rue Morgue Time has exposed all once more.

Unlike the fated archaeologists who stumbled into the unknown when they released the air trapped inside Tutankhamun’s final resting place, what greets years, two-album recording by Roger C. Reale & Rue Morgue is a collection that opens the senses of the lost and found, of the phantom made solid and robust, of tracks that have been unpublished for four decades.

The Collection is an insight to what could have been, the short-lived initial explosion that Punk and the mesmerising speed of aggression that went hand in hand with the underground creatives ripping apart the fabric of a post war malaise. It is captured across a series of songs, that included incredible performances by the likes of Mick Ronson, G.E. Smith, Jimmy McAllister and Hilly Michaels, which would have graced the airwaves with such an assured tone that it would have rivalled the finest of the genre at the time.

Unearthing treasure is not about preserving relics, it is about allowing their history to speak to the present day and across the two albums that make up The Collection, one of which was regretfully never released, Radioactive and Reptiles In Motion, the sense of history blazes in the dark like a beacon welcoming in the patient explorer. Across songs such as Pain Killer, Rescue Me, Reach For The Sky, Madonna’s Last Stand, a cracking cover of The Troggs track I Can’t Control Myself, Pros and Cons, Debutante Ball, I’m In Distress, Living In Anger and Rock It To The Kremlin, the curtain of discovery is drawn back with a flourish and even after four decades the sound is one of beautiful backlash against rules that made no sense, of genuine care for music.

Time remembers the forgotten, even if we as a species are too busy thinking of the tomorrow that evades us, and in The Collection, Time is to be considered a hero and Roger C. Reale & Rue Morgue, alongside Mick Ronson, are the leading players for world that never knew.

Roger C. Reale & Rue Morgue – The Collection is released on October 18th via Rave On Records.

Ian D. Hall