By boggling up all but three tracks from Bollocks with weedier productions from the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle soundtrack and a quartet of non-LP B-sides, The Original Recordings is way less monotonous than Never Mind the Bollocks despite the utter genericness of its title. Hearing stuff like "Pretty Vacant","Anarchy in the UK", and "Holidays in the Sun" shuffled with covers of classics by The Monkees, The Who, The Stooges, and Eddie Cochran helps those great songs stand out from the murk better. I would have chucked the unfortunately timely "Bodies" (sorry, Johnny, but there's no way to read this song as anything but an anti-abortion belch, and your half-hearted protests to the contrary are as rich as Keith Richards's recent claim that "Brown Sugar" is about "the horrors of slavery" and not just a witlessly ugly joke) and the idiotically misplaced ire of "New York" (a confounding criticism of the spectacularly influential New York Dolls, loaded with homophobia Rotten later tried to sell as references to meatballs!) and brought in the more righteous anger of "EMI" and "Liar". But overall, The Original Recordings is a good way to get most of the Pistols' you'll ever need. Plus the mastering sounds great and the vinyl is perfectly cut.
