The Mr. T Experience gets the odds 'n sods treatment on the two volumes of "Shards."
From the “you can’t listen to everything” department: I have seen albums by The Mr. T Experience for years, and enjoyed the often-entertaining cover art, but have never actually heard one. The band’s original run, from the mid-1980s to the millennium, is not a period where my knowledge of punk music runs all that deep, I guess. It still seems sort of weird that I just totally missed them, though. So it goes.
That’s a long road to explaining that Shards: Pieces of the Mr. T Experience, 1985-1999 is perhaps a curious way to be introduced to the band. The two LP volumes are shaggy dog sets made up of what the band describes as bonus tracks appended to past CD reissues and songs from varied compilations over the years. In some ways, though, getting to meet a band via an odds ’n sods collection is absolutely the perfect way to find out what they are about. You can hear their experiments, probably some influences-exposing covers (here ranging from a Schoolhouse Rock! song to The Collins Kids to Duran Duran), perhaps demos, and probably some songs that made it to tape but not an album, for whatever reason.
These two comps have all the elements of pop-punk that makes it work for me: good songwriting; a clever, sideways sense of humor; and a willingness to play around with the standard tempo and instrumental palette of the genre. As a bonus, they are also both very nice sounding pieces of vinyl; the records were both mastered and cut just up the road in the Middleton area, by Dave Eck at Lucky Lacquers. (And, thanks to Dave for sharing these with me, by the way.) After hearing the leftovers by The Mr. T Experience, I will definitely pick up the next proper album I see. (Sounds Rad, RAD-003 and RAD-004, 2018)