Camper Van Beethoven – Telephone Free Landslide Victory / II & III / Camper Van Beethoven / Camper Vantiquities

Whether driven by corporate beneficence or, more likely, greed, the encyclopedic box set is as ubiquitous in digital’s mature phase as label consolidation or file sharing. As an unintended sop to the patient and/or fiscally circumspect, such completist collections are inevitably followed by more affordable distillations. So if you balked at last year’s Camper Van Beethoven indie-era summation Cigarettes & Carrot Juice, consider the just-issued single-disc volumes your just reward — and the newly appended bonus material an unexpected, possible boon.

Possible because the additions cut both ways. Where most reissues treat bonus tracks as supplementary, end-of-disc material (allowing listeners to sample dutifully and then ignore), the Campers, true to their prankish nature, interleave their extras into the original running order — with the alterations camouflaged in redrafted track listings and liners. So amongst cherished favorites from Amerindie’s golden age, you’ll now find all manner of EP cuts, demos, alternate takes, re-recordings, tape trickery and, of course, the occasional, unsampled gem. True, for the most part, the bonus material falls between the LP era’s A and B sides, but there’s just enough resequencing, swap-outs and stray extras to distract.

On Telephone Free Landslide Victory and II & III, the effects are admittedly in keeping with the material’s “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” ethos — just more noodlings and ephemera to sift through. The Campers have always been something of a musical Cuisinart, mixing and matching American roots music and ’60s psychedelia with cross-cultural borrowings from the Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond. Their many cryptically titled instrumentals only hint at the resultant musical sprawl: “Payed Vacation: Greece”, “Balalaika Gap”, the eternal “ZZ Top Goes to Egypt.” But through some strange, serendipitous alchemy, the albums move as one thing, with the many fine songs-as-songs — the college radio staple “Take The Skinheads Bowling” being only the most prominent — foregrounded and enhanced by their more schematic neighbors.

Landslide Victory is the more songful set, II & III the more musically expansive, but both are marked by the good-humored unselfconsciousness of a band whose reach regularly exceeds its grasp — often by design. Suckers for a good joke, dumb (e.g. the above-referenced instrumental titles) or otherwise, and steeped in Santa Cruz scene mythology, the early-period Campers make a virtue of anti-virtuosity, their omnivorous eclectism a ward against obscurantism.

In retrospect, this crucial, shambolic charm is something of a high-wire act, a fragile balance upended at times by the bonus material. For every “Wasting Your Time”, an inspired tape mash-up, there are a handful of aimless aural doodles; the re-recorded “Chain Of Circumstances”, though more muscular than its earlier variant, is less spacious; and why flip-flop the debut’s opening tracks?

Reissue tinkering on the self-titled third album, though less extensive, is quite possibly more disruptive. In its original incarnation, the record represented an unexpectedly assured reworking of stray odds and ends into something resembling a statement of purpose. Bracketed by two Beach Boys-referencing undeniables and redolent in the casual exoticism of their Cali forefathers Kaleidoscope (subject of their own recent completist box), the album pays homage both overt and oblique to Zeppelin, the Dead and Pink Floyd, while profitably indulging the band’s penchant for loopy side-excursions, including a compressed history of Utah, a John Cale-style recitative, and a dippy, dystopian reverie. Despite several A-list add-ons (notably the sprightly, eccentric “Love The Witch”), the reconfigured album feels slightly bloated, less shapely, more third-in-a-series rather than career-making peak.

Mind you, such after-the-fact monkeying is hardly unprecedented. The title track of Television’s Marquee Moon (one of last year’s finest reissues) now features an additional minute of guitar heroics, while the recent “Deluxe Edition” of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors inserts a 45-only B-side between the original’s first and second sides. In the age of DVD-fueled “director’s cuts,” such sins of excess seem increasingly inevitable. But if the Campers truly intended a wholesale re-imagining, why not fold the spotty Camper Vantiquities, itself an odds-and-ends collection, into the regular releases as well?

So despite my many misgivings regarding the format, if you’re still wavering, buy the box. Cigarettes & Carrot Juice is moderately priced, and though you’ll sacrifice a handful of quality extras, the box’s Greatest Hits Played Faster, a live roughing up of their too-straight Virgin material, more than compensates.