Oddities is correctly titled. It's essentially an "official" bootleg, containing six distinct oddities -- tracks created by Spring Heel Jack for a variety of reasons. In many ways, this is SHJ at their most intellectual.

Nowhere on Oddities will you encounter the dubby drum 'n' bass stuff that you'll find on typical Spring Heel Jack releases. Instead, you get pieces like the haunting, delicate "2nd Piece for La Monte Young", which is constructed chiefly of processed violin samples. It recalls George Crumb's "Black Angels", but without the same brutality. It's really beautiful! "Shine a Light" is a cover of the Spiritualized tune of the same name, and SHJ's John Coxon and Ashley Wales do a great job of capturing the vast, static quality of Spiritualized's music while imbuing it with their own sense of urgency. "The Road to the Western Lands" is a setting of a William Burroughs text (read by the author) from Bill Laswell's 7 Souls remix project. It is quite sparsely orchestrated with the emphasis placed on Burrough's fascinating prose. I think it's my favorite track on the disc. "Trouble" is a somewhat trippy, ambient ditty. It is very atmospheric and free -- good music to hallucinate to! I particularly enjoy the ending, when a pretty little melody and Latin rhythm come in after ten minutes without a distinct sonic structure to hang on to. Finally, "BBC Radio 3 - Mixing it Bath Festival Commission - Piece for Six Turntables - Version 4" (whew!) is a type of minimalist collage. It's very restrained and subtle, blending the music of French masters (Rameau, Lully, Poulenc, Debussy) with contemporary French electro-acoustic music. The piece was performed live using 6 turntables on Mixing It (the BBC's late night avant garde/new music show), and is perhaps the most distant of Oddities' works; it fails to really grab you, and requires you to put forth some effort to follow it.

I'm impressed by groups like Spring Heel Jack that seem equally capable of dialoging in a serious art vocabulary as they are in a pop vocabulary. For that breadth alone, everyone should have Oddities in their library.