Back From Samoa is THE CLASSIC of the Samoas corpus, even if Metal Mike nowadays thinks Brain is the best. (Note that of course I’m transparently a poseur, since my ancestry is not red-blooded Samoan.)

As for the other albums, I didn’t care that much for Inside My Brain when it came out: “Hot Cars” was great, but they fucked up the songs from the original repertoire on all the other tracks. Naturally I liked the re-release better (i.e., I’m playing on the new Side Two).

YST is great except for the lame rendition of “Somebody to Love” and the fact that Mike got me pissed off: I first heard “Unhinged” on the radio! Mike hadn’t even bothered to tell me about the new release, much less send me a copy! Sheeeit!

STP is pretty good, and has some great tracks (e.g., “Garbage Pit”, “Death of Beewak”), but listening to it recently I found I didn’t like the guitar sound that much. Too synthetic, too fuzz-boxy.

“Live at Rhino Records” would have been great if the re-mastering of the tape had not somehow sucked all the guitars out of the mix. Someday, this will be remedied.

As for “The 90′s Suck and So Do You”, I never liked it. It took me a re-listening to realize that 1) the songs are good 2) the production sucks.

In closing, I will modestly submit that all Samoans liner notes not authored by “Wayne Davis” are unmitigated bullshit.