Scanner
The Galactos Tapes

Scanner, this very special and exciting band turns thirty and to celebrate they have put together a compilation they call a best of and added some rerecording of older songs with the new line up. They call it The Galactos Tapes and it contains fifteen songs from the career in remastered editions and ten rerecorded songs where of course iconic songs like Warp 7 are present. But if you are Scanner, how do you put together a best of album? At least when considering that they have done one exceptional album in their debut Hypertrace and a few meh-albums and then they came back with a bang in 2015 with their second best album that is still a long way of the great Hypertrace that was rereleased last year along with the second album Terminal Earth.

There is a fair deal of variation over the songs considering that the Scanner albums were all quite different in style with different vocalists and so on. Their style has do be described as Sci-Fi heavy metal, heavy metal with a touch of spacey things. The career took off at warp speed, and that makes it kind of strange that they start the album with Galactos that was a bonus track on the Japanese version of Hypertrace and on the rerelease from last year. This track is the worst of the rereleased version of Hypertrace and Warp 7 would have started it better but the songs fit well together bar perhaps the Queen cover Innuendo that feels a bit out of place. The second disk sounds more like the last Scanner album but with more familiar songs, and good production.

I think that this is a pretty good document of the Scanner career, their six albums feels well represented here, and the second album is a good show of how the old albums could have sounded if they made them today. In the case of the Hypertrace songs they are quite a lot worse, but still good songs. Overall I think it works quite well and it is a likeable collection of songs but there are several of the band’s best songs missing. I think that is a problem when you have one exceptional album where all the songs are better than anything else the band has done, the only song besides the ones already on Hypertrace that would have fitted on Hypertrace is the one called Puppet on a String. Otherwise I think there are some songs they shouldn’t have on a best of album, like Innuendo and Galactos that aren’t particularly interesting songs. Still, I think a better choice for a celebratory album would have been to rerelease Hypertrace with the added bonus of having that album rerecorded with the new line up, that would have been great – why didn’t they think of that?

So, it is a good collection of songs but it is hard to think that this is the best they have, as I know there are several of their best songs missing from this “best of” -album. I still think it is an album worth getting though, if not only for the rerecorded versions of their older songs. But in my view Scanner have already released their best of album, twice.

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