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Rating: Seven years after the original release, Feeder decided to reissue one of the least known and most controversial albums of their career, "Renegades".
Released in July 2010 as the seventh studio work, two years after the previous and underrated "Silent Cry" (an album that suffered from poor promotion due to the deep crisis of the Welsh trio's then-label, yet included true gems like "Itsumo" and "Sonorous"), "Renegades" represented a rather decisive return to the origins in Grant Nicholas's band sound. Completely absent were the epic ballads that had made the group's fortune in the 2002-2005 quadrennium; Feeder opted to push the hardening of the sound, begun with "Silent Cry", to the extreme, returning to the tight guitars of the "Polythene" era, but with new awareness and maturity. It was also the first album without drummer Mark Richardson, who rejoined Skunk Anansie and was replaced by former James Blunt and Ben's Brother Karl Brazil. Tracks like "Down To The River", the title track, and "City In A Rut" are worthy of the Welsh's best production, while the grunge-tinged hard rock of "Sentimental" and "White Lines" is a balm for the renewed vitality of the band from across the Channel.
In this new Special Edition, released at the end of 2017, Feeder adds a good 7 new items compared to the standard 2010 edition. Excluding the menacing "Godhead", already present in both the UK special edition and the Japanese edition of the time, the new reissue primarily includes four tracks released during that period in a series of EPs under the name Renegades, a sort of "band within the band" (as Grant Nicholas defined it at the time); Feeder used this new moniker also for some concerts presenting the new tracks before the album release, so as to avoid potential controversies given the massive presence of new songs. These are the power pop of the beautiful "In Times Of Crisis", the epic alt-rock of "All I Ever Wanted", the Weezer-like distilled "As Time Goes By", and "Fallen", the only semi-acoustic track (later used as a B-side of the first single "Call Out") comparable to their more melodic output of the early 2000s.
The other two tracks included are two little gems: "Sending Out Waves," a stunning, insistent rock used back then as a B-side of the second single and title track, and "Side By Side", a digital single released in 2011 to support the victims of the Tohoku earthquake (Japan). It's a rather catchy song with a good chorus, crafted during the album sessions and originally titled "Barbarella", but then excluded from the album.
An exhaustive reissue that completes the experience of an album that has always been too little considered, but represented a fundamental passage in the career of the Welsh trio.
Best track: Down To The River
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