Big Star - Complete Third box set

The Guardian 100

(Omnivore Recordings)

Related: Mike Mills: why I love Big Star

Big Star’s cult masterpiece is the sound of disintegration, of things falling apart – and of Alex Chilton’s drug-fuelled lurch away from the powerpop of Big Star’s first two albums. Recorded in 1974 but unreleased until 1978, Third/Sister Lovers has since been reissued sporadically under a variety of titles and with different track listings – so there has never been a definitive version until now. Omnivore has painstakingly assembled every tape from the sessions at Memphis’s Ardent studios and sequenced them in chronological order. We hear how the album grew from Alex Chilton’s demos – pristine recordings of beautiful performances – via rough mixes by producer Jim Dickinson and engineer John Fry to the final test pressing, which was rejected by record companies. What Complete Third shows is that the increasingly troubled Chilton arrived in the studio with finished songs, not sketches – and the atmosphere of chaos and fractured menace was wholly intentional, worked up in the studio and abetted by Dickinson.