You’ve got to feel for whoever at Warners was tasked with choosing a name for this, a collection of tracks from the four albums thus far produced by glossy Canadian punks Billy Talent. ‘The Best Of Billy Talent’, for example, would have been disingenuous as that album was released in 2003 and simply titled ‘Billy Talent’. Its chosen title of ‘Hits’ is also something of a misnomer, though, as this table of the band’s international singles chart performances shows. We would have gone with ‘Billy Talent: The Glaringly Obvious Playlist’, but then there’s probably a reason our job doesn’t involve naming anthology albums for major label artists.
We’re being glib, but this release does prompt the question: who is this record for? We loved ‘Billy Talent’, ‘Billy Talent II’ and 2012’s ‘Dead Silence’. Presumably anyone else who did already owns those records; those who don’t aren’t going to be prompted to buy any of them by this bizarre, arbitrary selection of tracks from BT’s back catalogue. The inclusion of two new tracks might have worked to get fans to shell out for songs they already owned back in the days before iTunes and Spotify but in 2015, when even fans of One Direction are calling out major labels for cynical marketing tricks, there’s really no explanation for this album’s existence.
The tracks-per-album balance feels about right, even if it does suggest a lack of confidence in the band’s post-BT2 material; a lack of confidence which is not entirely unfounded as the chronological sequencing serves to highlight just how bland 2009’s ‘Billy Talent III’ really was. Certified classics ‘Try Honesty’, ‘River Below’ and ‘Devil In A Midnight Mass’ all stand the test of time but BT3 lead-off track ‘Devil On My Shoulder’ sounds like a band running out of batteries even when following BT2’s energetic low-point ‘Surrender’. And Ian D’sa’s guitar solo on ‘Rusted From The Rain’ still kills, coming out of nowhere with a kick that has no place slumming it on such a dirge.
‘Viking Death March’ and ‘Surprise Surprise’ are even better than we remember, though, and got us listening to ‘Dead Silence’ in its entirety again. So perhaps that’s the point. If we’re lucky, this is simply a placeholder to remind us of what we loved about Billy Talent and if that’s the case then ‘Kingdom of Zod’ is a promising trailer for any fifth album. But as anemic, balladesque album closer ‘Chasing The Sun’ literally contains the lyric ‘the swans sing a song’ (subtle guys, real subtle), we won’t be holding our breaths.
If it does transpire that this is the last we hear from Billy Talent, ‘Hits’ is as good a place as any to start when it comes to compiling your personal ‘Best Of’ playlist but unless there’s a swathe of fans out there with upcoming birthdays and no functioning internet connection, it remains an odd decision both creatively and commercially.
ROB BARBOUR