Review: Joe Strummer – “Assembly”

Dark Horse – 26 Mar 2021

New Joe Strummer collection from Dark Horse features unreleased tracks but mostly reminds us of Strummer’s best solo work.

I wasn’t a huge fan of greatest hits collections when they were marketed on tv commercials in the 90’s, and nowadays I find they have even less relevance in an era where access to cheap streaming music allows your average fan to curate their own greatest hits collections. So when it comes to “greatest hits” or “best of” albums being released as retail, the bigger question becomes whether or not there is something of value added to sweeten the pot, which is especially difficult when assembling collections from posthumous artists who can’t record new material. While occasionally you come up with a gem like Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right,” for the most part, musicians and labels don’t sit on amazing material for decades and then suddenly realize it’s worth releasing. The question for the consumer is whether or not it is enough to make it worth the price of admission.

For all that the Joe Strummer collection Assembly has been hand-curated, what we have in the end is a collection of existing material bundled with a few long-lost post-The Clash tracks. Assembly primarily pulls songs from Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros’ three albums from the late 90’s and early 2000’s, along with a single track from Strummer’s mostly-overloooked 1989 solo album, Earthquake Weather, and “Love Kills,” his stand-alone contribution to the soundtrack for the 1986 film Sid and Nancy. The Mescaleros albums were all excellent and only got better with each release, and I’ve never had strong feelings either way about Earthquake Weather. “Love Kills” always felt to me like an attempt to make up for the disastrous final Clash album, Cut the Crap, by showing he actually knew how to do new wave right.

That leaves us with the three previously unreleased tracks. The 2001 live recording of “I Fought the Law” is a bizarre choice to throw on here because Strummer’s vocals are all over the place in terms of pitch and staying with the rhythm. “Rudie Can’t Fail” is another strange choice as The Clash performed that song as a duet between the band’s two frontmen, Strummer and Mick Jones, and it feels strange to hear it performed without the latter. Your mileage may vary but, for my part, I’m curious whether or not this track was included more for its general popularity rather than its importance in the full pantheon of Strummer performances.

Finally the closing track, the solo acoustic version of “Junco Partner,” is really good. Good enough to justify this whole release? I’ll leave that up to you. But the beauty of “Junco Partner” is really how flexible the song is and how many different genres it can be performed in. While The Clash did the song with a reggae/dub style, Strummer’s solo version puts some of the rock and blues back into it, living up to both Strummer’s stage name and his Johnny Cash influence. I might say that I actually like this version better than The Clash’s.

I’d be remiss to not mention in passing the irony of the frontman from the band that brazenly pronounced “No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones!” now having a collection released via George Harrison’s Dark Horse records. Someone else would, rightfully, point out to me that The Clash later admitted that their supposed hatred of those three artists was just punk rock posturing. If nothing else, this release is a nice reminder that Joe Strummer did some excellent after the end of The Clash, something that often gets criminally overlooked. I always think that the failure of Cut the Crap and the lack of commercial success from his later ventures left a noticeable gap in his discography where he lost his confidence in his ability to make good music. But once he got back to it he really produced some excellent records in his final years, capping off a legacy that had already been firmly cemented.

So where does that leave Assembly? All of the tracks have been remastered, and the liner notes for the vinyl release were done by Jakob Dylan (Wallflowers, son of Bob). The album is available for digital streaming and download, as well as a two-disk vinyl edition (and associated bundles). I think primarily the physical versions of the album are for die hard vinyl aficionados and collectors/completists but, for everyone else, it might be best to stream. Even as a vinyl collector with a pretty good selection of Clash records, I’d probably still go just for the streaming version of this album. Kudos to Dark Horse for bringing their focus to one of punk, if not rock and roll’s, greatest musicians. I think that an album of more refined “lost” works may have been a more valuable contribution to Strummer’s legacy than a “best of” release, even if that would have made this a shorter release.

At the top I mentioned how people can curate their own greatest hits on the streaming service of their choice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some, but not all, of these songs make the cut into some fan’s own Joe Strummer “best of” playlist.