Death In June – Abandon Tracks!

This album comes with rare versions and limited releases never available before or in limited quantities long time out of print or unavailable, sort of a "best of" without being it.
But the big thing with this album is that all of these versions are probably the more sensitive and heart felt songs DIJ ever did and specially the uttemost sincerity and heartfelt anti-war piece "unconditional armistice" is arguably one of those pieces that shows D.Pearce without mask and out the cryptic display of his discourse.
the rest of the songs are impressive,high quality prototypes of the original songs from previous albums. a "weird" touch and different understanding of the typical DIJ arch know style.
On the other hand the art cover is awful, Douglas with some extra pounds sitting in the cannon of a tank? it is certainly humurous but in a tragic way. Maybe DIJ/D.Pearce its making himself a joker after all these trascendental voyage.
As a band, with the apparition of this album and the dissapointing previous records, DIJ is facing a typical crossroad for mid aged bands, repeating itself in order to maintain the fan base ending with some known guitar chords, the now repetitive cliche of crypticism of politics and occultism or jumping into the adventure of new concepts and ideas. But thats probably not something DIJ was programmed for in the first instance...

If Douglas P is smart (there's no doubt he is intelligent at least) he would call this a day and put to rest DIJ with "abandon tracks".
This album would be the greatest epitaph for a band that was very influential after the initial wave of industrialism, a purveyor and rescuer of the european folk tradition, a tasty poetic, anti modernist, political-occultist conundrum, a music vanguardist and a aesthetic symbolic fighter.

Its time to let die DIJ with honour and avoid the ridiculous effects that senility works upon a dusty ideological reality.
"and the death of dreams shall be a beautiful end..."