Silver Box is mostly made up of previously unreleased demos, radio & TV sessions and various live recordings from 1979 to 1995... and is also including—as a final bonus disc—their genuine twelfth studio album (of original material), Our Secrets Are the Same, originally recorded between April and June 1999 and originally planned to be released on its own in early 2000 but delayed many times and even cancelled until its final inclusion in this very box set.
Critical reception
The few professional reviews the compilation received commented on the previously elusive album Our Secrets Are The Same positively. Adam Sweeting, writing for The Guardian newspaper, opined, "The album, dating from 1999, was scuppered by legal wranglings, but it's some of the best music the band have made in 20 years. Tracks such as "Death by Chocolate" or "Happy Is the Man" recall something of their old pioneering spirit, and show a fascination with the process of recording rather than with prancing about in front of a sea of cigarette lighters."[1] He dismissed most of the third and fourth discs as evidence of the band's progression into "overblown" stadium rock, but admitted: "If you chucked out most of discs three and four from this beefy five-disc box, you'd be left with some fascinating insights and lost nuggets from the past and near-present of Simple Minds.[1] Rob Fitzpatrick writing for the NME agreed, saying, "By CD3, "Waterfront" - a neat throb of a single - is bloated into ten-plus minutes of pointless noodling and "Ghost Dancing" is so clearly similar in sound to U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" it's embarrassing. By CD4 it's time for "Belfast Child". God no! Miraculously, though, CD5 the band's 1999 'lost' album has some really good music on it in fact it's a lost gem that some fans have never heard or even know about.[3]
Uncut meanwhile admitted that the new album would be the main source of interest, but thought that the music still owed much to U2, writing, "It finds Kerr and Burchill still a bit in the slipstream of '90s U2 - tastefully epic, techno-fringed and extravagantly exasperated ("Death By Chocolate" and "Neon Cowboys") with the wickedness of a world gone wrong."[4]Martin C. Strong meanwhile, in The Essential Rock Discography, complimented the band's new music: "The album's savvy pop smarts harked back to their early 80s purple period, only underlining the shortcomings of Néapolis, while the sassy momentum of "Jeweller to the Stars" could've easily regenerated Kerr and Co's contemporary credibility."[2]
Track listing
Silver Box (November/2004. Virgin Records)
Disc 1
No.
Title
Length
1.
"Life in a Day" (Live, London for the BBC in Concert Series, 8 September 1979)
2.
"Chelsea Girl" (Live, London for the 'BBC in Concert' Series, 8 September 1979)
3.
"Here Comes the Fool" (Live, London for the 'BBC in Concert' Series, 8 September 1979)
4.
"Changeling" (Session recorded at Maida Vale Studios, London, 19 December 1979)
5.
"Premonition" (Recorded at Maida Vale Studios, London, 19 December 1979)
6.
"Citizen (Dance of Youth)" (Recorded at Maida Vale Studios, London, 19 December 1979)
7.
"Room" (Recorded at Maida Vale Studios, London, 19 December 1979)
[1]