Reserved

They Say...

Review by Stewart Mason, All Music Guide

Ironically, just about everyone in the Servants went on to great pop success except for singer/songwriter David Westlake. At one time or another, Lush's Philip King (who also did time in both Biff Bang Pow! and Felt), Loop's John Wills, the Auteurs' Luke Haines, and the Housemartins' Hugh Whitaker were in Westlake's band, but despite stints on the high profile U.K. indies Creation and Glass Records, as well as the imprimatur of influential DJ John Peel, the Servants never fully caught the record buying public's attention. The comprehensive 16-track anthology Reserved gathers all of the Servants' single and EP tracks, Peel sessions and unreleased demos from 1986 to 1989; basically, other than their 1990 album Disinterest, this is the Servants in a nutshell. The majority of this material clearly outshines the knotty, artsy vibe of the disappointing Disinterest, but unfortunately it also makes it clear that overall, the Servants were a second-string band at best. There are a handful of genuinely great songs here, foremost among them being "The Sun, A Small Star," one of Creation's best early 45s, on a level with C-86 classics like the Weather Prophets' "Almost Prayed." (The Servants, unlike many bands now lumped under the C-86 rubric, actually appeared on that legendary compilation: the psych-influenced, slide guitar-heavy "Transparent," originally the flipside of debut single "She's Always Hiding," was one of the best songs on side two.) But Reserved is also larded with songs like "Meredith" and "Search Under Stones," which have all the shambolic jangle of the canonical C-86 sound, but little in the way of memorable tunes. Reserved may err on the side of completism, but David Westlake's best songs are such perfect slices of the sound of U.K. indie culture circa the mid-'80s that it becomes easier to overlook the flaws of the weaker tracks.