Well, that’s mighty, errr, low… No 25th anniversary celebration for CRACKER’s sophomore album, Kerosene Hat? The one that spawned their biggest hit, errr, “Low”? Not quite. It’s true that the band left their original (major) label, Virgin Records, in much less than amicable circumstances, so I assume the acrimony left the label’s current corporate overlords (Universal Music) unmotivated to do anything, as I assume Cracker themselves were. So, has anything been done to fête their (second) greatest album? Well, yes.
Leave it to Music On Vinyl out of the Netherlands to do it. Their 2LP, 180 gram release of Kerosene Hat is actually the first-ever vinyl pressing of the album (outside of a super rare Greek issue from ’93). Originally released mainly on CD and cassette, the album was their big ’90s breakthrough, with the hit “Low” and numerous other great “alternative” rock tunes, like “Get Off This” and my personal favorite, “Movie Star.” What’s cool about this reissue is that they didn’t try to cram the twelve songs from the album onto one record. Instead, MOV spread the dozen tunes over three sides and used side four for the “bonus” tracks that were buried on the original CD. Those songs, including the excellent “Euro-Trash Girl” and “I Ride My Bike,” were tucked away among dozens of silent :04 second tracks that were designed to confound listeners. 
(The CD has 99 tracks on it, only 16 of which have music; these four songs are numbers 15, 69, 88 and 99 and all the rest after number 12 are blank.) I have a few other vinyl pressings from this label – Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth and Iggy Pop’s Party – and they’re uniformly excellent. I don’t know whether this mastering job came from the original (maybe analog) master tapes, but regardless, the sound of this Kerosene Hat is worth putting on.
Cracker, the followup band to David Lowery’s indie/college rock group Camper Van Beethoven, took a more hard rock approach to the humorous tunes that he wrote. The band was/is of your twoguitarsbassanddrums variety, unlike CVB who augmented their arrangements with East European influences carried out by violin on wacky instrumentals and funny, catchy songs like “Take the Skinheads Bowling” and “Where the Hell Is Bill.” The fiddle wasn’t part of Cracker’s instrumentation so the sound was tougher and just right for the early ’90s, just before grunge was coined and gave birth to a thousand crummy, angsty bands. Kerosene Hat was the followup to Cracker’s eponymous debut album, which had a few minor college radio hits on it (“Happy Birthday to Me,” for instance). This 2LP vinyl reissue is a great way to enjoy the album a quarter of a century later.
4/5 (Music On Vinyl MOVLP 2091, 1993/2018)
NuDisc 