Search - Golden Cups :: 2001 Millennium Best

Generally underwhelming and derivative

David Goodwin | Westchester, NY United States | 08/06/2002

(2 out of 5 stars)

""The Mops and the Golden Cups" is what I remember hearing before I started actively getting into the Japanese rock scene of the sixties. Seemingly, those two bands stood at the top of the heap; their output was legendary, and their songs were amoung the first to actually cross over to American compilations (the Mops' "Blind Bird" showed up on Boulders, and the Cups' "Hey Joe" showed up on the Pebbles series). The Mops lived up to their reputation, but after chasing down a few Golden Cups albums, I was shocked to realize that the Cups...well, largely don't.The Golden Cups formed, as far as I can tell, comparitively later than most of the other "group sounds" bands; they got together AFAIK in 1969, and demonstate this late forming by their comparitively-serious (and hardly lightweight) approach to their music. Yet weight and dedication does not translate into quality, and their two albums are mostly rehashes of what came before. Sure, their cover of My Girl is technically excellent, with a lot of passion, and the Cups' mastery of sung English was heads above most of their competition...but c'mon! It's still a cover of My Girl!And that is where the problem lies. If you like lots of soul covers, surprisingly slow (and string-laden!) ballads, and the disappointingly-occasional fuzzed out rocker from the beyond, the Cups might appeal to you, but in songwriting prowess and sheer timeliness they lose out to bands like the Mops, Tempters, and the Launchers.That said, the Millennium Best does give a decent distillation of their limited output, and is the only one of the three Millennium Best GS collections (the other two being the Mops and the Happenings Four) where most of the material used is actually from the "golden" period. "Hey Joe" is here, and is just as wonderful as ever. And some tracks--like Happening Monday Morning 3AM, with its odd wah-wah-instruction-tape introduction--almost make up for the surprising schlockiness of some of the ballads.But worth high import prices? I think not. Pass, unless you can find it for very cheap, or can audition it first."