The Delgados

The Complete BBC Peel Sessions (Chemikal Underground)

Scots got the lot: brogue, liver, and snark. Glasgow’s pub poets the Delgados also demonstrated foresight cooking up Chemikal Underground Records with their 1995 debut, Arab Strap and Mogwai fellow countrymen and first-timers on the still-burbling indie. Five chamber trashed LPs later, the founding quartet’s sharp tongue sums itself up best with The Complete BBC Peel Sessions. Alun Woodward and Emma Pollock tart up like the Pixies on Radio Scotland, the gnarled “Primary Alternative” drawing first blood. (“Alun remembers never being able to match [that] guitar solo,” writes bassist Stewart Henderson in his lively liners.) A whipping “Under Canvas Under Wraps” rides Surfer Rosa. John Peel climbed aboard next with sweeter, thornier results (“Sucrose”), the group’s orchestration swelling middisc with “Pull the Wives From the Wall” stringing up Pollock. “Mauron Chanson” pits boys against girls à la Imperial Teen. Live, the gathering density of “The Weaker Argument Defeats the Stronger” and “No Danger,” both found on the DVD portion of recent label sampler Chem087CD + DVD, are suitably edged. Disc two’s covers – ELO, Dead Kennedys, Cat Stevens – complement the stripped pop of 2004’s Universal Audio, “Ballad of Accounting” a frank B-side covering Scot folk deity Ewan MacColl. Peel died a month after its broadcast. Fook.

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This article appears in December 15 • 2006.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.