Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead: Long Live Camper Van Beethoven

AMG Review of Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead: Long Live Camper Van Beethoven

Jason Ankeny
All Music Guide

Falling somewhere between a reunion LP and an odds-and-sods compilation, Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead: Long Live Camper Van Beethoven is an appropriately bizarre record by any measure; a crazy-quilt of live tracks, unreleased cuts, demos, and rarities all newly edited and manipulated in late 1999 by founding members David Lowery, Victor Krummenacher, and Jonathan Segel, the album goes out of its way to do seemingly everything but summarize the band's history. The finale, "We're All Wasted and We're Wasting All Your Time" -- a backwards reading of the classic "Take the Skinheads Bowling" complete with new vocals -- perfectly encapsulates CVB's deconstructionist approach to their own legacy, an irreverence wholly in keeping with the band's original spirit. It's impossible to know where the vintage material ends and the latter-day studio trickery begins. Old songs made new and vice versa, the album isn't a retrospective but a resurrection.