Natural Elements' 1999, Give Or Take a Few

Hey, remember when Natural Elements were finally releasing their long-shelved Tommy Boy album on vinyl for its tenth anniversary through Traffic Entertainment?  And then Traffic dropped out, and they wound up releasing a CD-only version that included about two thirds of the album and filled the rest with a bizarre, patchwork mix of older material?  Well, now it's their twentieth anniversary and they're here to do it right...er.  It's still kinda screwy.  But they've made genuine improvements.  It's definitely good news overall.

So let's start on the positive side.  1999: 20 Year Anniversary is on vinyl!  Yes, you can now finally, after all these years, get these songs on wax.  A double LP even.  And it comes in a cool gatefold cover, and if you really want to splurge, you can order the more limited colored vinyl options.  Specifically, there are 100 copies pressed on three striped color vinyl, 100 pressed on blue, white (white) and orange splatter vinyl (the stripes are the same three colors), and another 300 on your basic black.  Oh and there's also a CD version.

Now let's step into the disappointing... it's still mostly the same weird track-listing they made for the tenth anniversary CD, where they leave off several of the still unreleased Tommy Boy songs and fill that space with their most common, greatest hits material most NE fans already have (the credit in the liner notes saying, "all tracks recorded in NYC in 1999" is just wrong).  And the ones that don't could get them if they chose, unlike the still unreleased songs, which none of us can get.

But I said "mostly," because they did make an interesting change or two.  First of all, they've re-arranged the track-listing to put the intro back at the beginning, a nice little correction of the tenth anniversary, which curiously stuck it at the end.  But more critically, they've taken off the song "MTV (More Than Vocals)" and replaced it with the never officially released "Life Ain't Fair."  To be clear, this is the original version with the hook sung by Bridge that I first wrote about in my article for Hip Hop Connection and that wound up on that hard to find bootleg with the Truck Turner songs.  This is not the version Chopped Herring gave a proper release to on the first of their amazing Demo EPs.

This is a strange decision, which on the scales I suppose leans more to the pro than the con, but could've easily been a lot more pro.  This is the first official release of that "Life Ain't Fair," and it's on vinyl, so that's pretty sweet.  And taking "MTV" off makes sense, since it was never intended to be on that Tommy Boy album (it was recorded years later).  But "MTV" has never been released on vinyl, and it would've been nice to get it on wax now, even if it's not really a proper 1999 track.  After all, about a third of what's on here, including "Life Ain't Fair," isn't a proper 1999 track.  And again, there are plenty of songs on here that have been readily available on vinyl already for decades that they could've swapped off instead.  "Bust Mine" or "Paper Chase," for example, are super easy to find on 12", nice and inexpensive, and they weren't from 1999 either.  With that said, though, since "MTV" was at least on the CD, and "Life Ain't Fair" has never seen a proper release, I do prefer getting "Life" to "MTV."  It's a change for the better.  It's just a Sophie's Choice we shouldn't have had to make.

But don't let my criticisms land too hard.  A new double-LP of incredible Natural Elements music, most of which has never been released on vinyl before?  That's awesome news and everyone reading this should cop it.  I just wish they had the courage not to buoy these up with their greatest hits.  They definitely don't need to, and it means those last six songs from their 1999 Tommy Boy album are still abandoned in the vault.  Of course... just one more, little wafer-thin 12" EP could fix all that for all time, and we fans would gobble it up.  Just sayin'.  😉