Elvis Sex-Change

Compiling Cornershop's earliest EPs In the Days of Ford Cortina and Lock Stock and Double Barrel, Elvis Sex-Change offers few indications that this is the same band that would later record such genre-bending albums as Woman's Gotta Have It and When I Was Born for the 7th Time — the music here is self-indulgent and often silly, comprised of half-baked ideas writ large. Adding Western riffs and rhythms to Eastern sitars and drones and passing off the results as full-fledged songs, the majority of material here borders on the unlistenable, but stick with it long enough for the phenomenal "England's Dreaming," the first Cornershop song that successfully combines British punk, American hip-hop, and Bollywood accents to forge something new, strange, and utterly wonderful.