Back in the early 2000's when I was getting into Pop Will Eat Itself, it was incredibly easy to find their records. As a result, I have many PWEI records. One day when record shopping in Reading I found this 12" copy of their debut LP, Box Frenzy (for a very reasonable £5), along with another PWEI LP and a 12". I think there were a few more to be had that day that I didn't bother picking up.
I was familiar with a few of these songs from the PWEI Product anthology double-cd, so I knew that the album was the transitional release between their very grebo days and the strange hip-hop/indie mash-up that would dominate their sound in the 90's (so much so, the words "Fuck this grebo shit" appear before the song Hit the Hi-tech Groove on the sleeve). Throughout the album there are some really great moments, spiked with turntables and a blatant disregard for the genre they'd been in up to that point. Songs like Beaver Patrol, There is No Love Between Us Anymore and Hit the Hi-tech Groove are genuinely really good, but there are also fairly stupid songs, like Ugly and Inside You.
Stupid is the name of the game throughout the album really - the sticker on the front boasts that it contains two "totally crap singles", there's a comic strip about becoming well-built by listening to the Poppies and there's a quote from the NME asking "So how come they've made such a crap LP?". I guess hindsight does a lot for an album like this - if you heard this alone, without the context of what was to follow, it wouldn't be a great album. It's even stranger to think that this was technically their debut album - I can imagine a lot of people hoping they'd release something like the fully-grebo EPs and singles that preceded it.
I've not played this album in a very long time, but it's better than I remember. I think I got a lot of it mixed up with the early EPs in my mind - the first half of the first disc of PWEI Product covers the era before Box Frenzy and it does less for me (and, interestingly, was missing entirely from the other PWEI compilation I had in those early days). The confusion might be because I have the Poppiecock 12" and the Now For a Feast cd, which both cover a lot of those early songs, so I got confused about which album was which. Largely, anything before the Designers Republic era was slightly dubious, but Box Frenzy was the best of that time in my opinion.
Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £5 second hand
Bought: Reading
When: 27/12/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
