Saturday, September 25, 2010

Bic Runga
"Bursting Through"

Oh, dear! You must not have a compatible version of flash!

Bic Runga
Bursting Through
CD single
(Columbia, 1996)

I first heard Bic on the compilation CD Live At Helen's. I'd picked it up for the tracks by her fellow Kiwis, David Kilgour and Martin Phillipps, but Bic's song, a version of "Drive," blew me away. A couple years later, I came across a copy of her debut album, Drive, in the new arrivals bin at a local used CD store. I snapped it up and found that I could not stop listening to it. It's probably my favorite album of 1998, in fact.

Before the release of the album, Bic released a CD EP and a couple of CD singles; the Bursting Through single was the second of these. She rerecorded the song for the album, and this version is rather radically different. All told, over half of the songs on the album were eventually released as singles, all with non-LP material, of course. I don't want to think about how much I spent to get them all, but they were worth it.

Prolific, she is not. She's released only two more studio albums since Drive: Beautiful Collision and Birds. The former is very good; the latter is fantastic.

1 biased opinion:

Biki Honko said...

not bad. but ya know as a whole not a big fan of girl singers, and slow songs in general...... but it does have possibilities.