I’m normally not one for these 2CD compilations that you can now get, covering everything from this year’s best indie anthems to this year’s most popular classic tunes featured in toothpaste adverts, but I couldn’t resist picking up a copy of Acoustic 04 on a recent visit to Fopp. Well, £7 for 40 tracks is good value in anyone’s money, even if you probably already own most of the good tracks.

A few listens later, and feeling a little underwhelmed - apart from the wonderful Trouble by Ray LaMontagne, and All Years Leaving by The Stands, nothing particularly stood out for me, except tracks I already knew - and shocked that Fake Plastic Trees is still making it onto compilations, I set about putting together a tracklist for what I’d love to see Acoustic 05 sound like.

And then this morning I spot that Acoustic 05 is out today, so I guess the people at Echo records won’t want to know what I think should have been on it… but perhaps they’ll be looking for ideas for the Vol 6.

As for Acoustic 05 - I can’t quite fathom some of the selections. “Run” by Snow Patrol, for instance. When Final Straw was originally released back in 2003 sometime, I couldn’t get enough of this track’s soaring beauty, but then it went top 5, Final Straw was re-released, every festival-going man and his dog learned the lyrics, and Gary Lightbody could suddenly get away with hanging the mike out front rather than going to the effort of actually singing the chorus. So tell me, is there anyone that this song will be new to? Probably not, but that’s not my real concern here. The real issue is this - how acoustic is Run, exactly? In a nutshell, the answer has to be not very, or maybe not at all. Seems to me that Echo are cheating a teensy-bit here, but since they’ve done it, I have no trouble following suit, which is why my provisional listing for Acoustic 06 includes “What I’m looking for” by Brendan Benson, and “Everything goes around the water” by the Delgados.

Back to Acoustic 05, though, and an interesting co-incidence I spotted today. First I noticed that quite a few of the artists featured on Acoustic 04 also had tracks on Acoustic 05, which seems a bit unlikely, until you realise that they’re all, in fact, artists signed to none other than… Echo records. Now that’s what I call lame.

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