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| Snakes and Ladders / The Best of Faces | ||||
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| Compilation album by | ||||
| Released | 1976 | |||
| Genre | Rock and roll, boogie rock | |||
| Length | 49:05 | |||
| Label | Warner Bros. | |||
| Faces chronology | ||||
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Snakes and Ladders / The Best of Faces was an October 1976 best-of album (the 7th album and 2nd compilation album) by British rock group Faces. While the first released Faces compilation was a repackaging of the group's first two LPs as a double album, this US-only release presented the first attempt to compile the popular songs from the group after they had disbanded in 1975. Featuring photography by Tom Wright and unique cover art by guitarist Ronnie Wood, it was only eventually superseded in the US market by the CD compilation Good Boys... When They're Asleep in 1999.
The selections are however heavily biased in favour of Rod Stewart's contribution to the group, with only one track featuring Wood on vocals, and none featuring Ronnie Lane, the group's secondary vocalist and songwriter. Although he had left the band in 1973, Lane was a prominent founder member of the band and sang on and solely composed several tracks on each of the group's four original studio albums, but his songwriting is also under-represented here with his contributions confined to co-credits with Stewart and/or Wood. Lane is also not pictured in the collage of snapshots featured on the cover, while Jesse Ed Davis - who was only hired for the group's final tour of fall 1975 - does appear in some of them, despite never appearing on any of the studio tracks recorded by the group. Subsequent compilations, however, would go to great lengths to redress this collection's lack of representation of Lane's work - the first of these being a 1977 UK/European-only double-LP retrospective simply titled The Best Of The Faces, which effectively served as this album's expanded and more balanced counterpart in non-US markets.
The track listing of the original vinyl release of this compilation still remains unique however, in that the version of "Had Me a Real Good Time" presented there is the original 1970 single release, which is a noticeably different earlier mix to the 1971 Long Player album version (later reissues would substitute this mix with a short edit of the 'Long Player' mix). The original single mix, which runs at 3.49, has still not been recompiled elsewhere or released on CD as of 2019.
"Pineapple and the Monkey" would not appear on a Faces compilation again until the release of Faces: The Definitive Rock Collection in 2007.
| Review scores | |
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   link |
| Christgau's Record Guide | B+[1] |
- ^ Christgau, Robert (1981). "Consumer Guide '70s: F". Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Ticknor & Fields. ISBN 089919026X. Retrieved 24 February 2019 – via robertchristgau.com.