From the French website Pop News. Thanks to Paula Owens and Alice Dore for the painstaking translation...
Groups with more sprint than stamina are often called 'singles bands'. The Hellfire Sermons were decidedly, if by default, a 'singles band': in six years of discography (1988-1993), and these four young Liverpool lads have never succeeding in releasing an album. Who knows what obscure curse inflicted these Hellfire Sermons; the rarity of their work explains why apart from certain specialists - notably a laudatory article published a decade ago by Les Inrockuptibles, at that time still a monthly - almost no one in France had heard their marvellous singles, which appeared on diverse small indie labels. In England, it didn't get much better, even thought the band could count amongst its few fans a member of the Manic Street Preachers - just their luck it was Richey, who vanished. They found only his car.
We'll never thank enough American label Bus Stop for this compilation album, whose title isn't that ironic: the songs collected here, which almost nobody heard at the time, have just what it takes to become indie-pop hymns. None of the 19 tracks is disposable - all the singles and a bunch of unreleased songs, some of which where directly copied from vinyls (lost master tapes?).
Some years ago, the HFS could have ended up on the C86 NME compilation tape, which introduced the likes of McCarthy, the Pastels, Primal Scream, the Wedding Present and a bunch of long forgotten others. With their purposeful amateurism, melodic sense, angular intensity inherited from post-punk, jangly guitars and minimal sound, the band appears to be the paragon of a certain late 80s British rock. Like their contemporaries Wolfhounds, the band evolved towards a (relative) sonorous radicalism inherited from the Pixies and other bands from Boston. 'Sarasine' actually recalls 'Caribou'.
There are tastes and influences which the band cannot be accused of hiding: the booklet shows record sleeves strewn about, amongst them, rightly so, the Wolfhounds, Pixies, Breeders and Throwing Muses but also James, the Go-Betweens, The Fall, the Flaming Lips, the Delgados and Grandaddy.
This respect shown to influences shouldn't make one consider HFS (who have started rehearsing again in their spare time) as mere imitators. Here is a record destined for those nostalgic for English indie guitar rock and one that we would like to recommend to all those for whom music, regardless of genre, is a vital matter.