The Orange Peels Square Cubed

California pop pioneers The Orange Peels reissue their 1997 debut album Square! The band had just morphed from Allen Clapp & his Orchestra into its own entity, and the recording captures all the excitement. Fresh-scrubbed energy abounds, as do hints of what is to come later. The deluxe package, variously known as Square³, Square Cubed, or Square x 3, arrives via the Minty Fresh label and includes a freshly re-mastered version of the original album on 180g vinyl LP plus two CDs of bonus tracks, alternate mixes, and four-track demos. Forty tracks tell the story of how the band evolved from Allen Clapp and His Orchestra into The Orange Peels.

So why is the band revisiting this album that came out in 1997?: "First, the album never came out on vinyl, and we've always talked about the idea of eventually releasing it as a 12" LP. We sequenced the original release in two halves, and have always thought of it as having a Side A and a Side B. Second, there are two unreleased versions of the album that tell the story of how we got where we were going and how we became a band in the process (there's a whole version of the record recorded on a 4-track, and there's a whole version of the album we recorded and mixed in California and finished in 1996). Third, we wanted to remaster the original tapes and collect all this stuff to make the ultimate edition of our debut album."