Rivers Cuomo - Alone III

Alone III is by far the best album in the series thus far. The focus on the Pinkerton era demos seems to help considerably, so the era-focused approach is probably the way to go for future releases. It's interesting to hear a lot of the a and b-sides from Pinkerton in their earliest forms. Some of them are very similar to the finished product, and some of them are very different.

Also included on this disc are a number of lo-fi acoustic demos. These no doubt come from the time when Rivers was playing a few solo acoustic shows for friends at Harvard. Many of the songs from this era are very good even though the recordings themselves are not high in the fidelity department. This requires you to dig a little for the gold, but it's there. Some of the songs are very short and cut in and out of stereo, but that's what happens when you record on old tape recorders. These albums are exactly what they claim to be: demos.