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In terms of bonus content, this reissue of Rated R comes with a hand-full of b-sides, unreleased tracks and a live set from Reading Festival in 2000.

The studio tracks are a bit of a mixed bag. Ode To Clarissa will be familiar to anyone who picked up an original vinyl copy of Rated R, as it was a bonus track there too, and it’s a pretty good, classic QOTSA sounding number.

You’re So Vague is a slightly odd half-parody of Carly Simon’s You’re So Vein, although it doesn’t really resemble that song very much. Never Say Never, on the other hand, is a cover of a minor hit single by Romeo Void from the early ‘80s. It sounds a little out of character for QOTSA, oddly dance-punk-ish, in a way.

The live set is nice to hear. Reassuringly at least a third of the MusicRadar team can (hazily) remember being in the audience for this Reading Fest performance. We remember it being a fairly jam-orientated set from a band who were as much on form as they were obviously on a certain amount of illicit substances. Listening back to it now brings back good memories…

So in all the bonus content here is far from essential stuff, but it’s still nice to hear. Either way the extra stuff is fairly irrelevant; in case you haven’t guessed over the last twelve slides, we think Rated R is pretty essential listening.

It still sounds pretty much as fresh and exciting in 2010 as it did when we first heard it ten years ago; a unique, genre defining and influential record.

It’s also, fairly inexplicably, been out of print for several years now. So the fact that we can now pick-up a vinyl copy, having missed out first time round, is very good news however you look at it.

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