Here's a rather ironic review situation: I am soon to release recently restored and remastered tapes from my 1980's New Wave synthpop band, Chemistry Set, wondering if anyone will care for vintage electronic music made on vintage synthesizers. And then this comes along. 386 DX is the performing name of Moscow, RU resident Alexie Shulgin, owing to the fact that that he uses an old PC running Windows 3.1, and it recreates songs as 8-bit chip music (a vintage sound card loaded with MIDI files of drums, guitars and synth sounds), with the vocals recorded via a text-to-speech program. 'Biggest Smash Hits' contains covers of 12 songs, almost all of which are established-beyond-all-doubt classics (“Light My Fire,” “Purple Haze,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “I Shot the Sheriff”), plus some that are almost as well-known and lesser known.

Shulgin originally released a 15-track version of this with Staalplaat on CD titled 'The Best of 386 DX' back in 2001 that includes 9 of the 12 tracks on this album but also with some others. Haven't heard that one so I can't comment on what's not on this album. One thing I can say, after listening to the whole album on vinyl is that if the track doesn't make you laugh out loud, then for Shulgin, it probably wasn't a Biggest Smash Hit. Right off the bat I probably shouldn't have been sipping a soda when “Light My Fire” came on, because that was absolutely the wrong kind of coke snorted up and out of my nose. There's that iconic Doors' keyboard intro sounding like an '80s mall music store semi-auto Casio demo machine. With a Kraftwerkian electronic voice singing the lyrics no less! Following up with Led Zep's "Rock 'N' Roll" was nearly as good. Things flagged a bit with "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and although the Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the U.K." may have had too florid an arrangement it was still an ignoble effort. The synthetic voice is the star on "Black Dog" but really, one Led Zeppelin song was plenty for this comp. The same is true for the Stones, with what I could only call a limp version of "Satisfaction". Perhaps if Devo didn't already do their wonderfully off-kilter version of it...which got me to wondering, why didn't Devo do an album like this?

The same is true with Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a hoot but "Rape Me" was kind of unnecessary and not amusing. "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" was great. Metallica's "Enter Sandman" was not. I was on the fence with Hendrix's "Purple Haze"; I like the music but not the vocal. I wasn't familiar with Soviet blues-rocker Mike Naumenko’s “ " but it sort of sounds like Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" gone punk. Well, something Russian had to go on this record. The album closes with Clapton's “I Shot the Sheriff," nearly as hilarious as the opener. On any given compilation of songs, some are going to like some tracks more than others, and perhaps these were street-tested by Shulgin when he toured Europe in 1998 with his vintage computer as "the world's first cyberpunk band." I could think of dozens of songs 386 DX could cover for 'Biggest Smash Hits Vol. 2' but in the meantime, you really need to hear this album. As of the time of this review, Staalplaat still has 72 copies left out of the original Limited Edition of 300. I don't think they'll last much longer.