Various - Stroke: Songs For Chris Knox

Chris Knox tribute album Stroke. Photo / Supplied

Yes, well, it was always going to get five stars, you might think. After all, for nearly 20 years, his Max Media strip has been part of the Herald's entertainment sections - just one of Knox's many extra-musical, multimedia platforms he maintained before his debilitating stroke in June.

But that rating is as much for the Kings Arms launch show the other week as the double album itself.

Specifically, the three or so thrilling minutes when Knox returned to the stage to front a noisy number. His lyrics were, well, a little indiscernible but it came delivered with such wild-eye fervour and and punk joie de vivre that it wiped away the night's underlying sadness.

There's more of Knox's post-stroke vocal style down the end of this album, a noisy one with band The Nothing - with whom he's recorded two fine albums in recent years, last year's A Warm Gun comes recommended - and another in his Tall Dwarfs partnership with Alec Bathgate, the guitarist who accompanied him through the punk era outfits of The Enemy and Toy Love.

And it's in how this neatly considered compilation treats Knox's vast recorded past which makes it a cut above the usual tribute affair.

The title and its artwork echoes his 1989 first proper solo album Seizure, the title of which referenced his epilepsy just as this collection puts its reason for being front and centre.

As well, the songs spread neatly chronologically from Memphis lo-fi star Jay Reatard's spirited take on Toy Love's Pull Down the Shades, to Lou Barlow's haunting and poignant Song of the Tall Poppy from A Warm Gun at the end.

In between is a pan-Pacific generation-hurdling group of acts get to grips with the Knox songbook, one that this album reminds us, has never been short on great tunes or songs about love or mortality, many that become newly affecting in this context.

Predictably that includes a fair smattering of fellow former residents of the Flying Nunnery doing some unpredictable things, at best on David Kilgour's hazy Nothing's Going to Happen, the Chills' askew epic take on Luck or Loveliness and the Verlaines' lush chamber-rock Driftwood. Other local vets offering up memorable interpretations include the various Finns of "The Pyjama Party" singing the giddy rounds of It's Love, Don McGlashan on the self-loathing ode Inside Story , and Sean (SJD) Donnelly's sweet and strange The Outer Skin.

Also impressing are a younger local contingent including the Checks (on Toy Love's Rebel), The Mint Chicks' (taking an electro-gallop through Crush).

If many of the voices are familiar, the album's North American indie squad offers a higher ratio of surprises, especially The Mountain Goats' John Darnelle heads into mad rant mode on Brave.

But there's a thread of strangely lovely interpretations among the calmer Americans, whether it's Lambchop's What Goes Up, Bill Callahan's Lapse, or Will Oldham's quietly devastating take on My Only Friend.

It's a collection that is both heartening and heartbreaking. And it's the best Chris Knox double album he never made.

Russell Baillie