Prince Album of the Day (Day 11): Diamonds and Pearls (1991)

(It's actually Day 10, but I fucked up yesterday and now it's just pointless and I mostly hate myself for it, so let's all agree to pretend it's Day 11 and there will be some great mystery someday about what actually happened to Day 9.)

Standout Tracks: Thunder, Cream

Thank the gods for Diamonds and Pearls as the follow-up to the tedious three-disc Crystal Ball set. Diamonds and Pearls is good stuff. How good? Wait for it.

The disc kicks off with a bang, the upbeat rocking/funking Thunder. Thunder sounds like it could be a theme song from a James Bond movie, lots of dramatic keyboard action, a catchy hook, filled with good visuals. And while we're on the subject, why hasn't Prince done a James Bond theme song? I'm writing a letter!

The title track has a beautiful chorus, just lovely, but honestly I have to say the verses themselves leave me unimpressed. Prince sings along with the melody there, which is fine when it's a better melody than this. It's these five-syllable runs that are just too cheesy for me. The chorus is really something though. Really everything but those verses is great. In fact, while it's far from the best track on the album, it is the one song that seems to be the ear worm for this release. All day long I've been humming those damned five notes.

Strollin' is a great tune, very jazzy. There is a killer guitar solo in this tune, just spectacular. And here we need to talk about the personnel for a moment. This is the first Prince album that officially is attributed to him and the New Power Generation (even though the NPG had performed on previous releases), and because of the NPG, it's not just Prince playing all the instruments anymore. So I don't know whether to attribute the solo to him or to the NPG guitarist. It's a pretty stunning solo though, so it's probably safe to assume it's Prince's fret-work, but it is a much different genre of solo than you'd expect him to pull off. Great stuff though, wonderful tune. 

Gett Off is as close as you can get to making my Standout Tracks list without making the grade. It's got a super beat, is funky as hell, and Prince even throws down a rap, and while I cannot complain about it at all, there's just a little something special that's missing for this to go all the way.

But Cream, that motherfucker goes all the way. Funky, baby. And hot. Dance to that motherfucker.

Walk Don't Walk and Jughead, are mostly forgettable, the only real mediocre tracks on the album. Jughead ends with a bit of dialogue ripping on what is almost certainly Warner Brothers, and it sort of feels unnecessary. Again, not a bad song here, just mostly meh.

Money Don't Matter is smooth, 70s style R&B. I love it. It makes my sheets feel softer. Venus Flytrap would have loved it. 

Push is another great funk tune, and from there we go into Insatiable, the ballad in which Prince sings (and talks in PrinceSexyVoice) about wanting to videotape his lovemaking. This is interesting because by the end of the song, it seems he's more interested in being the star of the film rather than the cinematographer. None of this can be very surprising.

The album comes to a close with Live 4 Love, which also comes close to being a fitting James Bond theme song, again, mostly due to that dramatic keyboard action. Little bits of rap are tossed in throughout, but generally it's another funky little number that you can't help but tap your toes to. Super bass solo about halfway through that leads into a good rap portion. Well worth hearing, and a fitting end to a really fine album.

Rating: 4 pearl necklaces (out of 5)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 10): Crystal Ball (1998)

Standout tracks: Acknowledge Me, Ripopgodazippa, Last Heart, The Ride

For those who say you can't have too much of a good thing, Crystal Ball might just be the antithesis of your philosophy; there's just too much mediocrity here to be good. Not to say this 3-disc set is all bad. It isn't. But it is overwhelmingly mediocre, and frankly that shouldn't be surprising.

Crystal Ball's 3 discs are made up of some previously unreleased (but heavily bootlegged) material and some previously released material that have been all been remixed. So, let's face it. If it hadn't been released before, it probably wasn't all that great, and remixes are almost never better than the originals. Therefore, mediocrity.

But for the good stuff, the first two standout tracks listed about come from the superior Gold Experience album, and they appear right near the beginning of the Crystal Ball set. But then there's a long lag before we get to anything memorable, 1986's Last Heart, a track originally on the shelved Dream Factory project, a double album co-written and performed with The Revolution. This history gets a little confusing there, as Prince disbanded The Revolution and attempted to release the Dream Factory recordings along with a bunch of solo tracks as one three-album set called, dig this, Crystal Ball. Warner Brothers wouldn't go along with that and the set was pared down to two albums and released as Sign o' the Times, which, of course, we'll get to in a month or so.

See? Confusing.

There is a good live track at the beginning of the third disc, Days of Wild, from a 1995 NPG show. I like 18 & Over (the lyric itself Prince finds a way to rhyme with "I want 2 bone ya,"), a rappish, funky number that uses the music from the title track of the previously reviewed (and raved-about) Come, which may explain why I like the track more than anything else. Another live track from 1995, the blues-driven The Ride, is absolutely killer and allows Prince the opportunity to strut is stuff on the guitar. It doesn't fit thematically with anything else on Crystal Ball, but it's damned good and I'm glad it's there. Unfortunately, it's followed by a remix/remake of the Come track Loose (retitled here Get Loose), and... ugh. It certainly isn't the worst tune on the set (that would be 1983's 15-minute Cloreen Baconskin, a track so bad I refused to follow my code and didn't listen to it twice. In fact, I skipped to the next track before I had finished it the first time), but it's not very good.

There is a remix of the fun Gold Experience track, P Control, but again, the remix is just not as good as the original release and why it was included here is beyond me. The set ends with a ballad cut from the release of the Emancipation album (another three-disc set that I find... well, you'll have to wait for it), and it's pretty solid, not quite enough to make it as a standout track, but it's good.

This is a tough album to rate because there is so much material of such varying quality. The mediocre stuff might not be mediocre if there were less of it, you know? Like if there was a disc of six of the mediocre tunes and five of the better tunes, it would be easier to review than thirty tracks. So, I think it would be fair to rate it as:


Rating: 3 Dionne Warwicks (out of 5)

  

Prince Album of the Day (Day Off!): Behind the Scenes

So today is a day off, in a sense. In fact, it's not really a day off for me at all, but for the ten or so of you who have been following this little experiment, you have the day off. No Prince album reviews for you today, at least not from me. If you're reading other people's Prince album reviews, I hope they are smaller then mine. Be sure to use protection.

But it is a day off here, as I said. Or not, actually. Because the deal is this: I'm working my way through Crystal Ball, which is three CDs in length. Or five, if you count The Truth and Kamasutra, the two bonus CDs that came with certain incarnations of the Crystal Ball release. I'm counting it as three because I'll review The Truth when I get to the Ts, and I have been as of yet unable to locate a copy of Kamasutra. (If you've got access to a copy, please get in touch with me so I might be able to hear it. That is, to my knowledge, the only officially released album I do not have.) So I've got three discs to work through for Crystal Ball, and that's going to take some time. And so, what I wanted to do this evening is give you a basic overview as to how the process works for me, what I do to get these reviews together for you (and me).

Each day, of course, I listen to one album from Prince's catalogue, in alphabetical order rather than the chronological release date. In doing so, I listen to each album a minimum of two times: once in the car, and once on my home stereo. I do this so I can get the songs into my head enough to be able to say something about them, as well as to hear how they sound through different speakers. It wouldn't be fair to review them based only on how they sound in my car, right? Hell no. So I listen to each album in its entirety a minimum of twice, so with something like Crystal Ball, I've got five hours of listening to do just for the minimum.

After I listen all the way through for the second time, I go through the album again, track by track, spending more time with certain ones and less with others. Some I'll listen to three or four more times. Others I will skip entirely. For some tracks, the two minimum listenings are more than enough, but I still do it. It's only fair. It is at this point I start making notes about what I want to say.

I do a certain amount of research too, be it through the reading of liner notes to looking over other reviews from real critics. I am embarrassed to admit that I have referred to Wikipedia on occasion, but only for release dates and occasional chronological information in order to put into context in my own mind where things go, and where I may have been at the time. I realize no true journalist (and I am using the term loosely here when directing it at myself; I am not a journalist but I think I deserve a higher pay grade than the term "blogger" would award me) would ever choose to cite Wikipedia in his or her work. The site is utter garbage. But as a matter of minor information such as release dates and which album came when, I am content to trust it. (There's a lot of bad information on there though! Yowza!)

So after all that, I compile my notes into a short review and post it for you all to read. Yes, a good deal of time goes into this, and so when I get to something like Crystal Ball and its three discs, I just can't possibly pull it off in a single day. I'm about halfway through my first listen, in fact, so it may take a few days to get through this. And with the kid here until Tuesday, well, let's just say Prince isn't always the best music to have on when an 11 year-old is wandering in and out of the room.

So, until Crystal Ball gets through my ears, I'll be signing off. Thank you, the few of you who are interested. This is a worthy experiment and we have a very long way yet to go!

Prince Album of the Day (Day 8): Controversy (1981)

Standout tracks: Controversy, Do Me, Baby, Jack U Off

This is, essentially, where it all started for me with Prince. I saw the music video for the second track from this album (Sexuality) on HBO's Video Jukebox and I was immediately hooked. "Who is this shirtless madman of funk?" I doubtless didn't think. But I would soon enough. 1999 was right around the corner.

This album is the bees knees, people. Top drawer. High end. The good stuff. The only track that comes close to missing the mark is the admittedly offbeat Annie Christian, but there is just as much I like about the track as I dislike. But let's talk about the rest.

The title track is killer and a perfect launching point for the album. Great funk guitar, great keyboards. (Important to note here, that as with most of the pre-New Power Generation albums, Prince tends to handle nearly every aspect of the recording, in that he, on this album, plays every single instrument you hear with the exception of the very last track, when Revolution members Lisa and Dr. Fink join on keys and Bobby Z. is on drums. Again, this is common for Prince. That's just how fucking good he is, dig?) Sexuality follows in the second slot, and is a definite precursor to Let's Pretend We're Married on 1999, which was the album that came next chronologically. You'll recognize the keyboard and drum machine are in the same vein, thematically, and lyrically, it's certainly a little smutty.

From there, we go into the lone ballad, Do Me, Baby, and it's one of the best he's put down. Sly vocals, hitting all the high notes, one I still try to sing along with when I have the air and a strong throat. Just super good. Private Joy follows with a return to the upbeat funkiness, and the feedbacky intro into Ronnie, Talk to Russia is glorious. Prince is joined by Lisa on backing vocals, but the stunt guitar is really what it's all about for me. It's more of a rocker, but a short one, and it leads us back into the funky bassline groove of Let's Work. Definitely one to dance to if you've got your groove shoes on.

The album ends with the brilliant fun of Jack U Off, a funky pop masterpiece that you cannot help but sing along to. Dirty? Hell yes. There's not a track on this album you want to play with your kids in the car, but when you're all alone or with your special naked friends, turn this mofo up and let it move you.

Controversy. It rarely gets better than this.

Rating: 5 hand jobs (out of 5).

Prince Album of the Day (Day 7): Come (1994)

Standout tracks: Come, Loose!, Race, Letitgo

If I've done my math right (and I may not have, considering), this was the last album Prince released for Warner Brothers under the name Prince. They released The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale under the name Prince without his permission several years later, but that's another story. Bunch of jerks, as we've already covered.

This is one spectacular album, kids. It kicks off strong with the sexy, funky, 11 minute title track, and it means just what you think it does. There's sex all over this record, particularly in the last track, Orgasm, which is basically a bunch of looped feedbacky guitar noise and Vanity making orgasm noises while Prince whispers in his sexy voice for her to come. And she does, over and over. We'll assume she's faking it, even though his whispers had me pretty close once or twice.

The second track, Space, is solid R&B, and that is followed by Pheromone, more funkiness you can definitely shake a leg (or bedspring) to. From there, we go into Loose!, which is as close to techno music as Prince has attempted. This tune kind of reminds me of early Ministry, not guitar-heavy at all, just in the beat.

Race is a great funk number with a great beat, and that is followed by Dark, a capable ballad, but nothing terribly special. Solo is a mostly solo vocal track which frankly doesn't do much for me, as well as the earlier Papa, which is a strange, violent piece that doesn't quite fit with the fun on the rest of the album.

Letitgo is the penultimate track, just before Vanity comes, and it may be my favorite cut on the whole album. A slower funk number, it harkens to the early days of his career, with a great hook and some nice instrumentation, including a killer keyboard solo.

Track this album down and buy it. If you like Prince, this one will be a nice addition to your collection. Just don't put it on when your mom comes over.

Rating: 4 1/2 tissues (out of 5)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 6): The Chocolate Invasion (2004)

Standout track: Underneath the Cream, U Make My Sun Shine

What amounts to an homage to 1970s soul, this online-only release deserves an only slightly-better review than what the boys in Spinal Tap received for their album, Shark Sandwich. This is just a hair above a complete waste of time.

The songs go nowhere, and lyrics are uninspired and the music just doesn't emit any vibe that is even close to the glory of soul from the 1970s. Not that the album is aimed to be that, exactly, but it's the closest I can come to pointing you in any sort of direction where you might hear this style of music, but done far better than our man does here.

The two ballads listed above as standout tracks are the only songs that keep this review from a total pan. There is some merit in there; the singing is good and you can tap your toes to both, but even they are not up to what we know Prince is capable of. It may be that his online-only albums don't hold up as well as the ones you have to go out to buy, maybe because it's too easy and cheap (relatively) to just dump things via the internet on the unsuspecting, underserving fan base who will buy anything he breathes on. What can I say? I'm one of them and will continue to be. He is a genius, after all. But even Einstein screwed up once in awhile, right?

Give this one a miss and you won't regret it.

Rating: 1 1/2 600 baud modems (out of 5)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 5): Chaos and Disorder (1996)

Standout tracks: I Like It There, Zannalee, I Rock, Therefore I Am

Who else but Prince could put out an album of previously thrown away tunes and have it be as good as Chaos and Disorder? If anyone could, it would likely be the other weirdo from Minnesota. There must be something in the water up there.

Chaos and Disorder was the last collection of previously unreleased material Prince would do for Warner Brothers, thus wrapping up his contract which had been so unhappy with for so very long. (Frank Zappa also had a tenuous relationship with Warner Brothers, so they must be a bunch of idiots over there for pissing off two of the greatest composer/musicians of the 20th century.) One would think these leftover tracks (from previous recording sessions) would be garbage, but as mentioned in the opening paragraph, this is really solid stuff.

The album opens with the title track, and it's a rocker, guitar-driven, feedback and organ squealing in the background as the song kicks in. The rocking continues into I Like It There, a radio-friendly tune with a great hook. This would have been a better choice for a single than the one that was chosen, a pleasant Dinner with Delores, a more-than-adequate tune but one that doesn't have quite the appeal as the former.

For the other standouts, the blues-laden Zannalee is a must-hear, and I Rock, Therefore I Am is a funky little number with some great scratching and mid-section rap that sets this one above anything I've heard on contemporary releases from the hip hop crowd, a personal opinion to be sure, but one my inarguably snobbish ear stands by.

I Will is the one true ballad on the album and it is, as usual, killer. Some lovely piano here, and really nice instrumentation in the background. Nice vocal harmonies here too from Prince and some mysterious females. All around a really great album, not at all deserving the mediocre reviews it received upon its release.

Rating: 4 seductive whispers (out of 5)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 4): C-Note (2003)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 4): C-Note (2003)

Standout track: Empty Room

You're probably asking, "C-Note? What the hell is C-Note?" C-Note, my friends, was a fan club-only release (and you thought I only liked him for his body) that Prince released after promising members four albums just for them and then not following through, which led to lawsuits from the fans. A pretty ugly situation, no?

The album itself is a live New Power Generation recording, taken from soundchecks and live performances during the 2002 tour. The title is named after the order of the song titles, most being the cities where they were recorded: Copenhagen, Nagoya, Osaka, Tokya, Empty Room. (There is a sixth song that I have as a bonus, Copenhagen (Slight Return), which is, as you'd expect, a slightly different version that the opening track.)

It is a mostly instrumental album, Empty Room being the only cut with any actual lyrics. (Tokyo features Prince occasionally chanting "Tokyo," but that's as far as it goes.) It's very jammy and jazzy, which is pretty great because the NPG who perform on this stuff are all super at what they do. The most notable member is long-time NPG player Maceo Parker, probably best known for playing with James Brown back in the day. So musically, there are a lot of good things happening here.

I'm a little unimpressed with the recording quality, however. Osaka has way too much distortion, so the very prominent bass sounds really bad and everything else on the track thus sounds a little fuzzy, where it shouldn't. (I listened to the album through three different sets of speakers, and this track sounded horrible on all of them, so it wasn't just a bad speaker here.) Copenhagen and Empty Room have the best quality for sound, but Copenhagen, while a fine jam, just wasn't powerful enough to sit strong in my mind. Empty Room is killer though, as close to rock and roll and you're going to find here. I would put the song into regular rotation on a playlist, which I may create when all this is said and done.

Nagoya just misses the mark of being a standout track, only because of the sound quality. It has some nice horn solos and the usual inspired guitar work, but it just sounds so muddy to me.

The bottom line is, musically, this has a lot going for it, but if you care about sound at all like I do, you'll walk away a little unimpressed. This would be perfect music to study by though, at the right volume, and would maybe even be something you could sleep to.

Rating: $350 (out of $500).

Prince Album of the Day (Day 3): The Black Album

Prince Album of the Day (Day 3): The Black Album (1994)

Standout tracks: When 2 R in Love, 2 Nigs United 4 West Compton, Rockhard in a Funky Place

This album is probably more infamous than any of His Royal Badness's catalogue. Originally intended for release in 1987, Prince withdrew the album only days before it was to hit the shelves. Rumors at the time revolved around all kinds of crazy ideas, one I remember was that the album was too dirty for the label to release it. (It's dirty, but not too dirty.) A few promo copies got out and the album was bootlegged to high heaven (my first copy was a bootleg I bought at Off the Record in Royal Oak), but The Black Album did not receive an official release until 1994. Shortly after, Prince stopped being Prince for awhile and was spotted around town with the word "slave" written on his face. Warner Brothers' decision to release this album may have played a part in all that, along with many other things. That said, the album is a funk paradise, with great grooves everywhere. The only clunkers are the profane, bizarre, unnecessary Bob George, and a rap (of sorts) called Dead on It. Everything else is gorgeous, from the funky Le Grind that opens the record all the way to the bumpin' Rockhard in a Funky Place. 2 Nigs... is a super mostly instrumental jam with some wicked instrumentation, including a bass solo that would make Les Claypool blush. The sole ballad, When 2 R in Love, is stunningly beautiful. (That track was released on Lovesexy in 1988, which came out as a replacement for The Black Album.) A very good album, definitely one to brighten the mood, but skip the two clunkers. They bring the overall score down.

Rating: 3 1/2 copies of Smell the Glove (out of 5)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 2): Batman Soundtrack

Prince Album of the Day (Day 2): Batman Soundtrack (1989). 

Standout tracks: Lemon Crush, Trust.

The soundtrack for Tim Burton's first Batman movie, this album is mostly a big mess. There is no real cohesion here at all between songs, and on the tracks that don't include Jack Nicholson dialogue, you really have to stretch to connect them to the film. There are random references (lyrically) to Gotham City and there's a song named (ostensibly) after Vicki Vale, which had been actually recorded a year earlier and was named Anna Waiting, after Prince's then-girlfriend, but that's really about as far as it gets. And that's fine, because every song on a Batman soundtrack doesn't need to mention Batman. Musically, there's not a lot to talk about. Trust and Lemon Crush are both pretty great, and Electric Chair (also from an earlier recording session) and the upbeat Partyman are not too shabby either. The duet with Sheena Easton (The Arms of Orion) is not very good. The ballad Scandalous isn't terrible, but not very inspiring either. And the Batdance finale (I had the cassingle!) is fine if you like that sort of thing, but I'm not fond of film dialogue being inserted into songs. All in all, Lemon Crush is worth hearing though. There are snippets of smokin' guitar leads, like Eddie Hazel with Tourette's, and a really solid groove. I would definitely shake it up on the dance floor if it came on in the club. But the album itself? Meh.

Rating: 2 Bat Signals (out of 5)

Prince Album of the Day (Day 1): Around the World in a Day

Here begins a new daily (as time allows) series of posts. For the next several weeks, I am going to work my way through what amounts to be a majority of Prince's catalogue, in alphabetical order, one album a day, and report back each day to the few of you who haven't blocked me already with a small review. That said, let's begin:

Prince Album of the Day (Day 1): Around the World in a Day (1985). Standout tracks: Condition of the Heart, Raspberry Beret, Pop Life, The Ladder.

The follow-up album to 1984's Purple Rain, Prince let loose with some experimentation and came up with a merely mediocre album. The title track has potential but never quite goes anywhere. Paisley Park does even less. Tamborine may be one of the most painfully bad songs I've heard. But the rest of the album is not bad. It's hard not to like the singles, Raspberry Beret and Pop Life (I still have those both on 45). Condition of the Heart is a really solid ballad that I'd put up there with the best of them, not quite as good as 1999's Free, but really damn good. The Ladder is one of Prince's "come to Jesus" tunes, and it's very catchy and has been stuck in my head most of the day. That track is followed with Temptation, a sex and God-fueled romp that features some killer guitar and saxophone work. It gets a little weird near the end, where he has a little dialogue with the Almighty about sex vs. love, which was a common theme of the tour that led up to this album, but it's still a worthwhile listen.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)