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)
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