Search - Haircut 100 :: Pelican West Plus

Fun album, lousy reissue

Edward Doty Schatz | Baltimore, Maryland, United States | 01/22/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I've grown accustomed to buying Japanese reissues of a lot of music these days. Most domestic and European companies don't care much for their catalogue and put out shoddy reissues that sound lifeless and limp (usually being sourced from vinyl or tapes that are several generations from the original masters). The Japanese music companies (BMG/JVC) have this much hyped K2 24-bit remastering process that is supposedly the best you can get when it comes to music. However, with this album, it is a massive and painful failure. The album, while "remastered" insofar as volume goes, has ALL of the faults of the previous reissues one can find on Amazon at a cheaper price. The CD is full of pops, clicks and (special to this edition) copius noise reduction software use. The pops and clicks were on the old CDs (the other imports on Amazon) and thus are identical. The original CD issues clearly came from a rough analogue tape and this CD issue is seemingly merely a reprocessing of the old CD that is much louder. Louder may sound beter at first but you lose any dynamic quality to the music and subsequently get your eardrums blown out. For the price and supposed superiority, this reissue fails completely. Don't waste your money. One day someone will get it right using original master tapes (I hope). Buy the old the Pelican West + or the American Beat reissue. The American Beat reissue lacks the bonus tracks because of rights issues but is a very good remaster."