Popped to Sister Ray last night and picked up the new CD issue of ‘The Anvil’.
First – the artwork: Back in 1981, this album had a sleeve designed by Peter Saville, with photography by Helmut Newton. This edition has had that artwork rendered by…er….um…whoever was passing the scanner at the time.
When you consider the band stories/trials and tribulations going on during the making of this album, you’d think there’d be a lot you could do relaying such history through the sleevenotes. Sadly what you get reads like a cut and paste job from Record Collector magazine; ‘Track ‘Blah (Dance Mix)’ came out on catalogue number POSPX 7654765476347…’ so riveting a read, it makes the Yellow Pages look like ‘Ulysses’.
When you take the disc out of the tray, instead of having some of that Helmut Newton photography – you get adverts for re-issues of bands like Nena.
So what about the sound quality of the CD itself? Well, it’s a straight copy of the original CD issue by One Way Records back in the 90s. In case you’ve missed a thread or two – what Cherry Red have done is master the CD, from a CD – not original master tapes, so there’s no digital remastering from the original analogue masters. The same applies to two of the extra tracks; ‘We Move’ and ‘Frequency 7’ – because they were both extra tracks on the One Way edition. I’ve not given the new batch of extra tracks an in-depth listen, but I can’t hear any vinyl crackle yet!
A cursory listen - ‘The Damned Don't Cry (Dance Mix)’ was the vocal always that low in the mix? ‘Motivation’ and ‘I'm Still Searching’ sound a little bit muddy, and ‘Mind Of A Toy (Dance Mix)’ – sounds ok.
This re-issue has divided me a bit – it’s not completely the “cut ‘n’ shove” I assumed it was going to be…almost though. Part of me welcomes it; ‘good to have it on CD, mustn’t grumble at £7.99, at least it didn’t set me back £7,000,000 etc etc’ but part of me wants to scream ‘How can you not include ‘The Pleasure Boys’ 12”!? Or source from the original masters!? Are you insane!?? Etc etc’
Hmmmmmm….
