Friday, 6 April 2018

Cream - Nineteen Sixty-Seven


Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very poor sound quality


I am getting very fed up with poor-quality recordings of classic bands dredged up and foisted on the buying public like this.  Cream themselves, of course, are brilliant; they were three genuine musical geniuses (and I don't use that word lightly) and their playing here is first-rate throughout, but the sound quality here ranges from poor to dreadful. 

These seem to be recordings made from the radio onto a home tape recorder of pretty dubious quality in many cases, so there's a lot of hiss, distortion, imbalance and generally very muddy sound.  Just as a couple of examples, the vocals in the first version of Traintime, are distorted and really horrible to listen to, and I'd have liked an early version of Tales Of Brave Ulysses if it didn't sound as though I was listening to it coming through the wall from the next room while someone was hoovering the carpet.

Ardent admirers of Cream (like me) may want this in their collections, but there's a lot of far, far better live Cream available.  Personally, I don't think the live recordings on Wheels Of Fire and Goodbye have ever been bettered and this certainly isn't a patch.  I've given it two stars – just – because the playing is great, but my advice is to Approach With Extreme Caution.

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