Postby Rspaight » Tue Nov 16, 2004 8:51 pm
This is the stupidest fucking packaging ever.
I'm not kidding.
OK, picture this: you get this slipcase that's about ten inches high. So it can't possibly fit into any sane CD shelving system. Usually, when such a form factor is deployed (I love the word "deployed"), it's to accomodate an oversize booklet. Is that the case? Heck, no!
When you pull the inner contraption out of the slipcase, you are rewarded by your new CDs dumping out onto the floor. That's because the four mini-LP type sleeves are just sitting in the inner thingamabob with nothing whatsoever to keep them in place. Once loosed from the slipcase, they're free to slip the surly bonds of cardboard and make a break for it. Unless the inner whatsis is inserted into the slipcase the other way around, in which case the booklet leaps out. Genius.
The inner whatchamajigger folds into a ludicrously thick jewel-case size affair, if for some reason you want to stick it into your shelf that way. The resulting "spine," though the thickness of a double-CD case plus a single case, has nothing at all on it.
The booklet is normal-sized, and much too skinny to fit in its half of the weird origami cardboard inner structure. So Capitol thoughtfully provided two slabs of plastic glued to the inside of that half to sort of hold the book in place, though it will gleefully fall out if gravity is applied. The book itself is no great shakes. There's about five pages of totally unenlightening text from Lewisohn (those of you hoping for authoritative information on how these records differ from their UK counterparts will be sorely disappointed) followed by a bunch of boring pictures and glib quotes from the Mopped Ones. The only technical credit at all is for Ted Jensen.
The mini-LP sleeves are poorly reproduced copies of someone's old records, not the original elements. They have the duplicate mono/stereo tracklistings clumsily pasted into the original back-cover layouts, along with Compact Disc and Apple logos.
Four CD-Rs in a Ziploc baggie would have been about as good, and we might have saved a few bucks.
However, the discs themselves are surprisingly good in all their echoey, nth-generation glory. There's no NR that I can hear -- the outros are all drenched in hiss.
(Oh my God, "She's A Woman" just came on. Sweet bleeding Jeebus. This is hilariously awful. It sounds like... like... words fail me. Robert Johnson records sound better than this. Now "I Feel Fine." No wonder the kids all starting using drugs. I think I got my money's worth out of just these two tracks in comedy value. Quick check -- yep, the mono sounds the same, just folded in. Egads.)
That aside, it's all nicely done, given the limits of the sources. If the inevitable UK remasters are done to typical EMI/Apple NR/EQ specs, these may actually end up being the best official digital source for a lot of these tracks. Wouldn't that be a hoot?
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
