Mike Oldfield - Incantations
|
Our Price: $19.37 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Incantations
Free Music Review: Poetic and charismatic
Hit: 5 Stars
One of the most poetic , disturbed, evocating and hypnotizing of Mike's albums. YOu croos like a seagul all the moods of nature , from the raise of the sun above the sea , the stormy winds and the reconforting smell of the purple sunset on a endless seashore.Free Music Review: Classic Oldfield long instrumental
Hit: 5 Stars
This is one of Mike's great long instrumentals.Free Music Review: Good, good. Buy it now.
Hit: 5 Stars
A sweet album. Very close to your soul.Free Music Review: Incantations
Hit: 5 Stars
UniqueFree Music Review: Is this a pirate copy? No, it's the new remasters.
Hit: 4 Stars
This was the only Oldfield album I never listened to much on vinyl as I always preferred the wonderful live version on 'Exposed', so seeing it available newly remastered it seemed like a good time to become re-acquianted. I still it find less inspiring than the live version - particularly parts three and four - with too many weedy sounding keyboards and sparser instrumentation, especially during moments when the huge band on the live version would generate an awesome crescendo of sound. Having said that, it is still a very good, and often mesmerising, piece of music and happily the sound quality of the HDCD remasters is excellent and a huge improvement on previous CD's. This is more than can be said for the shoddy packaging, though, which applies for all the remasters I have purchased. The covers are very poor quality - almost like colour photo-copies giving the appearance of a pirate bootleg - and the booklets are cheap and flimsy. The booklets come with specially written liner notes which are excrutiatingly banal and full of errors. For example, the notes repeatedly make reference to the inclusion of the track 'Guilty' which does not even appear on the album, and never has. On the album 'QE2' the writer claims that the title track takes up the whole of side one (it appears on side two and at only seven minutes long could never have taken up the whole side of any album).
If an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could write the works of Shakespear then I reckon it would take half a dozen monkeys with a packet of crayons to write better sleeve notes than this. Surprisingly, the guy responsible was brave enough to put his name to this drivel.
Elsewhere, the tracklisting for the album 'Crises' completely omits one of the tracks and the small print for 'The Killing Fields' indicates that I am actually listening to 'Five Miles Out'. These examples (I'm sure there are many more) are not just small, petty errors, but whopping great errors than even a cursory proof reading could have avoided. The one redeeming feature is that if you collect all the new remasters a tubular bells image will appear on the spines, providing, of course, that you put them in the right order.
Kudos for the those responsible for the remastering then, but shame on Virgin for the awful packaging.