CitW quality

[deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu (Ben Haller)]

Well, I'm listening to my Rocket Man / Candle In The Wind single
that I just got.  First time I've heard either one.  A few notes:
  1. From all the talk of the reggae approach to RM, I thought it
     would be a lot more pronounced.  It's not really an extremely
     upbeat reggae thing, and I think it's used mainly to contrast
     with the parts where the reggae stops and it gets all soft
     and moody and deep.  I liked it.  However, it's only my first
     listening, and I've never heard the original.
  2. Candle In The Wind is really nice, I think.  I liked it a
     great deal.  I do hope, however, that this sort of thing isn't
     what her whole next album will be like.  It's not as musically
     interesting, it seems to me.  It relies a lot more or nice-
     sounding synth patches, and a lot less on the real quality of
     KT's older stuff.  Well, it's a B-side.
  3. The big point.  My copy has *massive* noise during the instrumental
     version of CitW.  A really big burst of static goes from 0:58 to
     1:00 or so, another two I noticed of shorter duration.  Is this
     my copy, or is Del really *that* bad an engineer?  If you don't
     hear what I'm talking about, then you don't have it - it's about the
     same volume as the actual music, so you can't miss it.  This is the
     CD single, and it sounds the same each time I play it, so I don't
     think it's a problem with my stereo.  No visible scratches on the
     disc (and I've never heard a scratch manifest itself in this manner
     anyways...)
  4. Just a nitpick: the instrumental version *does* have vocals, just
     not as many...
  5. The packaging sucks.  I wonder how many people do what I do: when
     I get a CD in one of these non-jewel-box "eco-packaging" pieces
     of crap, I go out and buy an empty jewel box and transplant the
     CD.  Therefore I use *two* pieces of packaging instead of *one* -
     hardly a big win for the ecology.  But with a CD collection the
     size of mine, those packages mess up my organization, and aren't
     worth the hassle.  Not to mention that I can't get the CD out of
     them with one hand, one of the great assets of jewel boxes (changing
     CDs while driving is essential...)  So how do we communicate to
     these stupid record companies that longboxes are bad, but jewel
     boxes are good?  U2's new album is particularly bad, it doesn't
     even say the group/album on the spine.  What planet are they from?

Picked up Sarah McLachlan: Touch yesterday.  Does this have any
relevance to the whole "available in the US" thing with Arista?
Or was that a different album?
  Adrian Belew just had a compilation album released with snippets
from three of his albums, "Lone Rhino", "Twang Bar King" and "Desire
Caught By The Tail".  It's not clear why "Desire" is on it, since
that's available on CD already anyhow.  The other two have not been
released on CD yet.  So the question is: are they going to release
those first two albums on CD, or is this all that us Belew fans get?
And if this is all, WHY?  Grrr.  I hate record companies sometimes.
  Well, that's all for now.  C-ya...

-Ben Haller (deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu)