Tapestry

by

Carole King

Edit

I'll admit -- I'm one of those people who feel that TAPESTRY is one of the greatest albums of all time. So my review of this new 2-CD edition is colored by that view.

TAPESTRY is one of only a handful of albums ever released that contains only total winners (in terms of songs). Many artists produce great albums, but there are always a couple of songs that I don't like as much as the others. Not so with TAPESTRY. Every song on the album deserves five stars.

This 2-CD set contains the complete original album, along with a second disc of previously-unreleased live recordings of (most of) the songs from the album. These live versions were chosen because they strip the songs down to their pure essence -- Carole at the keyboard and on vocals, with nothing else. This is a fantastic thing to have paired with the original album. Sound quality is excellent, performances are inspired and passionate.

The set loses a star, though, because it's just not as good as it COULD have been. TAPESTRY has already been issued in a remastered, expanded edition. (This version appears to be the same mastering as the previous one.) However, the first expanded edition included two bonus tracks (one a previously-unreleased studio track, the other a live recording), and neither of those bonus tracks were included in this new edition. So if you want to have a "complete" TAPESTRY, you have to own both versions of the album. To me, this smacks of record company greed -- let's see how many times we can get these suckers to buy the same album. Sony has done this same thing recently with Michael Jackson's THRILLER. And Elvis Costello fans know all about this sort of thing...

If you're a Carole King fan, you will definitely want this set. If you don't care about live versions of the songs, you can stick with the single-disc remastered version from a few years back. But if, like me, you're a die-hard aficionado, you'll have to have both. It's only shelf space!

I would give this album 5 stars as it deserved it musically. But this is a well known example of a poor recording (mastering) effect. From its original source this album was poorly recorded (what a sin!) so if you are expecting this album to be your reference album to showcase your system abilities and the sacd techonology be aware that it will give you a bad surprise. The audible distortion is evident and it shows. I think its better to have this album on a regular CD, you are not going to gain practically nothing having it in a superior format, only revealing more its recording mistakes. The version I have heard that most satisfies me sonically speaking is the 200 gram super vinyl version, fwiw.