Yer' Album

by

James Gang

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I truly think that this is one of the best albums out there. It has that same feeling as Dark Side of the Moon, Electric Ladyland, and Who's Next have... there is just so much going on and it never stops. This album is just crammed with great music. It has some truly rocking pieces that portray future Walsh stuff to come (Funk 48, Bluebird, I Don't Have the Time), some great use of the organ (Take a Look Around, Fred), some orchestration (Wrapcity in English), acoustic (Collage), and some just plain messing around (Intro, Stone Rap). Then, to top it all off, there are 2 fantastic blues jams, Lost Woman and Stop. That's every song on this album, each one worth listening to either for pleasure or just plain laughs.

Every song is well-produced and great sounding, well-written, and well-arranged within the album. There is not a flaw here. This is Rides Again and then some, this is my album, make it Yer' album too. (huh huh sorry had to do something stupid like that).

In 2000, MCA re-issued all three Walsh-era James Gang albums in remastered format. Unfortunately, the remasters are particularly lackluster, suffering greatly in the clarity department.

However, the previous year, the German Repertoire label released a 2CD "Best Of", with their own dedicated remastering.

Quite simply, the Repertoire set is the James Gang album you literally never knew you really wanted, especially if you own all three MCA CD's. All the muddy sound of the MCA discs is gone; the percussion is clear, the bass thunders and Walsh is there in all his distorted glory, with the dynamic range of the original albums perfectly intact.

Unfortunately, the Repertoire disc has the abbreviated "Bomber Medley", which is an enormous sore point for JG fans. Also, Repertoire allotted a major portion of the set to the non-Walsh JG years; only 14 of the 40 tracks are Walsh-era material. I'm sure many JG fans will have their opinions over excluded tracks, but the selections were made with input from Jim Fox, who contributes a song-by-song synopsis of each track in the booklet. There is also probably the best essay on the history of the band of any JG CD ever released.

It's a shame that Repertoire didn't produce individual editions of the first three JG albums, because they would have blown away the lackluster MCA discs. But, I've heard just about every other JG "best of", plus the BGO discs, and the Repertoire set towers above them all. While less than half of the Walsh-JG tracks are contained on the Repertoire set, no true JG's fan's collection is complete without it.