Animalisms (Import)

by

The Animals

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I've been waiting a long time for this reissue. I'm 57 and bought the LP when it came out. I've wanted to upgrade this one to cd for a long time. It starts a little slow, but picks up steam. Great vocals by Eric and some great guitar by Hilton Valentine similar in style to his work on Animalization, particularly CC Rider, which had a nice solo. He does some nice stuff here particularly on the slow blues. He's always been under appreciated compared to the Yardbird guitarists, but here he puts out work as good as anything they were doing back then. This is a great group of songs and performances, unique in the Animal's canon. Get it while you can. I got it very promptly from Hip-O.

I was thrilled to order this piece because, although almost all of the material was already released on THE COMPLETE DECCA RECORDINGS CD, I guess that one is out of print, and I wouldn't pay $40 for that. This was reasonably priced and only short one song, I think,

However, when I played this CD, which is the entire British album, plus the Decca reissue of the Animals first demo, and the stereo versions on the few songs released in stereo in America, the sound was horrible. Too much bass, distortion, and too high a level (so typical of many CD's). My feeling was that the source for this CD was MP3's somebody downloaded. That is just a guess, but my American vinyl reissue of the US version of the LP is better sounding on most songs.

The exception is the track, "Inside-Looking Out", which is also over-compressed on the US releases.

I just wish this CD was mastered by somebody else. I could do better off the records, I believe!