American Woman

by

The Guess Who

Edit

This 30th anniversary reissue of The Guess Who's classic AMERICAN WOMAN album is handled with great care and respect, making the old appear and sound brand new.

A CD reissue of this Guess Who album wouldn't have occurred if they hadn't received a resurgence in popularity. This was due in part to last year's successful cover of the title track by Lenny Kravitz, and the group's mini-reunion at the 1999 Pan-American Games in Winnipeg. (These two events prompted the band to stage a hugely successful cross-Canada tour, where they did a commanding 12-minute performance of "American Woman" that made the crowds get out of their seats and party!)

The new and much-improved reissue of AMERICAN WOMAN doesn't suffer from sloppy engineering or muddy sound, unlike the 1988 CD release. The progressive chord changes, Randy Bachman's snarling guitar, and Burton Cummings' distinctive set of pipes are heard upfront, making it all sound as if it were recorded just yesterday. Thankfully, none of the tracks are subject to annoying edits this time around. One example is "8:15," which has the first five seconds that were cut from the initial CD release.

To top it all off, this AMERICAN WOMAN CD has the original cover art and photos, along with new liner notes, lyrics, an excellent bonus track ("Got to Find Another Way"), and useful track-by-track commentary written by Cummings. All these elements make for a truly magical listening experience for Guess Who fans young and old.

I bought this when it first came out in album form. It is good to hear again. Great muscianship, vocals and some clever lyrics. I remember back when my buddies and I would sit and listen to this and track by track we could tag which bigtime band they were going for. Guess Who was always great at mocking the style of other bands and for this same reason they never were taken all that seriously as a force to compete with bands like the Doors, Zepelin or for God's sake the Beatles. If I'm not mistaken, their name implies that you should wonder from song to song "who" they are trying to sound like. Good listening here, but this is the best they had to offer and it is only a second tier in the layer cake of rock.