Vanilla Fudge - Self Titled SACD UDSACD2210
Mastered from the Original Master Tapes and Limited to 2,000 Numbered Copies
Permission to get weird is granted with Vanilla Fudge. Created during the peak of heightened chemical, musical, and social experimentation, the band's self-titled debut aims for sonic and mental expansion via psychedelic means. Consisting primarily of elongated covers of then-modern works by the Beatles, Supremes, Curtis Mayfield, and others, the album shape-shifts the familiar into original, uncharted excursions that lead to colorful dimensions. More than 50 years after its original release, the symphonic arrangements now sound more ambitious, direct, mesmerizing, and influential than ever before courtesy of a superior mono restoration.
Mastered from the original master tapes and limited to 2,000 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity's hybrid SACD unveils the baroque underpinnings, gorgeous harmonies, grinding soul, and low-end-plumbing organ riffs that help make the quartet's music inimitably unique. The timing of the off-kilter tempos and unpredictable improvisational movements is also cast into unpolluted light, with the collective's expert shading and deliberate tonality emerging as major components of the songs.
Vastly improved, too, is the powerful, jazz-inspired drumming of Carmine Appice. Seated deep and wide in the vast soundstage, his playing illuminates the genius of Vanilla Fudge's arguably most valuable asset – a sense of dynamics and surprise that contributes to a rich, malt-like musical thickness true to the band's name. Psychedelia, yes, but seemingly more dense, absurd, slow, and groovy than that offered by any of its late 1960s contemporaries, and free of any of the cloying nature that immediately identifies retro acts as imitators.
Indeed, Vanilla Fudge's 1967 magnum opus occupies territory located between high-art seriousness and rule-breaking outrageousness. Its maverick streak treats reverential scripts with inviting strangeness, offbeat vision, and zero pretension. Sharing a mental wavelength with Frank Zappa and the Mothers' finest work, renditions of the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" swirl with bizarre accents and stretch the imagination. Equally creative, Vanilla Fudge's takes on Sonny Bono's "Bang Bang" and the Zombies' "She's Not There" redefine the dirge.
tracklist
Ticket to Ride
People Get Ready
She's Not There
Bang Bang
Illusions of My Childhood - Part One
You Keep Me Hanging On
Illusions of My Childhood - Part Two
Take Me for a Little While
Illusions of My Childhood - Part Three
Eleanor Rigby
