The parallels are further enforced by Wilson’s tour de force Smile not seeing the proper light of day until many decades later — as a solo effort and not the Beach Boys vehicle it was originally intended to be. At the tail end of the 1960s, Berry was also working on a game-changing effort that would not soon be available to the masses, though it never reached the mythic proportions of Wilson’s effort. Essentially a solo album, but credited to Jan & Dean contractually (with Torrence’s blessing,) Carnival of Sound is finally available from the mischievous shoe-making elves at Rhino Handmade.

Reviewing both the previously mentioned discs require putting the reviewer’s mind in a retroactive state. Yes, Smile was recorded in 2004, but was written in 1967 and sounds like it. Carnival of Sound arrives already a relic of sorts, so you have to give it some slack, particularly in the flower-groovy lyrics and sitar-guitar of the title track. Tributes to gum (“Fan Tan”) and “Laurel And Hardy” and the questionable judgment of remaking “Little Old Lady From Pasadena” into “Tijuana” aside, there’s a nice sense of fun about the recording. A cover of “Stay” isn’t as essential as the original, and the pro-Vietnam War song “Only a Boy” comes across almost like a middle finger to the burgeoning anti-war movement. The best track on the album is a throwback to Berry’s doo-wop days, a cover of “In The Still of the Night” despite an awkward spoken sentiment in the bridge.

Is Carnival of Sound the lost masterpiece Smile was? In a word, no. It’s a neat listen, and for fans of pop music from the era, you’ll have a good time with the album, but the reality is that it fell on the wrong side of history. If it had been released way back when, Jan Berry would have been clobbered and his label would have been kicked squarely in the ass for — well — being square. Even so, you can hear in the stereo mixes how people could come to the conclusion that Berry was another studio wizard. The first 13 tracks are in mono and, as such, don’t really knock the listener out. The stereo mixes follow after and, sonically, blow the monos out of the water. With 29 tracks and nearly 80 minutes to account for, the disc is the final word in this lost release.

For packaging nerds like me, the vinyl edition is particularly awesome. It features what would have comprised the original release and sounds terrific; it sounds like an album from the 1960s, but is clean and sonically crisp. Packed up in an oversized hardcover gatefold, it reminds me of Warner Bros. “Loss Leaders” collections from the early Seventies. The design work provided by Torrence is suitably trippy, the exhaustive liner notes are welcomed and, yes, the package includes the CD too. In the end, Carnival of Sound is an interesting curio but reveals itself to be far too out-of-touch with what would have been the zeitgeist, and likely would not have been talked about for years after. If you’re a fan of the surf-pop sound, you’ll probably really appreciate the album. If you’re looking for a lost classic — despite all of its good qualities — this isn’t it.

Carnival of Sound is available from Rhino Handmade.

So it may be a hard road to travel for the entity known as Shearwater, for even though they can take down a mountain with sound when they want to, or sing softly like the mourning last animal left on earth, this is not the stuff of basic, by-the-book rock and roll. For me, this is a great thing, and the band has pulled off yet another recording that asks to be heard, from start to finish, with your attention focused. For others, it might be jarring. Peter Gabriel circa the Security album and Talk Talk and their masterpiece Laughing Stock could be cited as examples. Jonathan Meiburg, the central figure of the group, fits comfortably among the two and has never met a dynamic shift he didn’t like. The album opens with found-sound singing but heads into a bass drum heartbeat on “Meridian.” A frantic keyboard gives way to an anthemic rocker in “Black Eyes” and the side one closer “God Made Me” starts with acoustics and falsetto, erupts with grungy, thunderous feedback by the last chorus, then sends those guitars into deep background until they sound like the squeal of braking trains. “Runners Of The Sun” is just incredible, a pop song filtered through this (yes) arty aesthetic.

The vinyl version of the album is particularly neat, aside from the gatefold sleeve and the ‘dossier’ booklet that comes with it. Chiefly, the sequencing was made for vinyl, giving each side a clearly defined opening and close (and bonus tracks as well) so that the listener is compelled to sit through the entire musical narrative versus feeling like skipping around, a tendency becoming more prevalent for LP releases that were sequenced for a continuous CD instead, or a standard album where the singles are frontloaded. Plus, the pressing is pristine on heavy stock vinyl, so the separations in each channel really fill up the home stereo speakers. When the band hits a drum in the left channel, you hear it in the left and that separation sounds so much more pronounced this way than on the digital editions. The echoes and reverb all sound natural, a pleasant side effect of “mic’ing the room” and getting the sound not solely from the instruments but off how they sound bouncing off the studio walls and ceiling. From my system, the effect was incredibly natural and few recent recordings have given me the feeling that the band was in the space with me.

I recommend the LP edition without question, but I’d recommend The Golden Archipelago on whatever medium you choose because it’s just that exciting a record, redeeming texture for another generation of music fans.

The Golden Archipelago can be purchased in multiple formats from Amazon.Com.

Big Blue Ball

The Sun Came Out has a rock & roll through-line and, therefore, is an easier listen. The pedigree is outstanding as well, since you’re not just getting more Finns than you can shake a stick at, but you’re getting a chunk of Radiohead, a large part of Wilco, and some Johnny Marr for good measure. One of the early standouts is “Run in the Dust,” a Marr contribution with some nice, moody guitar textures, but the set spans two CDs or four full vinyl sides. By the sheer weight of the thing, the listener instinctively begins to cherry-pick tracks. For the CD or iTunes set, that’s fine. For the vinyl collector, not so much.

At heart, this is still a various artists compilation, and as such you’ll have styles you’ll gravitate to and others you’ll likely jump over. I’m still at odds with the inclusion of the Jeff Tweedy track “You Never Know,” as this version is virtually identical to the version on the latest Wilco album (titled Wilco (The Album).) It’s a good song and a standout on the Wilco release with its not-so-subtle hat tip to George Harrison, but it’s really just filler here.

If you do choose to go the LP route, it’s a hefty package on high-quality vinyl, housed in a handsome gatefold sleeve. Two added bonuses are the download code so you can snag a digital version for free with the purchase, and the proceeds go to the charity Oxfam so any purchase contributes to a worthy cause. Still, the nature of the collection is such that you’ll appreciate the programmability of a digital edition. (Read our review of the CD version here.)

The Sun Came Out (vinyl edition) is available through Amazon.com.

Shangri-La

That’s fine by me. His folksier side suits him well, especially on the album opener, “Border Reiver,” complete with a quick rambling pace and tasteful flute & violin combination, and highlight “Monteleone,” which is a song about the famous guitar builder John Monteleone. It’s the most telling tune on the record, as it’s less about the man or his profession, and more about the romance of the guitar. One loves to make them, one loves to play them. “Cleaning My Gun” displays a little grit for those who prefer a punchier guitar sound, but the restraint might be maddening to those who regularly pull out Making Movies. For myself, Knopfler’s melodies and his penchant for picking chords that simply feel ‘right’ make up for any lost stage sweat (or as he once mused, “liquid gumption”) and his modern version of the ancient art of musical storytelling is seldom challenged. In another age, his characters would have been as familiar as John Henry.

The vinyl version is just about perfect, made more so by imperfection. Presented in a fine two-platter gatefold sleeve, and pressed on fine 180 gram vinyl, it is about as good as new LPs get, but even so the record edition has natural limitations. If you don’t have a super expensive turntable with an equally super expensive cartridge, you’ll probably hear a degree of surface noise, especially in the quieter points, like the delicate and gorgeous “Hard Shoulder,” a paean to Bacharach and David ’60s pop. On the CD, it’s still clear and pretty, but that very particular mode of delivery, a diamond-tipped spike rolling through a channel,  adds something to these songs. They call it warmth but, I reiterate, it’s familiarity in it’s nicest possible form.

Get Lucky is not for everyone. It’s mostly a mellow affair, and it’s not out to reinvent anything, but definitely worthwhile on any format if you enjoy a good story the way I do – highly recommended.

Get Lucky (vinyl) is available at Amazon.com.

For those who like to geek out on the technical end of things, in the vinyl world a sound source is fed into the machine that lathe-cuts the groove into the metal master disc. It is this disc that subsequent vinyl imprints will be pressed from. For modern vinyl cutting, that source is a digital file and the cutting is in real time, meaning the lathe cuts at the same rate as the song is normally played. Mobile Fidelity, or Mo-Fi as they’ve branded themselves, goes back to the original analog master tape for source material and plays back the tracks at half the speed, thus being able to grab much more audio material, hence the “Half Speed Mastered” headline so famously pasted across the tops of their sleeves.

Does it make a difference? I begrudgingly have to admit that it does, and I say this because I am famously candid on the point that my love for vinyl is strictly irrational. I believe it is equal parts nostalgia, fetish and perhaps an attraction to the “bigness” of the record presentation, and that most of the time the much mentioned “warmth” and clarity of analog is the listener hearing what they want to hear, but not what really is. Yet those first palm-muted guitar plunks of “Good Times Roll” followed by the keyboard pings from Greg Hawkes definitely have something my remastered CD doesn’t, and the creeping fear that I’m becoming another arrogant audiophile has started to settle in.

Setting aside digital media entirely, the original vinyl editions of The Cars were mass-manufactured and, most often, played on really low-end turntables. My first real turntable had an 8-track deck in it, so there you go. The last tracks on either side, “Don’t Cha Stop” and “All Mixed Up” suffered terribly on that inner groove, especially the latter as there was a saxophone solo at the end, and the lack of bass clarity down at the end of a record causes some frequencies to sound thin and tweezy (“Tweezy” is a registered copyright of Dw. Dunphy Made-up Terminologies Ltd.) By using this particular cutting technology, and a grade of vinyl three times thicker than WEA’s standard weight of the time, there is enough guts in the material to take a bass signal. All this is to say that the record sounds fantastic, even on my Sony turntable bought straight off the shelf from Best Buy.

Is this an essential album? From the viewpoint of pop/rock history, absolutely. You know at least 75% of the album already even if you’ve never owned it. Is this an essential version? Only if you’re a vinyl nerd or a dedicated fan of the band. At $30+ a pop, this release will run you three times the cost of its predecessors, but if you fall into either of those two categories, you’ll truly appreciate another fine offering from Mobile Fidelity.