Search - Spike Jones & His City Slickers :: Cocktails for Two

Classic cuts monstrously mutilated.

Kimba W. Lion | the East Coast | 02/04/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Here we have yet another example of completely inept CD production. Everything that could possibly be done to ruin the sound of these recordings has been done, and the rarer tracks suffer the worst, to the point that some of them are rendered just plain unintelligible. Bad digital noise reduction has been crudely applied, leaving strange gurgles and whistles that were never a part of the original recordings. Old-fashioned filtering has been done with a heavy hand, lopping off both the bottom and the top octaves. Insane equalization has been used, apparently with the idea that if you outrageously boost the octave below the one you erased, no one will notice the filtering. Even artificial echo has been added, so that Chloe sounds like she was lost in a cave instead of a swamp. To make the whole experience better, none of these atrocities was applied consistently; the sound varies widely from track to track so that listening is a roller coaster ride from bad to really bad to "did someone cut off my ears?" to merely bad again.



Equally inept is the way the compilation was put together. Tracks are randomly thrown onto the disks with no regard to chronology or continuity. They actually put 4 WWII-related cuts together on Disc 3, so we almost had a theme going, but "Little Bo Peep Has Lost Her Jeep" was back on Disc 1, mis-identified as "Little Bo Peep Has Lost Her Sheep". "Sloppy Lagoon" is identified as "Water Lou", and the pun of the title of "Rhapsody from Hunger-y" is lost because the ending "y" has been lopped off. And to place "Dance of the Hours" BEFORE "The William Tell Overture" is the final proof that no one involved with these CDs paid the slightest bit of attention to what they were doing.



A total waste of time and money. Get one of the decent Jones compilations put out by Rhino, RCA, or Proper."