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Reader Comments
I have "Rehearsal 4 Reality" on vinyl and once made my own CD-R of it with my PC. I was happy when it was released "properly" on Solid Rock so I ordered it, only to find that my own homemade CD-R almost sounded better than the Solid Rock release. (The bonus tracks arenĀ“t really that interesting either. Only instrumental jams).
This is the second Cd release of this album from Larry and once again its mastered from scratchy vinyl! And in the puiblicity on his website he complains about the original record company putting out a bad sounding bootleg without his permission!
The CD has 20 songs and by your reviewer's reckoning only about 4 of the 20 are really good and worth having. As has been pointed out this release is also a CDR and a bad sounding CDR at that where the original master tapes have not been used and where they have basically recorded a scratchy LP version and transferred this recording to a CD. The studio version of Messiah is also largely an instrumental backing track with bits of singing here and there. All of which begs the questions - why rate this as highly as 7 out of 10 and by giving this 7 out of 10 when it probably deserves only a 4 or 5 out of 10 does this not demean many other 'pretty good' and 'better than ok' albums in Larry's huge back catalogue which do genuinely desrve a rating around 7 out of 10 - eg many of the solo live albums like Children of Sorrow which are well enough recorded and have nice performances of old and newish songs?
The Rehearsal 4 Reality CDR re-release sounds horrible sonically, only has a few worthwhile songs on it and most of them are available elsewhere, so why not call a spade a spade and rate it accordingly?!