Customer Reviews

Crystal Ball

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This 4-CD boxed set (which, from the price, seems to differ from the cut-out offered above) has two bona fide 5* CDs (CDs 2 and 4), a 4* (CD 3) and a 3 ½* (CD 1). Compute THAT and ya get around a 4 1/2 for the entire set. It is NOT absolutely essential to a Prince collection, but it offers such completely amazing tracks that most fans will want to get it. In short, it's worth the money, but it's not without some flaws.

CD Number 2: Almost worth the entire price is the odd but brilliant James Brown tribute: The outstanding improvisational "Cloreen Bacon Skin." Over a simple bass riff, Prince and Morris Day serve up over 15 minutes of incredibly tight funk. Prince's raspy voice is JB-perfect (though it doesn't develop to a rasp like JB-it starts there), as he goes crazy with some kind of one-sided monologue to "Alfred." Screams, guttural sounds, all glorious over SPECTACULAR jazz/Jimi influenced drumming. All of it impromptu...does Prince have a feeling for this stuff or not? Genius.

"Interactive" on the same CD is pure Prince sound: An engaging hook, heavy bass, a smooth guitar solo with some Hendrix, even a wa-wa guitar. "Da Bang" (track 2) is in a new genre: Power punk alternating with a blues groove. Once again, Prince is the master synthesizer of musical styles -- this hybrid is excellent. He gets a heavy rock sound on "Calhoun Square" and returns to rap on "Look Across the Street." The singing doesn't add too much to the latter, but it has a big funk sound and a rolling bass. Similarly, instrumentation on Track 7 is wonderful... the tight horns by Eric Leeds, but sounds like ensemble playing by the Flames!

CD 4 is the softer side of Prince, and his acoustic numbers are among his best ballads. He sounds a little like Tracey Chapman on the first cut (unfortunately the liner notes are very incomplete for this CD), with a compelling guitar riff-amazing. He just shines on the rest of this acoustic set, with almost all instruments by Prince. This pared down CD is a refreshing contrast to his big productions. A must for Prince fans. CD 3 opens with "Days of Wild," an overly long rap with an Egyptian motif in the chorus. Not entirely compelling, though Prince, in the brief liner notes states "the spirit of the late-nite Love4One Another jams were best captured by this song and particularly this performance." Not my cup of funk...

"She Gave Her Angels" is a sweet Prince ballad out of his old days, and "18 and Over" is a male fantasy rap that is funny if not taken seriously. "The Ride" is straight blues. Prince is excellent on guitar, but needs to allow some silences to make the soloing more effective. I'm not asking for B.B. King restraint, just a little more attention to dynamics and pacing. Still, this is almost quibbling: Prince shows his stuff here and he's superb. "Get Loose" has some great minor chords and "P. Control" is quintessential Prince sexual obsession. Probably great fun live, but with the exception of Prince making his voice sound like a record spin, not too memorable. The BEST song on CD 3, however, is Prince's Sly Stone tribute "Make Your Mama Happy," with great funky horns, alternating vocals a la the Family Stone, big funk bass, and outstanding sax by Eric Leeds. Prince knows from whom he draws his inspiration! It's followed by the tender "Goodbye."

The title cut "Crystal Ball" (on CD 1) has some shades of Sly Stone, and funk riffs out of P-Funk, but this is wholly his own. Heavy with instrumentation; it's like 30's big band a la funk. All the elements are here: Moving bass, jazz style drums, the famous Prince falsetto, the Prince scream, the Prince spoken lyric.

Great dance music on next track. Mixes a slow soulful beat, with techno breaks and jazz-style guitar. Track 3 is some pretentious male posing that's a little disappointing: N'Sync has copied this style offering sanitized, less bassy versions of just this kind of song. The hook is too easy, the rap a little too familiar. "2morrow" and, especially, "Lovesign" are smooth and soft R and B, that goes down like brandy. Hide the Bone is just a lot of fun(ky) stuff very much in the P-Funk mode. Speaking of pretentious, "Movie Star" is just too much-and I mean that in a bad way. Perhaps meant to attack vanity, it seems to revel in it. This CD is rounded out by the self-explanatory hit "Tell me how U wanna be done." Even if this kind of exercise no longer outrages us, it's a good reminder of Prince's earlier sexually explicit work.

Bottom Line: Lots and lots of tremendous work, with some stuff I wish he hadn't included, but worth the money and your time. (One last note. . . very little in the way of liner notes, or any other little extras we've come to expect from boxed sets.)

This is Prince's follow up to 1996's "Emancipation" which was his first release after the end of his much publicised fued with Warner Brothers and his exclamation of freedom. "Crystal Ball" though remains the true sound of an artist unleashed. Prince releaed the set on his own NPG label without the help of a single major label. And thank God he did it on his own, cause there is no way one of the majors would've released a 4 disc set of mostly discarded songs from the 1980's and we would've missed out on some of his most captivating music. Not to say it's a polished set with no mis-steps. There are some diffinite duds here, but "Crystal Ball" more than makes up for them by offering an astonishing view of his diverse talent and exposing sides of him we've never seen before. That's a pretty impressive feat considering that he's released a CD a year for at least 15 years! "18 and Over" for example offers us his most convincing hip-hop attempt yet, "Cloreen Bacon Skin" is a 15 minute jam session with Prince tossing off lyrics like yesterdays clothes, it's just free association and the glimpse into his mind is captivating. There's also the blues meets thrash metal "Da Bang", the techno/rock "Interactive", and the regge of "Rippopgodazippa" (as heard in Showgirls).

The Fourth disc "The Truth" is a mostly accoustic set that many fans have been begging to hear for ages now. The wait was well worth it. From the lovely "Welcome 2 the Dawn", to the tounge in cheek "Dionne" to the animal rights song "Animal Kingdom", he sounds inspred and relaxed. He's not trying to prove anything. The man's jsut enjoying himself and you can tell. There seems to be no airs about the man on these songs.

The only thing to make you think twice about this set is the insanely low price. High prices can scare a person but so can the low ones. $9.99 for four CD's?!?!?! I don't get it. Are they all included? Are all the songs represented? Has the set been edited? I don't know. I bought my "Crystal Ball" the day it was released for a heck of a lot more $. It's a hard set to find now, so you have to ask yourself is it worth $10 to risk getting an edited set. In my opinion, yes.

Four discs. The first three could've easily fit onto two. So already its a rip-off. This would've been forgiveable if the music was all first rate; which it should've been. After all, any Prince fan has heard of the fabled 'Vault' where supposedly hundreds upon hundreds of finished, yet unreleased, songs lie.

But, no-- rather than jam-pack this set of 'vault' material with unreleased gems (as was originally promised), nearly one-third of the first three discs consists of lame re-mixes of previously available material.

To put it simply, the best stuff on discs 1-3 are all the songs that were recorded during the '80s. The title track is an epic classic, and songs like "Sexual Suicide", "Dream Factory", "Crucial", "Movie Star", make this set worth picking up for Prince fans.

Disc four is actually not really part of Crystal Ball, but rather a seperate album altogether: "The Truth", which is a collection of acoustic-based songs that represents some of his sharpest work of the '90s. Along with the '80s tracks on disc 1-3, this is the meat of the OVERPRICED package. There is some great singing, interesting lyrics, and (perhaps most importantly) SUBTLE production in abundance on "The Truth".

An insane collection of outtakes. These are outtakes? Seriously? These are AMAZING outtakes! Prince's left overs are better than most people's most amazing albums. This stuff is really really three albums of brilliant left overs, that stewed in their juices in the refrigerator of the vault, and came out tasting better than ever! The fourth disc, The Truth, is a snazzy little "acoustic" album from Prince that is almost worth the price itself! At this point, people were worrying that Prince had completely lost his marbles and talent, and this small little "something extra bonus" was just what the doctor ordered! Oozing with well crafted, fun songs, that are different from the usual Prince style, he shows his ability to adapt and change and try new things all while writing amazing new songs. One of his best albums in years on a collection of music that helps his legend grow.

The price is almost worth getting your hands on Disc 4 - The Truth, a mostly acoustic album that is the best thing Prince has ever done. A surprisingly subtle and playful album of beautiful acoustic playing and quirky sound effects. It almost sounds like he is paying homage to Ween, who are, beleive it or not, heavily influenced by Prince. I've found that Prince is most brilliant when he is not taking himself so seriously. My advice, unless you're a Prince collector, is to find someone who already has this and bootleg disc four.

For those of you wondering, this is the FULL 4cd set. Any real Prince fan should not miss out on this set. why would you pass it up? I mean it's hard enough to find in the first place. Even though it says it's a "cut-out", there's no drilled holes or anything on the package, just like brand new! The music is extremely good for outtakes, most of the songs are worthy enough to have been put on the albums they were respectively cut from. The songs sound mostly like his 1999-Graffiti Bridge period except for the last disc, which sounds mostly NPG. A great album at a great price, don't let it get sold out before you buy it!! A MUST HAVE.

Like most people, I've become pretty jaded with Prince's more recent music. I liked the Gold Experience (which is out of print, for some reason, while Chaos and Disorder is still in print....you figure it out), but everything since then hasn't really caught my attention. No wonder; he hasn't been releasing any of the good stuff! There are some really good, recent songs on here, like Da Bang, Lovesign, Get Loose, and Calhoun Square. The older stuff is pretty great, too, like What's My name, Dream Factory, and Sexual Suicide. I think overall my favorite song on the collection is Crystal Ball itself. I had always been under the wrong impression about this song, thinking that it would be some avante garde orchestral piece. There are some orchestra overdubs in it, but overall it's just a really long, really great, synthesizer-based funk song, already one of my favorite Prince songs. But is the price for this 4cd set justified? I think it is. Of course, I got mine for much less, on an on-line auction, so what do I know? The 4th cd, the Truth, it's all right, I did have bigger expectations for it, but some of the songs are pretty good, like Animal Kingdom and Man in Uniform. Disc 2 is probably the most playable, even if Cloreen Bacon Skin is on it. I think Prince went a little overboard, putting that entire song on there. It's an all right song....but after about 10 minutes of hearing the same beat, you don't feel like listening to it for another 5 minutes. And sure, we could lament over what songs the Artist didn't include in the set, like There's Others Here With Us, Dance with the Devil, Rebirth of the Flesh, or even the uncut, 10 minute version of Computer Blue, but what would be the point? Prince has more songs than he knows what to do with, he should just release them all. So in the end, I'd say this would be a worthwhile purchase, if you're a Prince fan. I've had mine for a few weeks, and have been playing it ever since. And that's one to grow on.

If you are a fan of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, then you know that you'll enjoy this album. Prince doesn't make junk. This is a collection of out-takes, private performances, and other things that The Artist didn't think was worthy of release at the time of recording. But time sometimes brings a new perspective, and I think Prince must have realized that even what he considers to be his worst material, is a lot better and a lot more interesting than much of what is on the radio today. You will find this music to be both progressive and aggressively funky, and the package contains informative notes. The fourth disc really shows Prince's versatility. It's kind of like a "Prince Unplugged" disc. But you should beware, because the last time a Prince album appeared in this section ("Emancipation"), it was the version that had all of the cursing deleted. I, for one, don't enjoy hearing that backwards/vacuum sound in the middle of a groove. So just be aware that this is a possibility (I bought my copy in a record store). But at this price, you may feel that four discs of quality music is more than you can resist.

Just what it is.

4 CDs of the funkist outtakes I've ever heard.

BTW, love that sped up voice that Prince uses on many of the songs including the title track. I believe it's the same effect Stevie Wonder used on some of his early '70s work (ex. Maybe Your Baby).

Great stuff!

4 disc of complete and consistant works compiled by the artist himself. Most of them are outtakes from the "Parade and long awaited 1987 Crystal ball and Camile album. Which was later trimmed down and called "Sign of the Times". This is a jewel in the prince collection at best! These are songs that illustrate's a time period when Prince had fun and wasn't so serious! Disc 4 is an Accoustic set called "The Truth" which is beautiful and extremley innovative. The accoustic "Micheal Jackson" Jabb "Don't Play Me" is the stand Out! Disc 5 which is kinda rare to find is a Classical Instumental that is 40 min's long called the "Karmasutra"! Very, Very, Very Interesting seeing his former wife Mayte printed on the disc. This is a beautiful collection and originally was intended only for purchase through his 1-800 number for the fans. There were 500.000 limited pressings of this cd. Of coarse you will have alot of people that are not going to agree with creativity these days. And so you still have a chance to own a used copy. If you find the 5 disc in crystal (see through case) Grabb it that is the first pressings available only through the 800 number, and a sure collecters item.

Arish