Customer Reviews

Mungo Jerry: The Very Best of Mungo Jerry

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm giving this 4 stars because I like the music. Mungo Jerry was more popular in Europe than in the U.S. and they scored several hits after "In The Summertime". "Lady Rose" is one of them. The music itself is a mixture of Skiffle, Boogie and Glamrock. Party music in the best sense. The choice of tracks is also great - not only the well known songs but some lost gems like Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues".

I bought the DVD-Audio Version of this compilation because I wanted to get the best possbile sound quality there is. But this DVD-a scores only partially. The sound is very clear and "fuller" than any version I heard on CD. It's as if somebody had lifted a blanket off my speakers. However, the sound is also available in a 5.1 surround mix. And this is forgettable. I've heard some great surround DVD-Audios by other artists of the 60s and 70s (The Doors Perception Box comes to mind and I also liked the Grateful Dead's American Beauty). The surround mix here is a joke. The back speakers are only used as echoes of the front speakers. A good AV Surround Receiver with modern Sound processors will be able to emulate surround sound much better even from stereo CD sources.

Especially on songs like "Lady Rose" with its double tracked vocals and harmonies it would have been great to hear the singers from all speakers to get this "I'm in the middle of the band" feeling. But exactly that is lacking. I'm not saying it sounds bad - it's just not really a true surround mix.

If the surround mix is of no interest to you, thant this is a recommended buy. But beware: Even though the DVD-A plays in any regular DVD or Blu-ray Player - you will benefit from the higher quality sound only if your player specifically supports DVD-Audio and not only dts or Dolby Digital.

I purchased this for one song.. "in the summertime" to hear how it sounds in 5.1. It is just amazing. Glad someone went thru the trouble in re-mixing this classic.

Let's be honest -- Mungo Jerry is no lost British Supergroup. They did one classic song, "In the Summertime", and that one's on here. Of the rest of the songs, "Lady Rose" and "You Don't Have To Be In the Army To Fight The War" are pretty good, and the rest are completely forgettable. And then there's a turgid 10 minute version of "I Just Wanna Make Love to You" that reminds us of the era when British groups felt compelled to record a blues number, and of why that was a bad idea.

I got this as a used discount at a store that was closing. I would definitely not pay the Amazon price for it -- You just want "In the Summertime", and you can find that on lots of CD compilations that are cheaper than this, and have other groups' classic songs as well.

I did not attempt to play this in a DVD player, I just popped it in my computer DVD drive to rip to MP3, and that seems to have worked just fine.