Customer Reviews

My Secret Studio

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4 star:		(1)
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I don't think Bill Nelson would agree, but this might possibly be his finest work to date. It's a 4 CD collection of songs, completely with vocals, done in true Bill fashion, meaning fast and furious. What's significant is that the bulk of this material was recorded during a period of emotional duress, making for some pretty heavy listening. "Electricity Made Us Angels" bears the brunt of most of this emotional fall out. Tunes like "Wonders Never Cease", "God Thundered Boy" and "She Sends Me", are filled with what could be termed beautiful despair, Bill's voice literally cracking at points. All is not gloom, however, in the world of Bill. "Juke Box For Jet Boy" is a fun synthetic romp thru the playground of Bill's yesteryears, predating Bill's later fascination with his childhood and its arcana. Simply put, there are a lot of great tunes here and I dare say that the listener, in time, will be able to absorb the entire collection with great pleasure and ease. Bill-the-guitar-player fans will certainly find lots of tasty guitar playing through out. "Begin to Burn" (a personal favourite) and "Year 44 (The Birthday Song)", among others, contain some blazing guitar work. So get your heart on one sleeve and your air guitar on the other, this could be, as mentioned, Bill's best.

One the unheralded innovations of the CD age is what I'd like to call the "Long Form Album." This term refers to box sets of original material by mercurial artists who have dispensed with the old LP format in favor of the new expansiveness made available by the relative cheapness of CDs in the CDR age. Albums in this mode include The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs," Prince's "Emancipation" and "Crystal Ball," and this remarkable box set, released in 1996, same year as "Emancipation," and encompassing four CDs that must be taken all together for a full and fair hearing. Here, Nelson, after years of experimenting with purely instrumental music, returns to the rock song format with 4 discs of eastern-influenced ambient pop chronicling his triumphant psychic recovery from a broken divorce, which event was itself painfully and somewhat embarrassingly chronicled in an earlier and much less successful 4-disc box set, "Demonstrations of Affection," which is only for collectors, trust me. The sound on "My Secret Studio Vol. 1" is warm, electronic, guitar heavy, and lush, with songs that stay in your head for weeks on end and melodies that soar and throb in the lower reaches of your consciousness. More consistent overall than his 6-CD set "Noise Candy," "My Secret Studio" is the Bill Nelson work that I'll grab if my house ever burns down.

When I got these CDs, it took me a few listens until I adapted. There's something about the tone of these tracks that isn't as warm as, say, "My Secret Studio II." Once you get past that, I think you'll find some of your favourite nelson tracks in this set.

Just for the sake of reference:

This four-CD set consists of the following titles, to match the Amazon.com track listing --

-- Buddha Head

-- Electricity Made Us Angels

-- Deep Dream Decoder

-- Juke Box for Jet Boy

The first three are available as separate CDs, & have apparently been reissued recently. To my knowledge, the fourth has never been released except as part of this set.

Anyone familiar with Bill's work will enjoy this album, anyone who enjoy's the music of Brian Eno et al won't fail to enjoy this piece of work.

Give it a listen, it'll be well worth it.