Customer Reviews

We're Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx

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Great album at wrong speed for Dory Previn, 13 Oct 2007
By Mr. Paul E. Houghton -
Children of Coincidence WAS rather than is a great album. This re-release by Collector's Choice Music is recorded at the wrong speed: Previn's voice is a whole octave lower and the music is sickly slow. The title track alone plays 14 seconds longer than it should at this recorded speed. Didn't the engineer have his ear that day?! So a terrible disappointment for fans and newcomers alike. Best advice is to find it on vinyl. It is a great album with its droll humour, great sassy production and of course, as you would expect from the great Dory Previn - has some of the best and most unusual songs you're likely to ever hear. Wit and wordplay that you won't hear anywhere else. Meanwhile, several people have e-mailed the CD company about the recording horror to no avail. But the companion self-titled CD is fine. And meanwhile, all the other Cds released (by BGO) are absolutely superb and a new album is coming! THE ART OF DORY PREVIN arrives in January 2008.

This great album has been spoiled by a dreadfully shoddy reissue. Whilst there have been questionable remastering jobs throughout the history of CD, this one has been bizarrely slowed down. The entire album is a whole tone (not an octave) lower than it should be. What a shame, as it's one of Dory's very best. Collectors' Choice seem to have ignored every person who has written to them about this. Their other Dory reissue (the self-titled album) is better, but still to my ear a hemi-demi-semi tone lower than it should be. Those who enjoy Dory's works are advised to get the vinyl and make their own CDs which will invariably be better, even with hiss or surface noise, than this awful CD.

After waiting YEARS for Dory's final commercial release to become available on CD, I was excited when this (along with her first album, 'Dory Previn') were finally released. But the sound of this is drastically OFF. Dory's voice, although not strong, was always bell-like in it's clarity, and always on pitch and in tune. (In fact, her singing improved with each release.) The songs here have seemingly been remastered at the wrong speed, as Dory now sounds like the child of Bea Arthur and that "Cola Nut" guy. Her writing, as sharp as ever, is served well by the arrangements and overall production (which is a bit more commercial sounding than on her previous releases) but this new version does not do justice to the original. The songs are recorded too slow, and the resulting sound just doesn't SOUND like Dory. I hope someone brings to this someone's attention, because for fans of this truly unique singer-songwriter, this is really a shame.

Certainly the weakest of Dory Previn's trailblazing series of confessional singer-songwriter albums in the 1970's, this recording does still boast one of her very finest compositions 'Woman Soul' as well as the cheeky closer 'The Owl And The Puzzycat'. Of most interest to Dory fans of course is the fact that this album took 31 years to become available on CD so despite it's weaknesses, it remains a must-have item to fans of this fascinating artist. Virtually every review of this album has also commented on the appalling engineering error of the album playing to slow. As a musician and modestly skilled sound engineer, I found this to be absolutely correct so I pitch & tempo shifted everything up one semi-tone which worked perfectly. To all Dory fans with these skills, I recommend doing this as it sharply increases the listenability of the recording. All credit to Collectors Choice for releasing this CD (and Dory's 1974 Warner debut) but shame on them for making such an obvious error in production.

Admittedly we're a small select group - but for those of you who, like me, wore your Dory Previn LPs down to the nub, these new CDs are like a gift from the gods. The earlier ones were released back in the 90s but I always yearned for these last two as well, and was amazed when they finally were released this year. Some of the lingo is a bit dated, but Previn's willingness to use different styles of music and outrageous ideas and lyrics reminds me of how good she was, and how unsung.