Click to enlarge
|
The art box = 6 CD Box Set = (CD)
THE ART BOX contains HOPES & FEARS (1978)/WINTER SONGS (1979)/THE WORLD AS IT IS TODAY (1981) as well as ART BEARS REVISITED (2003) featuring mixes, remixes and re-workings of Art Bears tracks by various artists. Also includes a limited edition extra bonus disc with other remixes and rare Art Bears tracks.
The Art Bears were a thinking person's rock trio, unfortunately destined to be also-rans during the age of punk's ascendancy. But for an outfit operating at the margins of popular music for less than two years, it turns out that the Bears left quite an impressive legacy, as evidenced by The Art Box, a 2004 Recommended Records set celebrating the 25th anniversary of the band's inception. The collection is crammed with six CDs, not to mention a CD single and several booklets, that nearly burst the box's seams. Members of the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy aggregation, multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, drummer Chris Cutler, and singer Dagmar Krause came together in 1978 and recorded three albums between the Art Bears' founding and breakup. These albums -- Hopes & Fears, Winter Songs, and The World as It Is Today -- are all here in remastered form (along with high-quality reproductions of the striking original cover art), as are two discs of remixes made by various artists over a six-year period, an odds'n'sods disc of live material and miscellanea, and a single ("Coda to Man and Boy") that duplicates a track from the odds'n'sods disc but is a nice souvenir anyway. The three original albums presented an adventurous mix of avant rock experimentalism, smatterings of noise and dissonance, British folk flavors, medieval imagery, and leftist, anti-corporate politics -- all distilled into the short formats of art songs with an occasional cabaret feel. In other words, not exactly Top 40 material.
The Art Bears' uniqueness is immediately apparent upon listening to the first of their albums, 1978's Hopes & Fears, like all three of their studio efforts engineered by Etienne Conod at Sunrise Studios outside Zurich. Hopes & Fears was a transitional LP, first intended as a Henry Cow album and including contributions from Cow members Tim Hodgkinson, Lindsay Cooper, and Georgie Bor
Limited availability - ships immediately
Liknande artister: SCIENCE GROUP
|