Prince Estate Signs Deal With Sony Music to Re-Release 35 Catalog Albums

The EU pressing of Gold Experience is great: loud, dynamic, no clicks, flat discs (marbled yellow/orange). There's only one negative point: The "deluxe edition" of this promo replica should have a booklet with the original cover, credits and song lyrics.
By the way I never liked the original ugly cover. The promo cover is so iconic!

 

Listening to P. Control now and “I’m astounded” that the audio quality sounds this good. For sure kills my original CD.

*Note I did see the CD Re-Issue today and it’s in a cheap digipack case / not a jewel case.

 

Damn, I might have to open my copy now! Or get a second one. I have the original promo release but I’ll want to hear this one of it sounds as great as the reviews so far.

 

Yep - I'm blown away at how good the LP sounds. Nice to have at last!

 

Same here. I was grinning like a fool listening to my copy on Saturday.

 

Wonder when we hear about the next release, now the Gold Experience is out.

 

This RSD release was my first exposure to the Gold album and holy cow did I love it! As an average at best Prince fan can anyone recommend something from him in that same style? I only have 1999, Batman, Sign, Batman, and Purple Rain (my favorite).

 

Same style could be Come or Chaos & Disorder, but you need Parade the most

 

I once had the promo release, and as memory serves, my sense is that the original promo had a deeper low end, but maybe less separation? That being said, this new version is extremely nice!

 

thanks for the tip!

 

Come and Chaos and Disorder?! I personally don’t think either of those albums sound similar to The Gold Experience. (With apologies to Izozeles!) I think Diamonds & Pearls, The Symbol/Love album and The Gold Experience form a great trifecta. They all have a similar style!

 

Letitgo and ESPECIALLY the 11-minute title track are both fantastic songs from Come. I would also recommend the NPG album Exodus and Emancipation, which may have some bloat (understandable, given its 3-hour run time), but has at least 80 minutes of top-tier Prince on it.

 

Come is a top 5 Prince album. There's part of me that thinks his true masterpiece (The album he was born to make except this time for real) is somewhere among that 93-95 era, The Dawn, if you will, but another side of me thinks it was so insanely messy and complicated that there was no universe in which a triple LP opus emerges from that hellstorm in the fashion it needed to, thus leaving Come as my favorite representation of the masterpieces he was spinning at the time... of course it doesn't even begin to encapsulate what that whole era was all about.

 

Still all of those songs (along with Exodus, but excepting the second half of Chaos...) were both recorded over the same period (with the same people) and swapped back and forth between different configurations of albums, so they do belong together.

I was pretty drunk when I wrote that, so I don't really know what I meant. I think possibly I'm referring to TGE being the first album he did away from Warner, because even though they distributed it and even though he didn't get to release it when he wanted and he was still a "slave", this was also his first NPG Records album and the first as and he made it out to be the opposite of the Prince album he gave to Warner, so kind of him breaking away. That doesn't make sense really, but what can I say, it was my birthday.

 

But hitmanhart408’s question was other albums in similar style (sound) comparable to TGE. Come, Chaos and Disorder, Emancipation… none of those albums sound a lick like TGE. Perhaps songs he wrote during TGE but dropped, later to appear on Come, etc. were done for that exact reason. They didn’t fit the sound of that album (TGE.) Also, Come and Chaos and Disorder are both rather polarizing albums. I’m sticking by my opinion. I mean at the very least in sound, style, format, etc. The Symbol/Love album is a total twin to TGE.

 

If you want something that’s truly similar, try one of the last studio albums he released before his passing - 2014’s Art Official Age. When I first heard that record, I felt the same way about it as I did the first time I heard The Gold Experience. In both cases, I thought they were the best overall Prince albums I had listened to in many years. Stylistically, they are also very similar in that both have those little spoken word segues between songs. It’s really almost a sequel in some sense.

 

love this era of Prince. Come and Chaos are really good albums, but as you say I don’t think they are like The Gold Experience, especially Come.

both Come and Chaos were throwaway albums to an extent as they were contractural obligations/ not supported by Prince.

 

You’ve got a little bit of that info backwards. Songs weren’t dropped from The Gold Experience to form Come. Rather, it’s that songs were pulled from Come’s original track listing, and would be put on what would become The Gold Experience particularly the more rock-oriented tracks like "Endorphinemachine". He had written quite a bit of material around 1993 with ideas of making a couple of different projects, one of which was a triple album set, tentatively called The Dawn. That was ultimately scrapped in favor of releasing the songs on separate albums, which would ultimately form Come, The Gold Experience and Chaos And Disorder, with him also writing new music to help flush those records out to what they became.

Otherwise, The Love Symbol album is fairly stylistic close.

 

Wait, you are ALL CORRECT.

Also, select tracks on Crystal Ball...

 

You are all correct . That’s why his 93-95 era is so amazing

 

Well, what can I say, I don't agree, while on the surface, sonically, it may have similarities, I think is quite a different album, with the larger NPG ensemble (incuding Tony M. in particular) which gives it a different vibe to the small group style of the album of the next era.

While I love TGE I don't care at all for Art Official Age, so all this just goes to show that there won't be an agreement on what to go for next.

This is not a correct interpretation. He tried to make those album out to be that, because of the situation with Warner, but he was as much into those songs as any others when they were created. He even made videos for four of the "throwaway" songs on Chaos And Disorder.

 

I only talk to P fans who have Johnny in their top 20.

 

Both were not supported by Prince. Chaos was contractural, and most fans consider it to be a poor album and throwaway. I personally like it.

He took what he thought were the better/ more commercial songs from Come.

 

All albums are contractual if you are signed to a label.

 

Due to this chat, I just gave Chaos and Disorder another listen. I’ve never been a big fan, but it is indeed a fun, if slightly uneven album. I’ve never been able to get into Come. The best song on that entire album is “Loose!” And it just sounds so out of place with the rest of the songs on that album.