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| See: Really Liking Into A Dream |
Naturally, I was very excited when I saw this announced especially with the prospect of TWO unheard bonus tracks, but I was a little trepidatious owing to the previous reissue of Into A Dream in 2009, ABP-201. Here's a spectrogram of one of the tracks on there:
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| It's really not supposed to look like this. |
You may not be a person who understands spectrograms so I'll describe that in one word.
BAD!
Here's an audio snippet from the CD.
Which you can compare to the audio from the Korean Bootleg CD by Big Pink
Obviously the Korean bootleg CD is not the most ethical release, but it clearly sounds much better, even if it comes at the very unfortunate cost of not supporting the artist.
I'm not sure how easy it was to purchase ABP-201 was back in '09~, I've wondered if the very poor sound quality is the reason for it seemingly being quite a hard find, and for the times I've been told that IAD was never reissued on CD. The copy I have is described as a promo, and based on the web archives for adrianbakerproductions.com it wasn't listed for sale or had a spot on the website.
Thankfully this new release, IAD50, sounds better than ABP-201... I wonder if fresh transfers were used instead of the ones done by Bobby Bush. Yet it is not without its faults. Let's get into it!
Tracklist
1 - Sherry
2 - Vibrations (Into A Dream)
3 - I Feel Fine
4 - I’ll Surrender
5 - Live & Love Together
6 - Find Another Fool
7 - Candy Baby
8 - So You Think You’ve Got It Made
9 - Get Away From Me Girl
10 - I Was Only Foolin’
11 - Think About It
12 - Is It Love
BONUS SONGS
13 - Cry Baby Cry (bonus track)
14 - Love, It’s So Real (unreleased)
15 - Goin’ Home (unreleased)
16 - Look For A Miracle (bonus track)
17 - Leave Me Alone (bonus track)
18 - Don’t Do It Baby (bonus track)
19 - Back Home (unreleased)
I do wish I knew why in later releases of IAD the tracklisting has been changed, I think there is indeed benefits of separating Sherry and Candy Baby from each other, both being pretty sonically similar... but not starting the album with Vibrations seems pretty wrong to me, it works very well as an album opener. Starting with the hit isn't too wild in the end though, and I like this tracklist much better than ABP-201's opening of Sherry - > Candy Baby - > Vibrations.
Minor nitpick, but "Goin' Home" is tagged as an "Unreleased Track", when it very much was released, and there even is an unreleased version, but ABP-201’s follows the version of the released. Again minor, but a little misleading.
The selection of bonus tracks are also a little mystifying to me. All great songs, but priority seems a little strange. Why Going Home but not also Sylvie? Why only half of the Work, Work, Work (EP) but not Work, Work, Work or Marlena - with Work, Work, Work being one of Adrian's best songs in my opinion! Dance To It was the flip side of Candy Baby, where is that?... and to be greedy why stop at only seven bonus tracks? There is the elusive 2nd Magnet LP which was so close to release at one point, why wouldn't that make a showing?
Perhaps those tracks weren't seen as good enough though, I can't claim to know Adrian's personal opinions on these tracks, or their availability to be released or transferred. Ultimately I'm just being greedy and wanting my hands on everything, especially when there’d be space on a CD for more music!
Artwork and Presentation
I don't yet have the physical CD as it will release in June, but when I do I'll edit this review accordingly with those thoughts if there's anything interesting to note.
The font replacement is okay, but I find Sherry written in such a prominent place on the album cover silly and disharmonious. A lot of text has been added, and not even in the same colour! The artwork is a little too crushed and low resolution, and there's clear and unpleasant clonestamping at the bottom of the cover. And my good friend the aeroplane has yet again been tragically erased.
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| Maybe I've heard this album too much to immediately notice when this is gone |
It's a completely serviceable cover ultimately, it does the job. What I do find strange is that the writing credits provided on streaming services make no mention of Roy Morgan, not sure as to the reason but having genuine authentic writing credits would have been especially helpful for the unreleased tracks, but thankfully both appear in the PRS for Music database.
Music and Mistakes
This will be more focussed on sound quality than the music itself, which I think is excellent and I probably wouldn't be conveying much of interest other than typing "BEST SONG EVER!!" for every song on the album. I'm definitely not expecting a MFSL quality release here, so I'll get the obvious out of the way that it's a little loud, a little too hissy at times, but I'll be focussing on the more glaring issues from here on.
So You Think Youve Got It Made contains an edit that is not present on the original release, and it's not the most clean, compare IAD50
to the Korean CD here
Cry Baby Cry appears to be a vinyl rip with some noise/declick applied, most apparent at the introduction with the repetitive dull thuds. Not really the cleanest and most egregiously it has a skip in it! Compare IAD50
to my needledrop
Very unfortunate!
Going Home suffers from a similar problem, note how there's a edit between "There I know she's waiting for me" and "Going Home" - and the repetition during him singing "Forever".
IAD50 here
and my needledrop here
I'm especially disappointed by this one as this has been such a difficult one to get a good needledrop from :(
Back Home is interesting. It is obviously completely new to me so I don't have a good point of comparison, but there's something that sounds a little like CD rot present within the track, a kind of "chchchchchchch" noise. Here's a particularly awful example of the rot present on Adrian's ABCD
and compare the sound to Back Home
It's of course very quiet, and maybe it's something completely unrelated, but I could see this being stored on a CD-R for many years to the point that the dye had begun to leech. Pretty minor ultimately, and I'd rather have a new song than not have a new song, but found it worth mentioning.
The panning on I Was Only Fooling feels a little off compared to the vinyl versions. Although it's hard for me to articulate exactly what's happening. I don't believe this is the case for other tracks on the album, based on a random sample, but if a closer listen reveals more I'll list them accordingly.
And to end things on a positive note. an extra layer of percussion is on the mix of Don't Do It compared to my single rip, and ultimately feels like a much better way to listen, yay! You can compare the introduction to the song below between IAD50
and vinyl.
Ultimately I am happy this release is on streaming, there have been a lot of times in which someone has asked me how they can listen to Into A Dream and I've had to be like well... you can listen to my rip of the Korean bootleg CD... and then they don't because it's 2026 and everyone is afraid of music not on Spotify. But it's hard to not feel a little disappointed that music I care for so deeply and have personally put a lot of effort into trying to preserve hasn't been preserved very well here in some places.
However....
Love It's So Real is AWESOME!
