The Moody Blues – Every Good Boy Deserves Favour + Seventh
Sojourn (Universal Music CDs)
Sound:
B Music Albums: B/B+
The first
seven albums of The Moody Blues are considered their great early period,
especially since they took a break after they were made. Still their most prolific period, the albums
have often received top rate treatment over the years from vinyl, to 1970s
Quadraphonic releases, to Mobile Fidelity 24K Gold CDs to remastered CDs and
Super Audio CDs from Europe. The first
five albums, Days Of Future Passed, In Search Of The Lost Chord, On The Threshold Of A Dream, To Our Children’s Children’s Children, A Question Of Balance, were issued in
SACD a few years ago in the U.K. and some copies did make it to the U.S.
June 2008
sees those albums officially reissued in the U.S. officially with CD
equivalents, but here is our original coverage of the SA-CDs as imports:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3637/The+Moody+Blues+–+U.K.+SACD
Now comes
the final two albums of that original cycle and though they have been issued as
SA-CDs we hope to get out hands on soon, Every
Good Boy Deserves Favour (1971) and Seventh
Sojourn (1972) are back as remastered CDs which we will look at now.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is a sort of sequel to A Question Of Balance and though it is
a good album, I always found it the oddest of the albums, though it produced
the hit The Story In Your Eyes and
remains the third highest charting album they ever released. There is something more abstract about the
songs as a whole and though it is another fan favorite, I still cannot get into
it as much. Maybe the SA-CD version will
offer something this one does not. The
tracks include:
1)
Procession
2)
The Story In Your Eyes
3)
Our Guessing Game
4)
Emily’s Song
5)
After You Came
6)
One More Time To Live
7)
Nice To Be Here
8)
You Can Never Go Home
9)
My Song
Seventh Sojourn brought the band back to a more
Rock oriented state of mind and they were starting to develop with A Question Of Balance and the result is
the biggest album in the band’s long history, including being #1 for over a
month, sporting two of their greatest hits (tracks 2 & 4 below) and so
strong that you can see why they took a definitive break. The songs include:
1)
Lost In A Lost World
2)
New Horizons
3)
For My lady
4)
Isn’t Life Strange
5)
You & Me
6)
The Land Of Make-Believe
7)
When You’re A Free Man
8)
I’m Just A Singer (In A Rock &
Roll Band)
At this
point, the band showed that they were more than the peers of bands of the time
like Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer, but at the time these albums were hits,
Days Of Future Passed suddenly
received a new boost from the huge revival in airplay of Nights In White Satin, pushing Sojourn
up the charts and making Days (where
the song came from) just as famous and successful an album. It is a peak of success for an artistically
uncompromised band so rare, that it puts The Moody Blues in the company of a
small handful of acts, including The Beatles.
The PCM
2.0 16/44.1 Stereo on both CDs is good and is decent sounding, but after the
first five SA-CD releases sounded so clear and detailed, this can actually
sound compressed at times. Sojourn was previously issued as a 5.1
DTS-only CD years ago and that sounds better than the CD here. They sound good for their format, but I
wonder how they would compare to the Gold CD versions.
For more
on the band, try this HD-DVD (due out soon on Blu-ray) of one of their recent
concerts:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6498/The+Moody+Blues+–+Lovely+To+See
- Nicholas Sheffo
