Sound Affects

Product Information

No trace of that here: he is furious, and seems to run forward, dragging the other players with him, towards the ballot box, and they can hardly keep pace. Whilst this new edition of Sound Affects is undoubtedly better than the standard CD edition, it's not quite as impressive as previous Jam/TSC/Weller re-issues.

It wasn't until first hearing `Going Underground' in the early 2000's on VH1 Classic that I decided to investigate some of The Jam's music. Its my favourite Jam album as well as one of my favourite “post-punk” albums full stop, so I think I’ll invest in an original and see how they sound together. There are plenty of wonderfully catchy hooks and great songs that made me think The Jam's overblown and overrated reputation may not be entirely exaggerated. This involved consulting a few of the band's friends as to what they thought the best release would be. There are still eight unreleased tracks as well - all good (better than 99% of Blur's back-catalogue, anyway) though not quite of the calibre of the material on "Extras".

Nice chunky bass that reverberates in your chest, I swear it sounds like the 4001s Foxton used to play and yet the inner sleeve clearly shows him transitioning to a Precision bass. Still beloved of original fans and new supporters through Paul Weller’s solo career – he still plays many of the Jam songs in his live sets today.

The original sounds much more dynamic, the sound is rich and full, each instrument and vocal track is clean and sounds great. It’s regarded by critics and fans (as well as Weller) as their most adventurous and experimental collection of material, drawing musical influences from the ‘post-punk’ groups of the late-70s - Wire, Gang Of Four and Joy Division as well as neo-psychedelic touches from The Beatles and The Zombies etc. I doubt it - those 38-year old magnetic tapes were sourced and sent to the Czech Republic to cut a lacquer? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. And it does contain at least two of the best Jam singles that never were, in "Pretty Green" and "Boy About Town"; to say nothing of "Start!

Scrape Away is a classic for those desperate to leave it all behind, and Monday – thankfully far less depressing than its namesake – combines the melancholy of Embarrassment-era Madness with Byrds jangle. In the United States, the album spent 11 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart and reached its peak position of number 72 in February 1981. Sound Affects was reissued on 8 November 2010 as a two-CD deluxe edition to celebrate its 30th anniversary. I must say that I bought it because of the convenience rather than the extra tracks on disc 2, so I cannot really comment on it. It may just be a list of simple things we’ve all done, seen or heard, with an ironic chorus, acoustic guitars and no drums, but so what?

In their short career, along with the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Buzzcocks, they influenced a generation with their music, style, politics and inspiration.a track built around almost exact copies of the bass-line and guitar solos from The Beatles’ Taxman (at the time Weller considered the album a cross between Off the Wall and Revolver! I am unfamiliar with any previous release that may have been remastered by him but if this is the kind of quality that comes as a result, Universal mastering should hire him to remaster the entire back catalog of the Siouxsie and the Banshees botched remasters. Instrumental track “Music For The Last Couple” has similarities to the sound of David Bowie's Low album. In BBC Radio 6 Music's documentary The Jam: Made in Britain, Paul Weller cited Sound Affects as his favourite Jam album. From my readings, they will make a vinyl record out of anything - your pubescent brother's farts recorded on a Maxwell cassette can be made into an "180-gram audiophile record".