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In my opinion the best reggae album I have ever heard. From the first listen of the original vinyl I was hooked. I played it over and over again for days. It was all I wanted to hear. The vibe of this album is just fantastic! Totally up. My personal favs are "Fisherman", "Children Crying", "La La Bam-Bam", "Ark Of The Covenant" and of course the otherworldy, transcendant power of "Open Up The Gate".
Now, initially I was a bit put off by the sub-par sound quality of the original release vinyl. The opening track, "Fisherman" has very noticable drop-outs and the album as a whole has various problems with eq and tape hiss. I attempted remastering the album myself a few times but I was never quite happy with the results. The dropouts in "Fisherman" especially bothered me. Luckily, the album was professionaly remastered and re-released on cd as the "Blood & Fire" edition. Included in this edition is a thick booklet which has a detailed explaination of the limitations of the original master tapes (which were quarter inch, recorded on a Teac 4-track!). Apparently the tapes were not very well preserved. Although the mastering engineers used all the latest technology to try to eliminate tape hiss and drop-outs, in the end they still couldn't make it perfect. Most of the tape hiss was generated by Lee "Scratch" Perry's practice of bouncing tracks (mixing multiple instruments together on one track to free up the other tracks; a necessity if you are recording on a 4-track machine) and they opted to allow some tape hiss in order to preserve the original fidelity of the recording. They also claim that they couldn't do anything about the dropouts in "Fisherman" but from my estimation they cleaned them up rather well. The dropouts of hardly noticable at all on the remastered cd. The frequency spectrum has a much better balance as well.
I highly recommend the remastered Blood & Fire edition! The versions of most of the songs are longer and it includes some songs not featured on the original release, plus a bonus disc of 12" remixes and b-sides. Although the sound quality isn't perfect, (compared to other Jamaican reggae recordings from this era, or earlier; like Bob Marley's original tracks for "Catch A Fire" or Mighty Diamonds "Right Time") the inventiveness of the Lee "Scratch" Perry's production style and the songwriting and performances are all incredible. Also knowing that the remastered version is as good as it can get makes it easier to accept the slight flaws in production and/or engineering.
All in all it's hard to say exactly what it is that makes this album so enjoyable. It's as if everything just came together; the songs, the music, the vocals, the effects, the vibe...a perfect moment in time. In my opinion, you would be very hard pressed to find a better reggae album than this. It is sheer bliss!
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Vicente Gomez
el disco presenta un salto y parece ser que es debido al prensaje.
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Believer
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