Slapp Happy - Live in Japan - May, 2000 (Mega Blowout Sale)
SKU
23-VP 523
In May, 2000, hot on the heels of their excellent (if a bit over-produced) reunion album Ça Va, Slapp Happy embarked on their first ever tour of Japan. The original trio of Dagmar Krause (vocals), Peter Blegvad (guitar, vocals) and Anthony Moore (piano, keyboards) perform a wonderful selection of tunes from their earliest times to the then present, but with the most notable fact being the startling recasting of a large number of tunes from Ça Va in a very acoustic format where they work wonderfully well.
This was originally released only in Japan in a very limited edition. I got a copy courtesy of Anthony, but my pleas to the label to please sell them to us so I could offer them to you were ignored. But now it's been reprinted in an exact edition and we can do so. Highly, highly recommended, especially if you love Dagmar, as it finds her in especially beautiful and delicately fragile form!
“Slapp Happy 'live in Japan' gives you a special sensation after a few hearings. There's a melancholy through out not apparent in the studio versions. I've never heard Dagmar with such soft and almost whispering voice before this record.
Also the striped down approach to the songs gives them a new, almost like a farewell, sort of quality…This is an album to listen when you want something dreamy and special in the air. Recommended.”
“Nine years on from its original, blink-and-you'll-miss-it release in Japan, Voiceprint unearthed one of the key elements in the Slapp Happy discography, and it truly is as wonderful as rumor always insisted.
Recorded at one of several reunions this once-and-always legendary band has convened in the decades since its 1974 split, Live in Japan is as beautiful, infuriating, and electrifying as the "original" group always was, but its early eccentricity is justified now by the knowledge that the group's influence has never gone away. It may have crept into earshot without anybody noticing, and theirs might not be a name that the rich and powerful drop too often, but if you can listen to Slapp Happy without picturing what Radiohead (for one) might have sounded like without them, then clearly you're living on another planet.
A gorgeous "King of Straw" opens the show, and the mood lingers on through "Slow Moon's Rose." Slowly, however, the band's more eclectic side begins to show, together with the almost maddeningly evasive melodic shimmer that characterized the best of Slapp Happy's early output. "Casablanca Moon" is a special treasure, retaining every ounce of its original delicacy, while dancing flirtatiously around your ears.
Of course, fans can always find something to complain about, and the absence of "Johnny's Dead" from the proceedings is as good a moan as any. But still, Live in Japan is essential listening, not only for original fans, but for everyone who's grown up on the band without even being aware of the fact.”-AllMusic
- LabelVoiceprint
- UPC604388337422
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