Sprawling, eclectic, and messy, Prince's second double album, Sign O' the Times, falls into the tradition of great chaotic double albums like The Beatles, Exile on Main St., and London Calling that are great because of their overreaching, seemingly haphazard scope. In short, it's the album where Prince shows nearly all of his cards, from bare-bones electro-funk and smooth soul to pseudo-psychedelic pop and crunching hard rock. In between, he touches on gospel, blues, and folk, among many other stylistic flourishes. ...
Read More
Sprawling, eclectic, and messy, Prince's second double album, Sign O' the Times, falls into the tradition of great chaotic double albums like The Beatles, Exile on Main St., and London Calling that are great because of their overreaching, seemingly haphazard scope. In short, it's the album where Prince shows nearly all of his cards, from bare-bones electro-funk and smooth soul to pseudo-psychedelic pop and crunching hard rock. In between, he touches on gospel, blues, and folk, among many other stylistic flourishes. Originally intended as a triple-album set called The Crystal Ball , Sign O' the Times was the first album Prince recorded without the Revolution since 1982's 1999 (the band does appear on the in-concert rave-up, "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night"), and the effect on him is liberating -- he is free to dive into all the styles he merely hinted at on Around the World in a Day and Parade. The music sounds open and, usually, inviting, even though some of the songs rank among his most insular. Many of these tracks are from the aborted Camille project, an alter ego Prince created that was personified with the use of sped-up tapes. Camille is the voice that sings "If I Was You're Girlfriend," the most disarming psychosexual song Prince ever wrote, as well as the equally chilling "Strange Relationship." The fraying relationships are weighted by the social chaos Prince hints at throughout the album with his apocalyptic imagery of drugs, bombs, empty sex, abandoned babies and mothers, and AIDS. But he also balances the despair with hope, whether it's God ("The Cross"), love ("Adore," "Forever in My Life"), or just having a good time ("Play in the Sunshine," "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night"). In its own roundabout way, Sign O' the Times is the sound of the late '80s -- it's the sound of the good times collapsing and the natural reaction to retreat to your own world, so you can just dance all those problems away. [Sign O' the Times received a lavish Super Deluxe Edition reissue in 2020, one that expanded the original double album to eight CDs (or 13 LPs), adding a DVD containing a live show held at the recently opened Paisley Park on December 31, 1987. The first of six bonus discs contains the single mixes and edits of both sides of the album's singles, and the last two are devoted to a live concert in Utrecht from June 20, 1987, leaving the heart of the box set being three discs of unreleased material from Prince's legendary Vault. Some of this material may be familiar to hardcore fans, either through bootlegs or through proposed track listings for such scrapped albums as Dream Factory or Crystal Ball . Those unreleased records can be reconstructed through the bonus material on this 2020 box (so can the original triple-LP version of Sign, along with most of the album by Prince's alter ego Camille), so it might be easy to view this as a bit of a clearinghouse for unreleased tracks, but the three discs are sequenced with their own logic. They kick off with one of the great discoveries, the original 1979 version of "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" in all its new wave glory, and end with an unreleased Shep Pettibone club remix of "Strange Relationship" that pushes the song into the vanguard of late-'80s dance. Between those two extremes are experiments, gems, a duet with Miles Davis (the densely funky "Can I Play with U?"), alternate takes, follies, and inspiration. Collectively, these songs from the vaults do emphasize how Prince was operating at the peak of his creative power in the mid-'80s, yet when heard alongside the original double album, it also becomes clear that Prince was also at his peak as a self-editor during this time: he picked the cream of the crop for Sign O' the Times. That the bonus material here isn't as good as the album proper is not a knock against it, since Sign O' the Times is one of the great pop albums of the 20th century. The bonus material here may not be as incandescent...
Read Less
Add this copy of Sign 'O' the Times [Super Deluxe] to cart. $230.25, new condition, Sold by Entertainment by Post - UK rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from BRISTOL, SOUTH GLOS, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2020 by Warner Records.
![Sign 'O' the Times [Super Deluxe] - Prince](https://www2.alibris-static.com/sign-o-the-times-super-deluxe/cover/51055ip5f6_l.jpg)
![Sign 'O' the Times [Super Deluxe]](https://www2.alibris-static.com/cover/51055ip5f6_t.jpg)
![Sign 'O' the Times [Super Deluxe]](https://www3.alibris-static.com/sign-o-the-times-super-deluxe/cover/51055ip5f6.jpg)
Portions of content provided by Rovi Corporation. © 2024 Rovi Corporation.