Shylock – Île De Fièvre

In the late 1980's all the prog fan world welcomed the wave of CD reissues that started to flood-out with open arms. Never had we had it so good, so much great music and in such good quality at "reasonable" prices.
Well, that was generally the case. There were exceptions though, and two such casualties were the Shylock albums. The bizarre thing is that Musea had previously reissued these on vinyl and they didn't sound too bad. "Gialorgues" only fault on CD is that it sounds rather thin and weedy. "Île De Fièvre" on the other hand is clearly either taken from damaged tapes or someone messed-up with a vinyl transfer. Side one doesn't sound too bad, but there's obvious tape stretch on much of side two, which makes the avant-garde elements and long keyboard notes sound "drunken".
When we first got copies of this at Ultima Thule, way back in 1989, we told Musea about the fault. They claimed ignorance, and that they'd had no complaints from anyone else. After further communication they itted that indeed something was wrong and that they'd correct it for the second pressing. But they never did. In fact I recently ordered some new copies from the French distributor to check, and these are still the very same pressing! Strange though, but some people that bought the Musea CD's way back when couldn't detect the faults! Maybe some people just can't? And, at least this does have a rather nice bonus track!
In this case, such rare classic music just gets rarer!