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O Come All Ye Faithful

February 20, 2000 | Music
Very early in the year we received this package last week. Of course it was meant to be released before last Christmas, but we were told some accidents on the way belated it a little. What do we got? Well, on first sight it is a beautifully designed and neat. After opening the box we found 5 postcards, 3 of them with great pictures, so that ain't a bad score. Unfortunately the printing of the pictures isn't too good, or is it the resolution of the pictures? We are not printers ourselves, but we notice it could have been better. Next to this postcards we got a 2001-calender. It learns you how many days that year will have, but not much more, because they forgot to print the days of the week on it. Still the additions are nice and it shows the producers wanted to deliver a nice product.

Let's open the jewelcase! Believe it or not the first thing you'll find here is a 3,5" disc. It's a screensaver with some nice pictures (looks like they are from the vault) and annoying midi. There are better Elvis-screensavers available on the Internet. The CD itself is just red, but the package contains a manual how you can write your own label. It looks like a nice idea, but the producers must know that most collectors want CD's in their original state. And this CD is mainly for collectors.
Now it's time for the most important, the music. The producers claim 10 songs are unreleased. Partly this may be true, but as For Elvis CD Collectors states, that's not hard to do. When listening to this CD you get some nice extras, the version of the title track is great, especially the closing verse. Overall the soundquality of this CD is very disturbing. The mix is very poor, with continuous switching of sound levels, balance and so on. Merry Christmas Baby, probably one of the best recordings by Elvis ever, is unlistenable in the long version. It starts pretty good, but after about 4 and a half minutes Elvis moves backward to return again in the front one minute later. Also a lot of the songs have very much noise in the background.
In other words: this CD is a kind of devil in disguise. A very nice package that is hiding a poor audio-product. To collectors nice anyway, but if you really want to listen to Elvis' music, BMG's "If Everyday Was Like Christmas" is preferred.