Over the years many "talking only" albums have been released. Even during Elvis life some were released like "Elvis Sails" or 'The Truth About Me" and The Colonel tried it with concert fragments on "Having Fun With Elvis On Stage". Now the Danish Elvis Unlimited fan club released "The Complete Word For Word 1955 - 1977".

Design

Most spoken word releases are budget releases on obscure labels or fan club releases and contain some spoken words or are part of a Louisiana Hayride compilation. After their release "The Complete Press Conferences" Elvis Unlimited now completed the Elvis spoken word material with this five CD set.

The package itself is a real beauty. It's a five panel digipack with full colour photo's of Elvis from various era's. Mostly fifties and some seventies images. A great shot of Elvis in his Army uniform graces the cover. The CD's itself are picture discs with the same images as the panels have. The package looks very stylish and really catches the eye.

Content

Mostly we have a line up of music to listen to and give you our opinion. This time it would take quite a while to sit trough all five CD's and compare them on completeness and quality to all the interviews we have. We won't do that since we aim to have reviews on the latest releases on-line as soon as we can. So we'll give our opinion on the whole.

The sound quality of the interviews varies of course, depending the source, but overall they did a good job. Especially with releases like this it's important the quality is as good as possible. Looking at another Elvis Unlimited release we found
that some press conferences were included on this release, but not all. Besides these missing Press Conferences this release contains probably all "spoken word" available today. There probably are some other spoken word lines out there like excerpts from his early TV appearances, (documentary) movies, concerts (the "Having Fun On Stage Series") or telephone conversations. But those don't fit on this release. They have either been released on some bootlegs or will see the light of day some other time we guess.

Conclusion

Elvis Unlimited did an outstanding job releasing Elvis' "Spoken Words" on both this and the above mentioned "Press Conferences". The sets look great and together the form a complete collection. This is not a release you'll put in your player every week, but just like Jerry Osborne's book "Word For Word" it's good to listen to Elvis in his own words.

Sound quality: 7/ Cover art: 9