8/23/2023 0 Comments Clapton unpluggedHaving sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S. Truly, everything about Unplugged matters. It is made for discerning listeners that prize sound quality and production, and who desire to fully immerse themselves in the art – and everything involved with the album, from the images to the finishes. Aurally and visually, this UD1S reissue exists as a curatorial artifact meant to be preserved, touched, and examined. Housed in a deluxe box, the UD1S Unplugged pressing features special foil-stamped jackets and faithful-to-the-original graphics that illuminate the splendor of the recording and the reissue's premium quality. The expanse and depth of the soundstage, fullness of tones, natural snap and extension of the guitar strings, realistic rise and decay of individual notes, and roll of Clapton's vocals all attain demonstration-grade levels. Surpassing the sonics of any prior version, it peels away any remaining limitations to provide a transparent, lively, ultra-nuanced presentation of a record that won six Grammy Awards – including prizes for Album of the Year, Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, and Best Rock Song. These are the tunes that belong to the '90s - and several of these also appear on the 2013 expansion, which contains songs that didn't appear on the album, almost all of which are originals apart from an alternate "Walkin' Blues" and "Worried Life Blues" - but the rest of MTV Unplugged manages to transcend its time because it does cut to the quick of Clapton's musical DNA.Strictly limited to 10,000 numbered copies, pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl at RTI, and mastered from the original master tapes, Mobile Fidelity's ultra-hi-fi UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP collector's edition enhances the blockbuster work for today – and the ages to come. These capture a moment in time, when EC was settling into his age by reconnecting with the past, whereas the originals - whether it's the revised versions of "Layla" and "Old Love," "Tears in Heaven," or the debut of "My Father's Eyes," originally heard here (and on the 2013 expanded anniversary edition) but released as a single much later in the decade - point forward to the sharply tailored adult contemporary crooner of the '90s, one who turned out to be very comfortable existing in a world of high thread counts and designer duds. Tellingly, it's these blues and folk covers - Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues," Big Bill Broonzy's "Hey Hey," the standard "Alberta," Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'," two songs from Robert Johnson ("Walkin' Blues," "Malted Milk") - that are the best performances here they're alternately lively and relaxed, Clapton happily conforming to the contours of the compositions. Clapton is embracing his middle age and the pleasure of Unplugged is to hear him opt out of the pop star game as he plays songs he's always loved. The album's hit was a slow crawl through Derek & the Dominos' "Layla," turning that anguished howl of pain into a cozy shuffle and the whole album proceeds at a similar amiable gait, taking its time and enjoying detours into old blues standards. What is true is that Unplugged is the concert and album that established the MTV program as a classy, tony showcase for artists eager to redefine themselves via reexamination of their catalogs, which is what Clapton cannily did here. The passage of time has blurred the lines separating all these events, suggesting Clapton's 1992 Unplugged was the first-ever MTV album, that it alone was responsible for revitalizing EC's career, that it is was the place where "Tears in Heaven" premiered, when none of that is quite true. The guitarist wrote "Tears in Heaven" as a tribute to his late son and, via its inclusion on the 1991 soundtrack to Rush, it became a hit single and, later, a centerpiece to the Unplugged set. Also in 1991, Clapton's young son Conor died in a tragic accident. It arrived three years into MTV Unplugged's run - 1989 also being the year Clapton stirred artistically with the assured AOR of Journeyman - and a year after Paul McCartney established the practice of an official album release of an Unplugged session with his own Unplugged (The Official Bootleg). and it went platinum all over the world it also won the Album of the Year Grammy for 1992 - makes it difficult to place Eric Clapton's 1992 MTV Unplugged in context, but it's important to do so. Its massive success - it is one of the rare albums to be certified as diamond in the U.S.
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