Purple Rain

Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain still sounds as good today as it did in the mid-1980s. The songs are still great and the performances still sound huge (unlike, for example, Springsteen's Born in the USA, which sounded huge then but could really use some real drums... or perhaps just a re-mix). Unlike other 1980s albums, this one doesn't sound stuck in that decade - although I didn't bother listening to enough music in the 1980s to know for sure...

This album covers an incredible variety of musical ground, much of it showcasing Prince's musical talents. The guitar playing is awesome, both generally and in specific places. For example, while the overall guitar playing on Let's Go Crazy is excellent and the guitar outro is famous, the dissonance that starts the outro is sublime: the opening foreground note hangs, bends around and distorts for long enough that it almost causes pain... and then it resolves into melodic playing, ending with an aptly large ending. The vocals on take me with u are brilliantly textured, but haven't had the life produced out of them. In fact, the whole album shows that Prince has a fine voice, sometimes singing and other times screaming at the top of his lungs, but still sounding remarkably in tune.

The whole album is excellent, but there has rarely been a `set closer' as good as Purple Rain. Wow...