My experience of this album was pretty problematic and so I’m kind of struggling with how to give it a fair rating. For some reason, the sound quality on this album was not very good. I’d go so far as to say it was really bad by comparison with the other Domino records I’ve listened to recently. You have to weigh this kind of thing carefully. Remasters used to be pretty rare really and any time you listened to a CD release of an older album, you just had to kind of brace for really poor sound quality because the CD release would typically just take the cheapest route possible to get the music. This has changed quite a bit though in recent years; all of the other Domino albums I’ve listened to have boasted exceptional quality for their advanced age. Still, is the fact that the CD makers here did not do a full remaster the fault of the original artists? Well, no, so it seems weird to reduce the qualitative ranking of the album as a work of art because of something that the artists have nothing to do with, but all I can say is that it did negatively impact my experience of this album. I also think that the song selection isn’t as good here as on some of his other albums; but maybe that has something to do with the fact that I was hearing bad versions of these songs. It feels like all of these songs are pretty standard issue blues-tunes and that this album has less variation than some of his other records; or maybe they just all sound alike because they’re all pretty tinny and soupy. Maybe if I was listening to really crisp versions of these songs I’d hear the differences between them and the nuances Domino brought to them. Hard to say. Regardless, this album is still fun. Domino plays like a man possessed on the first two tracks especially, Detroit City Blues & Hide Away Blues, and his piano solos in those songs are absolutely brilliant. A lush, slow (for Fats Domino) rendition of I’m In the Mood for Love is a standout as is the one big hit here, I’m Walkin’.
Mentioning that brings up a couple of oddities. The first is that the sound quality actually varies from track to track in really startling ways. I imagine that the CD makers just snatched up what they could find in terms of digital versions of these tracks because I’m Walkin’, one of Domino’s biggest hits, is presented here in a version that has very obviously been really well remastered. It’s loud and crisp and so you go from a tinny track that sounds like Domino is singing into a bucket with a backing track so muddy you can hardly distinguish the drum beats to I’m Walkin’ where the beat just bursts out of the stereo and Domino is right up front with his vocals. Probably the most annoying thing though . . . is that this CD actually CLAIMS to be remastered! Given that the master for I’m Walkin’ apparently sounds really good, it seems hard to believe that the masters for all the other songs on the album actually sound this bad. I’m pretty darn sure this wasn’t remastered at all and it just so happened that a remastered version of I’m Walkin’ was readily available because of its popularity, so they included along with the other unremastered tracks. Well, at least this whole thing gave me more to say about this album than the previous ones; maybe just saying how great everything is was getting a little old. Still, it’s fast-paced and fun and short, like all the other albums, so I’m not going to subtract too much from this one. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – disappointing sound quality can’t help but detract a bit from this one & the song selection is a bit off, but this is still a fun album. 3 ½ stars.