Paul Simon - Graceland

The Classic Album series from Warner Vision take a look at the making of some of the great albums of the world. Paul Simon's Graceland is a classic in itself and this disc takes you through the months of preparation and creation of this great album.

The story of this album is told by Paul Simon himself. Looking aged at the time of the interview, he re-traces what he went through, the highs and the lows of the recording and the support he received.

The main catalyst for writing this album was the big flop of the previous album to Graceland. He went to South Africa and in finding a wealth of talent and rythym he came up with what we now know as the album Graceland.

The video quality on this disc is quite acceptable for 2 reasons. Firstly, the archival footage used is a video format, not film, from 1985 and secondly, the bit-rate encoding of this disc is always in the high 8's.

Granted, there is a bit of MPEG artifacting in some scenes but then that could be due to the nature of the source material and in some cases it is a tad blury lending to this artifacting being more noticeable.

The transfer is full frame so those of you with widescreen televisions be prepared for some window-boxing. Other than that, I'd highly recommend this over any video version you might find.

Ok, just when you though mpeg audio was on the way out, it seems to be on the way in. I don't know why these discs are encoded with this format but as they are imported there's not much we can do about it.

What you get is an MPEG stereo soundtrack in 5 languages which is not as bad as it sounds considering these are not movies or live performances but documentaries. The dialogue is clear, the music is pretty much cd quality so there's no real gripes about what you may expect from this and the other classic albums.

Hehe, this disc is basically an extra feature in itself so I don't know how to rate it. What you get is a documentary making of and some of the title tracks from the album either played live or via its associated film clip.

One thing you do get is a great cover disc and that goes for all the current crop of classic albums. The picture disc is by far the more creative type, either having a colorful image of the bad or a the original album cover.

This disc is for Paul Simon fans only. It has nothing to offer anyone who is not a fan. If you are remotely interested then you might consider borrowing this disc.

The actual Paul Simon album will be released by Warner Vision in the coming months and this disc would have been the perfect way to add to the flip side as an extras bonus.