Music Week's round-up of the latest album reissues and catalogue releases, including C.J. & CO, Freiheit and more...
C.J. & CO
Ain’t It Amazing: The Unreleased Westbound Masters (Westbound CDSEWD 165)
Best-known for their solitary UK/USA Top 50 single Devil’s Gun – which was the first song played at Studio 54 – C.J. & Co deserved better. Produced and arranged by Dennis Coffey & Mike Theodore, who also wrote most of their songs, they released a couple of albums of superior, soulful disco music, with a driving beat and expansive orchestral backings complimented by the strong vocals of the mixed gender quintet, who had started their career 10 years earlier in Detroit as The Strides. With interest in the group still high some 40 years after their modest success, Ain’t It Amazing gathers together a dozen previously shelved recordings which, thankfully, are of excellent quality and thoroughly deserve to make their belated debut. The uplifting title track sets the template, with slick singing dovetailed with tight but economical instrumentation. Rainbow Music is a hustling insidious groove, Is Your Love Life Better is a little more laid-back and chimes nicely, and Boogie Love is a funky workout. There are no weak tracks, and the album includes the group’s unreleased original mix of Devil’s Gun - originally a flop in 1975 for its British co-writer Barry Blue that somehow found its way over the Atlantic - which is a little less busy than the hit version but well worth inclusion.
FREIHEIT
Fantasy (Cherry Pop CRPOPD 207)
Well-loved in their native Germany, where they have charted 18 albums and 22 singles since 1982, Freiheit are known in the UK largely for their one hit, Keeping The Dream Alive. A powerful ballad which sounds like an ELO track and finds the band supplemented by The London Symphony Orchestra, it was a No.14 hit in December 1978 and has become synonymous with Christmas, even though it is bereft of either jingle bells or seasonal lyrics. It was the key cut on Fantasy, an anglicised version of the band’s fifth German-language album Fantasie, which is now released in an expanded 2 CD version for the first time, with the album supplemented by German-language originals, 12-inch mixes and b-sides. Freiheit prove to be a slick and likeable band with a flair for melodic rock, and it is rather surprising that they failed to capitalise on their initial success here. As you might expect, Keeping The Dream Alive is well-represented, appearing in no fewer than seven versions, including short, extended and instrumental versions as well as in German as So Lang’ Man Traume Noch Leben Kann.
VARIOUS
Car Songs: The 70s (Crimson/Sony Music CRIMCD 625)/80s Car Songs (DMG TV/Sony Music DMGTV 075)/Car Songs: The Anthems (CRIMCD 624)
Demon Music released three earlier Car Songs album and therefore double the range with these new releases. The 70s album and The Anthems are 4 CD, 80 song sets, released on the budget Crimson label, while The 80s set is a 3 CD, 60 song release with a higher retail price, and a higher profile, as it is released on Demon’s DMG TV label, and is TV-advertised. I’m never sure whether songs intended to be played while driving should be uptempo or laid-back and what it is about a song that makes it suitable for consumption of the highways and byways except that – maybe - they are meant to be sung along to. Whatever, all three of these releases trade only in bona-fide hits of varying tempos. The Anthems (obviously) covers a much greater timespan than the others as well and has some songs that - though they charted – have faded from public awareness, including The Wannadies’ You & Me Song, The Fray’s You Found Me and Phatom Planet’s California.. It also includes 17 songs that appear on the two other albums, so anyone buying all three will have to suffer a degree of duplication.
