I've had this one stuck in the queue for a while. It's really hard to obtain Prince's music over the internet. I finally broke down and paid for a copy through Murfie.com, which is a great service. You buy CDs through them and they send you high-res downloadable copies for backup. Not that I couldn't rip my own FLACs off the disc they're sending me, but that disc won't get here for a little while and in the meantime I have my own FLACs to listen to :)
But since we're talking about Prince I have to say last time around I wasn't terribly enamored with Prince's music. Maybe in the 2 years between 1999 and Purple Rain things got a whole hell of a lot better.
The synthesized weirdness of 1999 hasn't abated, but at least I can hear some real guitars and drums. It makes it sound way less 80s. Don't get me wrong, it's still very 80s, but the instrumentation on a song like "Take Me With U" has a sharpness that I feel makes it more timeless than most of the pop music released that decade. I'm mostly thinking right now of George Michael and Janet Jackson when I write that. Actually, now I'm thinking of "The Beautiful Ones". It's not a complete regression into easily dismissed cheesy 80s crap, but it lacks a solid guitar backing and over-relies on drum machine sound effects. Prince's vocals are pretty decent though.
The album is probably the best-sounding cheesy 80s album I've heard yet. I don't mean the album itself is necessarily cheesy, but it uses a lot of the cheesy 80s synthesizer sounds and manages to balance them well against a hard rock and funk edge reminiscent of the 70s. I'm also very happy that Prince didn't make the album completely depressing and maudlin like so many other 80s artists. The music is fun to listen to even if it's dealing with dark themes.
"When Doves Cry" is described as being bass-less, and listening to it there certainly isn't a very prominent bass guitar line. Maybe it's just my imagination filling in the gaps, but I swear at certain points I can hear someone playing bass. It might be that the song has such a strong funky groove that my brain can't accept that there's no bass so it makes one up. The song would probably be ruined if Prince had included one- the absence of a bass line makes it quite a striking song, a great example of accomplishing more by actually doing less.
Meanwhile the title track is the opposite. It's pretty enough, but after 2 verses (maybe 3, it was a long time ago), the song delves into a long simple instrumental that just repeats the same descending progression over and over. There's not even a rocking faux-epic guitar solo. As a grand finale it's kind of a dreary ending to an album I really enjoyed. Oh well, I still actually liked Purple Rain, and it may be the best 80s album I've heard yet. 4 stars.
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