THE NASHVILLE SESSIONS (REMASTERED EDITION)

This re-release of The Nashville Sessions heralds a welcome programme of reissues of Van Zandt's recordings for Poppy, and its later reincarnation, Tomato. It includes a lavish sleeve featuring Milton Glaser's original artwork, an illustrated twelve-page booklet, and splendid liner notes by Rob Hughes of this parish. It has also been remastered from the original tapes - work more urgent in the case of The Nashville Sessions than for most albums. According to persistent legend, the record only exists at all because Eggers, afeared that a vengeful Clement was about to erase the master tapes, crept into Jack's Tracks Studios one night and transferred Van Zandt's semi-complete work onto cassettes. As such, no amount of buffing, polishing and scrubbing is ever going to make Seven Come Eleven sound like much beyond a bunch of half-baked demos - the sound overall is muddy and crackly, esses fizz against the microphone, a background tape hiss is perceptible throughout, and Van Zandt's vocals, many of which are surely guide tracks, are far from his most adroit. But a forgiving listener can nevertheless still enjoy this raw, lo-fi work-in-progress as, say, Van Zandt's "Nebraska": certainly, the songs are good enough. (Uncut)

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