Recently a supposedly remastered release of Born Again was put out. I say supposedly because it seems to me that all they did was EQ a little bass off of it and put it out like that. Its quite quiet compared to most CDs these days, and although the whole brickwalling thing is a problem these days, this CD is considerably below any normal peak levels. It can be turned up about 3 dB across the board with very little clipping. Keep in mind that 6 dB is about double the volume and you'll get a feel for what I'm getting at.

Another flaw in Born Again has always been, to me, the running order. It has always bothered me that the first side of what we used to call albums contains not one, but two pieces of what can only really be described as time filler: Stonehenge and The Dark. Not that these don't belong on the album, but they just shouldn't be so close together. Also, Hot Line is a great rocking song that would have been better suited to being placed near the start of the album than buried near the end with Keep It Warm. And the title song is so intense with its moody, thick production and its slow fade out on the amazing solo that really nothing should follow it. That is the end of the album to me. I always turned it off after that because nothing should follow that song.

So here I've resequenced Born Again to how I think it should have been done.  Besides fixing what I think is wrong with the album, this release also contains the previously only available on a bootleg song The Fallen, a song that, along with Disturbing the Priest, contains Ian Gillan's most amazing singing ever. But this song is even quieter than the rest of the album (about 5 dB before clipping, 2 less than the rest of the album) and is EQd so that the vocals jump out of the song very prominently. Add to that the fact that they took it from a bootleg rather than the actual master tape ( something attested to by the drop out in the left channel about 27 seconds in, one that matches the one on the bootleg tapes) and you see why I consider this 2011 release to be deeply flawed.  For this version I've included the extended version of Stonehenge from the 2011 release and also added The Fallen, but that I took from the bootleg and remastered it as well as I could to fit in with the sound of the rest of the album. Being that this was basically a rough mix all the instruments weren't EQd correctly, and the drums don't sound quite the same, but overall I think it fits quite well. In fact the whole package is a hell of a lot better than the way it was presented in 1983.

The source for this was the 2011 2CD set which I tweaked a bit for volume and tonality and, for The Fallen, the bootleg CD The Manor Tapes, which received full remastering.

01 Trashed
02 Hot Line
03 Stonehenge
04 Disturbing The Priest
05 The Fallen
06 Digital Bitch
07 The Dark
08 Zero The Hero
09 Keep It Warm
10 Born Again

More to come. Enjoy!