You’ve Never Seen Everything

Bruce Cockburn released a new album last week called You’ve Never Seen Everything.

Rounder Records, which is releasing the album in the U.S.A., has a set of song clips from the album. On first listen, it all sounds a little too electronic too me: Cockburn is an inspired guitar player, and taking his sound and mixing it with bloops and glips that sound like they’re coming from a Commodore 64 does not enhance it in any way. Try listening to Tried and Tested, for example (RealAudio stream from Cooking Vinyl).

Part of this feeling might be an by-product of poor digital encoding for web delivery: all the clips I’ve listened to, no matter the source, seem to have been filtered through a thin jaggedy metal sock. Even acoustic numbers (try Open) have this quality. The best encoding — and even it’s very low-fi, are the Windows Media Player versions on Amazon.com.

My favourite track (keeping in mind that I’m strongly in the “Wondering Where the Lions Are” camp, in terms of his career), is Messenger Wind.

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