Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon

[Yo Daddy]

Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left



Review by Ned Raggett
It's little wonder why Drake felt frustrated at the lack of commercial success his music initially gathered, considering the help he had on his debut record. Besides fine production from Joe Boyd and assistance from folks like Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson and his unrelated bass counterpart from Pentangle, Danny Thompson, Drake also recruited school friend Robert Kirby to create most of the just-right string and wind arrangements. His own performance itself steered a careful balance between too-easy accessibility and maudlin self-reflection, combining the best of both worlds while avoiding the pitfalls on either side. The result was a fantastic debut appearance, and if the cult of Drake consistently reads more into his work than is perhaps deserved, Five Leaves Left is still a most successful effort. Having grown out of the amiable but derivative styles captured on the long-circulating series of bootleg home recordings, Drake assays his tunes with just enough drama — world-weariness in the vocals, carefully paced playing, and more — to make it all work. His lyrics capture a subtle poetry of emotion, as on the pastoral semi-fantasia of "The Thoughts of Mary Jane," which his soft, articulate singing brings even more to the full. Sometimes he projects a little more clearly, as on the astonishing voice-and-strings combination "Way to Blue," while elsewhere he's not so clear, suggesting rather than outlining the mood. Understatement is the key to his songs and performances' general success, which makes the combination of his vocals and Rocky Dzidzornu's congas on "Three Hours" and the lovely "'Cello Song," to name two instances, so effective. Danny Thompson is the most regular side performer on the album, his bass work providing subtle heft while never standing in the way of the song — kudos well deserved for Boyd's production as well.

http://rapidshare.com/files/66118674/ND_5Leaves_RM.rar

Nick Drake - Bryter Layter



Review by Ned Raggett
With even more of the Fairport Convention crew helping him out — including bassist Dave Pegg and drummer Dave Mattacks along with, again, a bit of help from Richard Thompson — as well as John Cale and a variety of others, Drake tackled another excellent selection of songs on his second album. Demonstrating the abilities shown on Five Leaves Left didn't consist of a fluke, Bryter Layter featured another set of exquisitely arranged and performed tunes, with producer Joe Boyd and orchestrator Robert Kirby reprising their roles from the earlier release. Starting with the elegant instrumental "Introduction," as lovely a mood-setting piece as one would want, Bryter Layter indulges in a more playful sound at many points, showing that Drake was far from being a constant king of depression. While his performances remain generally low-key and his voice quietly passionate, the arrangements and surrounding musicians add a considerable amount of pep, as on the jazzy groove of the lengthy "Poor Boy." The argument could be made that this contravenes the spirit of Drake's work, but it feels more like a calmer equivalent to the genre-sliding experiments of Van Morrison at around the same time. Numbers that retain a softer approach, like "At the Chime of a City Clock," still possess a gentle drive to them. Cale's additions unsurprisingly favor the classically trained side of his personality, with particularly brilliant results on "Northern Sky." As his performances on keyboards and celeste help set the atmosphere, Drake reaches for a perfectly artful reflection on loss and loneliness and succeeds wonderfully.

http://rapidshare.com/files/66125128/ND_BryterL_RM.rar

Nick Drake - Pink Moon




Review by Ned Raggett
After two albums of tastefully orchestrated folk-pop, albeit some of the least demonstrative and most affecting around, Drake chose a radical change for what turned out to be his final album. Not even half-an-hour long, with 11 short songs and no more — he famously remarked at the time that he simply had no more to record — Pink Moon more than anything else is the record that made Drake the cult figure he remains. Specifically, Pink Moon is the bleakest of them all; that the likes of Belle and Sebastian are fans of Drake may be clear enough, but it's doubtful they could ever achieve the calm, focused anguish of this album, as harrowing as it is attractive. No side musicians or outside performers help this time around — it's simply Drake and Drake alone on vocals, acoustic guitar, and a bit of piano, recorded by regular producer Joe Boyd but otherwise untouched by anyone else. The lead-off title track was eventually used in a Volkswagen commercial nearly 30 years later, giving him another renewed burst of appreciation — one of life's many ironies, in that such an affecting song, Drake's softly keened singing and gentle strumming, could turn up in such a strange context. The remainder of the album follows the same general path, with Drake's elegant melancholia avoiding sounding pretentious in the least thanks to his continued embrace of simple, tender vocalizing. Meanwhile, the sheer majesty of his guitar playing — consider the opening notes of "Radio" or "Parasite" — makes for a breathless wonder to behold. If anyone needs confirmation as to why artists like Mark Eitzel, Elliot Smith, Lou Barlow, or Robert Smith hold Drake close to their hearts, it's all here, still as beautiful as the day it was released.

http://rapidshare.com/files/66121451/ND_PinkMoon_RM.rar

Nick Drake - A Treasury [DTS-CD]



Review by James Christopher Monger
Poor Nick Drake. The soft-spoken introvert may have spent his days upon this earth as a struggling singer/songwriter, but since leaving, his atmospheric and distinctly melancholy songs have become a pop culture fixture. Rescued from British folk oblivion by a one-off Volkswagen commercial, his name has since been bandied about by critics looking to link the English bard with every winsome, dough-faced up-and-comer who puts out a record with strings on it. What's on a Nick Drake compilation is never as interesting as what was left off. The insistence of compilers to show the "whole" scope of Drake's sound is a bit laughable, as his four records — despite the sparse arrangements on Pink Moon and 1986's demo collection Time of No Reply — are essentially the same. On the SACD Treasury, his third "best-of" (not counting the Fruit Tree box), listeners get the usual suspects: "Hazey Jane II," "River Man," and "Way to Blue"; stereo remixes of "Black Eyed Dog," "Road," and "From the Morning"; and the posthumously released U.K. "hit" single "Magic," a flatly sung composition that Robert Kirby's spooky new string arrangement can't rescue from mediocrity. This leaves no room for essential Drake offerings like "Fly" or "Time of No Reply," resulting in a mix that, while still classic, suffers from the very knowledge of the aforementioned tracks' existence. Newcomers, if there are any by now, would be better off picking up 1994's Way to Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake, a far more comprehensive look at an artist who continues to enchant and inspire, despite his somber demeanor and bitterly contested end.

This is a set of 5.1 dts surround encoded wav files. They can be played in various audio players like Foobar and VLC player or burned to an audio CD and played through a dts enabled Receiver on a home stereo. The cd can also be played with PowerDVD.

http://rapidshare.com/files/200464990/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200464954/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part02.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200464897/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part03.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200465040/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part04.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200465034/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part05.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200483598/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part06.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200483630/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part07.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/200483646/Nick_Drake_-_A_Treasury__SACD-DTS_CD_.part08.rar

Link checked on Thu May 14, 2009 11:59 am [WBB_Linkchecker_Bot]