Isaak, Chris Heart Shaped World - 2LP One-Step

There was nothing in contemporary music like Chris Isaak’s Heart Shaped World when it hit shelves in June 1989. More than three decades later, the singer-songwriter’s third album still sounds unique. Home to the Top 10 smash “Wicked Game,” the brooding set remains a masterful mood piece that invites you to pour a late-night drink and relish Isaak’s elegant albeit raw ruminations on love, relationships, and questionable decisions. For all the melodrama and sadness at hand, Isaak’s baritone dives deep underneath emotional surfaces. He mines subtleties that go beyond heartbreak and anguish, and occasionally suggest frustration, menace, and anger. The contributions of his backing band, anchored by the brilliant playing of guitarist James Calvin Wilsey, seamlessly match his patient deliveries and cool command.

Sourced from the original master tapes, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing, and featuring the bonus track “Diddley Daddy,” Mobile Fidelity’s UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP box set of Heart Shaped World unearths the staggering inner details, saturated tones, and extraordinary atmospherics of the crisp production. This demonstration-grade reissue brings you up close and personal with Isaak’s spectacular singing — impeccably controlled, tense, brooding, steamy, smoldering, haunted — situated amidst strippeddown backdrops that allow every note to fully bloom and decay. The record’s lonesome temperaments and pensive themes have never been more hypnotic on vinyl. As Isaak croons on the title track: “Trouble going down.” Indeed.

• - 1 -
  
  • 1. Heart Shaped World
  • 2. I M Not Waiting
  • 3. Don T Make Me Dream About You
  • 4. Kings of the Highway
  • 5. Wicked Game
• - 2 -
  
  • 1. Blue Spanish Sky
  • 2. Wrong To Love You
  • 3. Forever Young
  • 4. Nothing S Changed
  • 5. In the Heat of the Jungle
  • 6. Diddley Daddy