Wham! Fantastic (1983) [EAC FLAC] [RePoPo]

******************************************************************************* Wham! - Fantastic ******************************************************************************* 01. Bad Boys [0:03:22.07] 02. A Ray Of Sunshine [0:04:48.18] 03. Love Machine [0:03:23.57] 04. Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?) [0:06:45.05] 05. A Ray Of Sunshine (Instrumental Remix) [0:05:42.20] 06. Love Machine (Instrumental Remix) [0:03:28.35] 07. Club Tropicana [0:04:29.25] 08. Nothing Looks The Same In The Light [0:05:57.28] 09. Come On! [0:04:25.22] 10. Young Guns (Go For It!) [0:03:59.08] 11. Nothing Looks The Same In The Light (Instrumental Remix) [0:06:38.37] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Biography by Ed Nimmervoll Wham! sparked something of a pop revival in the mid-'80s and could arguably be held responsible for sparking off the boy band trend of the '90s. They were unashamedly pop, to the point of padding the front of their trousers for television appearances. At the heart, however, was a string of catchy singalong singles written by George Michael (born Georgios Kyrriacos Panayiotou in London to a Greek restauranting family). George met Wham!'s other half, Andrew Ridgeley, at school in the London suburb of Bushey, and in 1979 they started performing together as part of the ska-based band the Executive. When that group dissolved, they wrote songs, made demos, and rushed into a recording contract with the equally eager independent label Innervision, scoring an instant hit with "Wham Rap!" (they thought that "wham" was the sound they made when Michael and Ridgeley performed together). In order to move to a recording contract with Sony label Epic, Wham! was forced to walk away from most of the royalties from their debut album, Fantastic. None of that mattered when their 1984 single, "Wake Me up Before You Go Go," became a worldwide hit, accompanied by a video of the pair cavorting in their sportswear. Almost immediately, George Michael started thinking of a solo career, and released "Careless Whisper," issued in the U.S. under George Michael of Wham! Wham!'s end came suddenly two years later, in 1985, reputedly when the group's manager, Simon Napier-Bell (later to manage Take That), decided to sell a share of his management to a South African entertainment conglomerate. Supposedly, as part of a stand against South African politics, George Michael immediately announced Wham!'s breakup. They gave their farewell performance before a sold- out audience of 72,000 fans at London's Wembley Stadium. George Michael comfortably stepped straight into his own highly successful solo performing and recording career. Andrew Ridgeley's post Wham! album, Son of Albert, sold poorly and produced just one minor hit, "Shake." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Album Review by William Cooper Fantastic is the misguided 1983 debut release from the U.K. duo Wham. With Fantastic, George Michael and partner Andrew Ridgeley introduced themselves as leather jacket-clad, street-smart "rebels." This approach proved wildly popular in the U.K., where Fantastic was a Top Ten hit, but the album went largely unnoticed in the States. While Fantastic showcases the ability of the young (20 at the time of the album's release) George Michael to craft engaging, hook- filled melodies, much of the material on Fantastic suffers from the duo's pretentious, tough-guy posturing. The empty funk of the U.K. hits "Bad Boys," "Young Guns (Go for It)," and the embarrassing "Wham Rap" barely registers, and Michael's smart-aleck, self-conscious lyrics are often unintentionally hilarious. Although Michael eventually became well-known as a reasonably successful emulator of R&B trends, neither these tunes nor Fantastic's stupefying remake of the Miracles' "Love Machine" give any indication of his abilities. At best, Fantastic can be viewed as a testament to George Michael's maturity. "Nothing Looks the Same in the Light" and "Club Tropicana," two of Fantastic's best tunes, lean toward the lush, adult pop of Michael's later solo work. Fortunately, Michael and Ridgeley would later ditch the superficial, leather-jacketed approach for the more sophisticated pop of later Wham releases like "Everything She Wants" and "Freedom" (both from 1984's Make It Big) and "The Edge of Heaven" (from 1986's Music From the Edge of Heaven), finding major U.S. success in the process. Fantastic isn't a good album, but it's oddly entertaining. It's certainly interesting hearing the difference between the frothy Fantastic and Michael's later, "serious" solo work like Listen Without Prejudice and Older. And Fantastic is also good for a few chuckles. Unfortunately, that probably wasn't George Michael's intention. But even he might get a good laugh out of it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BAD BOYS Song Review by Amy Hanson The duo’s third, and most popular single yet when it dropped in at #2 on the British chart in May 1983, ”Bad Boys” was an easy, breezy winner all around, even if it remained somewhat musically indebted to its predecessor, ”Young Guns (Go For It”. Toning down the political rhetoric, yet still espousing a less than pure invitation to the party life, the song rang out to the disenfranchised, inviting bad boys all across the land to step out of the oppressive family unit for sex, smokes, fast cars and even faster girls. With backing singers Pepsi & Shirley trilling out the chorus, and an irresistible battery of “whooo whooos” thrown in for maddening emphasis, ”Bad Boys” was further dignified by a charming video that placed both Michael and Ridgeley in the short pants and satchel set, before pouring them into the tight pants and studded leather that was more in keeping with their at-the-time sex star images. Musically and visually, it’s a smart, funny look at youth gone normally wrong. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008 EAC extraction logfile from 14. April 2009, 2:12 Wham! / Fantastic Used drive : HL-DT-STDVD-RAM GSA-H55N Adapter: 3 ID: 1 Read mode : Secure Utilize accurate stream : Yes Defeat audio cache : No Make use of C2 pointers : No Read offset correction : 102 Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No Null samples used in CRC calculations : No Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000 Gap handling : Not detected, thus appended to previous track Used output format : User Defined Encoder Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s Quality : High Add ID3 tag : Yes Command line compressor : F:Archivos de programaExact Audio CopyFLACFLAC.EXE Additional command line options : -6 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" -T "COMMENT=%e" %s -o %d TOC of the extracted CD Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector --------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 0:00.00 | 3:22.07 | 0 | 15156 2 | 3:22.07 | 4:48.18 | 15157 | 36774 3 | 8:10.25 | 3:23.57 | 36775 | 52056 4 | 11:34.07 | 6:45.05 | 52057 | 82436 5 | 18:19.12 | 5:42.20 | 82437 | 108106 6 | 24:01.32 | 3:28.35 | 108107 | 123741 7 | 27:29.67 | 4:29.25 | 123742 | 143941 8 | 31:59.17 | 5:57.28 | 143942 | 170744 9 | 37:56.45 | 4:25.22 | 170745 | 190641 10 | 42:21.67 | 3:59.08 | 190642 | 208574 11 | 46:21.00 | 6:38.37 | 208575 | 238461 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969
udp://exodus.desync.com:6969