Description
Russian pressed music cassette. Clear Best Music cassette with silver text.
The Russian cassette market is an interesting one with lots of different labels and tons of unique best of compilation tapes where some releases contains track selections taken from quality sources while others may contain poor quality recordings mastered from sound files or taken from jumping cds. Several Russian labels were also making material for the Ukrainian market. With such a massive country and material made for several former USRR countries its really something to dig into for a cassette collector. Invisible Halahup / Halahup is one of ex-USRRs biggest labels. They gained big popularity because they started to make releases with nicely designed booklets, printed on high quality paper, often multi-page, containing artists biographies and rare photos. The company name can be seen with several name variations on releases like: Holahup, Hulahup, Halahup Studio, Halahup Records, Halahup Records, Inc., Halahup Records Ltd. or as ООО Халахуп (means Halahup Ltd in Russian). Hula-Up, Halahup Music Media, Halahup Music Entertainment (Germany) GmbH, Halahup Music. Halahup had an office at the Vozrozhdeniya 20-A in St. Petersburg but they also had a contact phone number to Moscow and some say they were a sub label to Misteriya Zvuka (Mystery Of Sound) Records at 6th Novopodmoskovny Alley in Moscow. Halahup released both cassettes and later cds so there should be several thousand of releases once made for the USRR and Ukrainian market
Throughout his career, Rod Stewart has been remarkably skillful at adopting current musical trends, whether it was disco, new wave, adult contemporary, or even Brit-pop. Still, his records started to slip off the radar screen toward the end of the ’90s, so he parted ways with Warner Bros. and signed to Atlantic, where he released Human in early 2001. Again, he tried to change with the times, which, theoretically, may have been a wise move, since his thoroughly credible trad rock When We Were the New Boys was largely ignored. Since he tried contemporary rock, it made sense that the pendulum would swing back and he would take a stab at contemporary soul. Seems logical, but as the neo-TLC title track starts, it’s hard not to think what the hell happened? Cher’s neo-electro move on Believe made some sense, since she had always indulged in trashy modern dance, but Stewart never played that game — even when at the height of superstardom, he never pretended to be hip, which is what he’s trying to do here. Surrounded by skittering drum machines and En Vogue-styled harmonies, crooning Babyface-styled ballads, it sounds like he’s auditioning for the La Face roster. Rarely does Human try to be outright modern dance music, instead blatantly stealing these production techniques for a set of mid-tempo tunes and ballads that are firmly adult contemporary territory in content — they’re just delivered as if they had a chance of sitting at the top of the charts. It comes out as the sound of an artist painfully trying to sound modern but — by trying to sound fresh — sounding older than he ever has. Human are a Stewart album that you can miss.
Track list:
1. Human
2. Smitten
3. Don’t Come Around Here
4. Soul On Soul
5. Loveless
6. If I Had You
7. Charlie Parker Loves Me
8. It Was Love That We Needed
9. To Be With You
10. Run Back Into Your Arms
11. I Can’t Deny It