Recently i have purchased the Vault on CD finally (it was very find too hard before, i did find it an second hard recordstore recently).

After listening a few days to this album, i must say: not bad, very good even!
Certainly not throwaway material. The songwriting is good, the music sounds fresh and lively, its nice to hear him going 'old school', leaving the synths and drummachines out this time, and delivering mostly relaxed jazzy and bluesy material. Next to that Five Women has 'hit' written over it, it should have been released as a single IMO. My personal favorite is 'Sarah', rocking out a bit and with cool vocals.

I must say this album is a lot better then some of the regular cd's he released in the nineties (New Power Soul and Rave), and it also outshines the stiff, boring 'Come' album IMO.

The best cuts from this album, combined with the best cuts from C&D (which i believe was recorded around the same time) would have made a splendid album IMO.

In short, I love this little (short) album!

Curious about your opinions on The Vault.

Riverpoet31 said:

Are you kidding me.The valt sucks compared to come.The song Come is beautiful and Prince displayes some of his best vocall abilities.Race is funky and so is phernome. Plus letitgo is good.Orgasm is the Best.The valt is just jazz and songs that never made the cut.

I really like the vault. The jazzy flavor is more my style than some of his other work (like the nineties dance songs and such).

Sorry funkmaster, tasters differs, so i disagree with you

The title track of Come is indeed sung very well, but the lyrics and the slurping sounds are annoying.

Race, Pheromone and Space are some of the weakes track Prince ever put unto an album in my opinion, mostly because he sounds totally on autopilot, bored even.

There are three strong tracks on that CD IMO: Papa, Dark and Letitgo. The rest is very mediocre.

When it comes to the Vault i would say: that arent jazz songs, they sound jazzy. In the end it are bluesy and soulsongs played in a jazzy way.
The songwriting in general on the Vault is better then that on Come, and most of all, the general delivery by the band and the vocals of Prince on some songs is much more lively and vivid.

Riverpoet31 said:

Although Come has only like four tracks that I can listen to (come,race,pheremone, I can't listen to orgasm the whole way because of boringness but it's funny.)They're are more stand outs on come than the valt. I think the charts could prove that. Although it migh have alot of soso songs and come might only Have 2 standout chart songs but the rest might be junk. It's the standout that make most albums better than others but not in all cases.

The vault (the entire album) doesn't interest me as much as the single track "Pheremone". That track is wicked. With it's eastern duck quacking solo... scary good. He needs to do more of those sounds/genre's only scifiPrince would do.

No more presets on the keyboards! No more standard genres!

The Vault is a great album.

one of the better albums, imho

ufoclub said:

Which is on the "Come" album...

Pherenome is on come. But no funk in the valt.

Funkmaster3000 said:

Mind your spelling oh funky one!

MartyMcFly said:

read the first post!

Come on . The song come shows some of Prince is best vocal performance. Race is pretty funky.Orgasm Always gets alagh.Pherenome is just awsome.

Snap said:

agreed.

not 1 of his best, but a wonderful piece of work.