They also review everything else by Prince, including the third NPG album

http://www.warr.org/prince.html#NEWS

Here they review his side projects, including the first two NPG albums.

http://www.warr.org/purple.html


N.E.W.S. (2003)
Another instrumental fan club release, and this one really sounds like a Madhouse record, with Leeds on sax, Prince mostly on lead guitar, and the tunes verging between midtempo funk and soft mood music (the interminable second half of "South"). The disc is organized into four fourteen-minute tracks, but except for "North," each track is made up of several unconnected sections: "East" starts as a drum solo, shifts to a funk dirge with Prince repeating a three-note riff, then breaks into fast James Brown-style R&B for a few minutes before an impressionistic, gossamer denouement. Which would be great if the individual sections were up to Prince's standard, but they're just undistinguished vamps: the middle section of "West" is probably the high point, and even that's no more than a solid groove. The featured soloists - Leeds and Prince - don't play anything we haven't heard from them before, so though Renato Neto plays some exceptionally delicate keyboards ("West"), the disc is less interesting and no more entertaining than Xpectation. Maybe Prince should have pressed that one on CD and kept this for MP3. (DBW)
[This message was edited Sat Jul 19 23:19:10 PDT 2003 by thedog]