Why?: I was a little bit obsessed with The Tea Party's Edges Of Twilight album back in the day, having discovered it when someone slipped me a bootleg of theirs. I never knew Led Zeppelin, so The Tea Party seemed awfully unique to me. I was also obsessed with acoustic versions of rock songs, so an EP of acoustic renderings of The Tea Party songs was the perfect product for me.
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These days my mind has swapped, and now I tend to find acoustic versions like dulled versions of otherwise great songs. The Tea Party have at least attacked these songs with a strong attempt at reinterpretation, with traditional instruments and lots of 12 string guitar to fill in the spaces. Mostly it works. "The Grand Bazaar", "Silence" and "Turn The Lamp Down Low" all sound pretty good, but I think "Innana" loses a lot in acoustic mode. "Turn The Lamp Down Low" is the bluesiest song on Edges, and I never much liked how it speed up and rocked out, it always seemed like a cheep trick. It survives much better acoustically, especially with the drum jam at the end. I think overall I'd have preferred more drums though.
"Time", the only new song on the EP, is sung by folk singer Roy Harper, who also appears in spoken word form on the hidden track of Edges Of Twilight. It's a great song, in the tradition of 70s folk rock, rocked up slightly for the chorus. Roy has a pleasant enough voice. I can't really imagine this song with Jeff Martin singing it, although I'm sure such a thing probably exists. I'm not interested enough to go find it.
It was a remix of Sister Awake on it too, but I'm not a big fan of remixes. This at least isn't just techno-beats, they have actually remixed the core elements of the song, but it's still silly.
The EP also comes with a multimedia element with videos of the band explaining the instruments they use. It was fairly interesting from memory, with the postage stamp sized video you used to see on CDs in the 90s. The multimedia part on my copy doesn't work in Windows, but can be ripped with some software like ISOBuster to at least watch the videos in Quicktime. The EP was re-released in 2000s fixed to work properly, but I suspect they didn't fix the size of the video.
Overall it's a nice little package, but it's the kind of thing you'd see on a $10 DVD these days, in much better quality. Other acoustic songs recorded at the same time ended up as b-sides and compilations. These days, you could plug a better, more complete version of the EP together (minus the multimedia) via iTunes, and you might be better off.
5/10
