Paraf – Sabrana Djela 1976. - 1987.

Someone is finaly ruined the best new wave/punk/dark albums and songs in Croatia ever. This re-issued "remaster" is worst remaster sounding material songs ever in my whole life. Only the booklet is okey and worth money and some extra songs , but I have original Lp's and what the fuck is it..first album sounds more like pop rock, and the volume of songs is to low..First LP is best Punk album in ex yugoslavia ..i dont know, all songs are great and I love Paraf very much, but I'm deeply disapointed with this low quality sounding Cd's

Which song is from 1976? just asking...how can i see, album is from '80.?

While the good intention by a number of enthusiastic individuals involved in the realisation of this box-set deserves every praise, the long overdue release that is "Sabrana djela 1976. - 1987." ("Collected Works 1976-1987) is a sad victim of Dallas Records' merciless superficiality and sloppiness, delivering in the worst fashion when it comes to "value for money"...

Such stepmother-ish mistreatment of Paraf's meta-legendary (post)punk legacy is beyond belief, and sadly mars a great deal of what's otherwise consoling musically. An amassing collection every admirer of the group will welcome dearly - the demos, alternate versions, the amazing live recording and never-before heard studio recordings reward the listener with curiosity, regardless of the varying (and at times questionable) sound quality.

Visually, it is below the clichéd sub-standard, degraded to a half-baked, generically painful (punk) aesthetic. The hastiness of the whole package is repulsive to the screaming levels of cheapness, but again - don't blame the "graphic designer" alone. The very label sadly has no knowledge, neither cares much for the recorded / visual work in order to handle it aesthetically with more professional and analytical care, apart from it being "product on the shelf", which at the same time compromises Paraf themselves; their entire discography documented here is one of cosmopolitan strength and daring avant-garde, radically evolving from punk naivety to astonishing maturity in mere three studio albums.

Dallas Records, shame on you. As for Paraf and those who had the best intentions with this - you are king, and because of you this was worth it.

This is a good, yet faulted box set, which could have been a fantastic one with just a tiniest bit of additional effort. Here's the breakdown:
- The packaging: the box itself and the booklet are nice (completely written in Croatian of course) with lots of cool photos and acceptable design. On the negative side, the discs are in "vinyl replica" sleeves (which some may like but I consider a cheap cop out) which don't even contain original inner sleeves. That's a major gripe as all three original LP's had great inners, and on the first album only the inner sleeve was of band's creation (the main sleeve was picked by the record company to replace the original, "controversial" one, which was supposedly in the same vein as the released inner sleeve).
- The material: all of the band's released discography is accounted for and a decent number of bonus tracks is present as well. The bonus tracks are as follows: an absolutely brilliant live show of the second lineup (the highlight of the box and basically the best sounding part of it, which is kind of a travesty, but more on that later); some rehearsal recordings which actually sound fine and bear repeated listens; two excellent complete songs which weren't released at the time of recording; good alternate versions of released tracks; and a few curiosities which don't really add a lot musically (a track of (unused?) film music and a live version of a first lineup track performed by the second lineup, which is great in a historical sense, but also kind of a train wreck; I'm still very happy to have it, though). This bunch of "new" stuff is the best part of the box set and the main reason for buying it, in my opinion. I don't know if I'd like to have the additional stuff that was unearthed for the two recent-ish vinyl compilations here as well; as far as I remember them, I think they're inferior and would possibly dilute the quality of what is here.
- The presentation: sound quality of the previously released stuff is where the box takes a complete nose dive. Both "A dan..." and "Izleti" are way too trebly, "Izleti" possibly being the trebliest release I own (I had to listen to that disc at something like +5 bass and -5 treble, while most of other CD's I own are played at flat settings or perhaps +1, -1). Sound levels between tracks are not balanced and you will have to reach for the volume control on the beginning of almost every track. I cannot be sure, but it sounds like they used simplest automatic normalization which only considers the highest peaks in a track and amplifies everything according to it, therefore making tracks with high peaks too quiet ("Pritanga i vaza") and tracks with consistent volume throughout too loud ("Federico u bačvi"). "Zastave" sounds the best of the three albums, at least when you reach track two - track one sounds hissy and thin, is definitely from a different source, and frequency analysis shows a hard cutoff at 16 kHz - a symptom of 128 kbps mp3, sadly. I'm assuming the master for that track was lost or damaged, but cannot understand why a NM copy of the record wasn't procured, digitalized, and equalized to resemble the sound of the rest of the material? Even a talented amateur with free software could do a much better job with that than what was done here, supposedly professionally. There are also random glitches that aren't crucial, but should have been caught nevertheless (the "Kabul 1980." track plays twice in a row, first as part of the previous track, and then as a track of its own; the snoring at the end of track one was cut off too early).
All in all, this is definitely a release that a Paraf fan should OWN, but they probably won't LOVE it as much as they could and should have...