Emancipation

Prince's first album after leaving Warner Brothers. Originally released in 1996, this three CD set runs exactly three hours which easily makes it one of the longest albums of all-new original material ever released by a popular artist. Long deleted in the States. Standard triple jewelcase. Please note this is a Cut-Out product. UPC is punched. EMI.

As long as the stalemate between Prince "Symbol" Nelson and Warner persisted, there was no way to tell who was right: were the vaunted unreleased tracks inferior efforts, better left in the can, or, were they great songs, unwisely repressed? Now that the impasse has been broken--Nelson has left Warner and started his own label, NPG--the answer is clear. Nelson's first post-Warner release, "Emancipation," offers three full hours of music on 3 CDs, and none of it seems extraneous. Instead, every disc contains some of the catchiest melodies and most danceable rhythms of Nelson's career. It's as if a dam had cracked and a flood of pent-up creativity had been unleashed. --Geoffrey Himes