CHRIS ISAAK - HEART SHAPED WORLD (MOBILE FIDELITY) HYBRID SACD

Chris Isaak — Heart Shaped World Hybrid SACD sourced from the original analog master tapes and housed in mini-LP-style gatefold packaging.

Mobile Fidelity's numbered edition Hybrid SACD plays with superb clarity, detail, and tonality.

There was nothing in contemporary music like Chris Isaak's Heart Shaped World when it hit shelves in June 1989. More than three decades later, the singer-songwriter's third album still sounds unique — and claims a backstory nearly as fascinating as the retro-leaning material and standout performances that propelled it to sales of more than 2.5 million copies. Home to the Top 10 smash "Wicked Game," the set remains a masterful mood piece that invites you to pour a late-night drink, sit in a dimmed room, and relish Isaak's elegant albeit raw ruminations on love, relationships, and questionable decisions.

Sourced from the original master tapes and housed in mini-LP-style gatefold packaging, Mobile Fidelity's numbered-edition Hybrid SACD presents Heart Shaped World in audiophile quality. It unearths the staggering inner details, saturated tones, and brilliant atmospherics of the crisp production. And it brings you up close and personal with Isaak's spectacular singing — impeccably controlled, tense, brooding, steamy, smoldering, haunted — situated amid stripped-down backdrops that allow notes to fully bloom and decay.

While Isaak's ever-steady baritone remains the anchor, the contributions of his trusty backing band, the aptly named Silvertone, come across with just as much cool, command, and realism. The indispensable playing of guitarist James Calvin Wilsey particularly emerges with superb clarity and dimensionality. The character of his 1965 Fender Stratocaster, shivering twang of his spring-coiled fills, and his signature use of reverb, delay, and vibrato seamlessly match Isaak's patient deliveries and the band's unhurried rhythms. The record's lonesome temperaments and pensive themes have never been more alluring on disc.

A quick note on "In the Heat of the Jungle." On original CD releases of Heart Shaped World, this track clocks in at 6:20. For this reissue, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab used the shorter 4:38 version originally included on original vinyl copies of Heart Shaped World. The label supplied MoFi with the shorter version.