Beatles Travesty, Vol. 2

I'm a fanatic Beatles fan, but not an unreasonable soul. So believe me when I say The Capitol Albums, Volume 1 was one of the most shoddily packaged boxed sets for a major artist I have ever seen. It came in a flimsy, cheap cardboard box mimicking the "longbox" format popular 15 years ago. The four CDs themselves came in pseudo-LP jackets also very cheaply made without any album listings on the spine. All four of them were housed in a super-cheap cardboard slipcase that folded back onto itself so it could at least be housed in the same space as regular CDs -- except it too had no info on its spine, so if you placed it on your bookcase alongside other Beatles albums, it offered just a generic, blank front that gave you no clue as to what it actually contained. Most Beatles bootlegs are put together with far more care. This was the first sonic upgrade since the Beatles debuted on CD in the '80s, making it LONG overdue. So I bought the junky, insulting packaging to get the songs -- which are presented in the same order as their original US releases. Thank God for iPod; I just took the newly remastered songs and plugged them into the original album order as much as possible. The outcry over such a pathetic release was universal, so now Capitol is releasing Vol. 2 on April 11...and apparently doing it just as cheaply the second time around. Well done! Only a true idiot could mess up something as sure fire as a "new" release by the Beatles.