Giant – BUDDY HOLLY**

Love Is Strange/Good Rockin’ Tonight/Blue Monday/Have You Ever Been Lonely/Slippin’ & Slidin’/You’re The One/(Umm Oh Yeah)Dearest/Smokey Joe’s Café/Ain’t Got No Home/Holly Hop

It says a lot for the genius of Buddy Holly that there was still considerable demand for new product ten years after his death. Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of the overdubs, Giant scraped the barrel and added little or nothing to his reputation. (UK:13)

"The fourth of five posthumous Buddy Holly albums Giant finds ex-Cricket producer, Norman Petty, once again blowing the dust of Buddy’s old demo tapes while his new band, The Fireballs, trudge along. I believe I have credited another Buddy Holly album in this series as the biggest catastrophe. I may have to retract that claim as I notice Giant is the only one that does not include any of Buddy’s original masters. This is the shortest one. It’s got that going for it. It goes without saying that I highly recommend avoiding Giant."

"What you're hearing isn't Buddy Holly as he sounded, but someone else's idea of what he should have sounded like. Tracks like Love Is Strange and You're The One are almost completely ruined by obnoxious and goofy sounding strings overdubs, while Slippin' & Slidin and Smokey Joe's Cafe suffer from horribly un-authentic sounding backing tracks."

"This album is a grab bag of barrel scrapings from the 1956 garage tape and the apartment tapes from Buddy's final days on this earth, all similarly treated with clunky out-of-synch overdubs. This is Buddy Holly for the Mantovani crowd."

"These tracks gives you a deep look into his roots with some very 'true' country music and a quick look at what might have been as songs like You're The One and Love Is Strange, which were basically home demos recorded shortly before he died. Here they are overdubbed to sound almost like a finished recording."

"They would have done much better by simply presenting Buddy's original recordings as they were, without the hideous and gaudy additions of newer musical arrangements placed on top of the original, un-marred performances. Frankly, I would sooner recommend searching out a bootleg recording rather than see anyone pay good money for a doctored Buddy Holly album. Pretty disappointing."