Music Review // Greg Gould "Strings Attached"

 As someone who really enjoys physical media, I also very much enjoy when musicians do "special editions" or "deluxe" reissues of albums.  Having an album that is twelve songs long re-released with an additional ten songs that could be demos, acoustic or live is always welcome because the more you can feel like you're getting to know an album the better.   Greg Gould had just released this album, "Strings Attached", in 2024 and now, a mere two years later we get a Deluxe Edition.

I can support this being a Deluxe Edition a few years after the initial release because it gives people enough time who maybe didn't find the album in 2024 to find it now.  As much as I love when we get albums with bonus tracks, it also feels like something we shouldn't have to wait ten or more years to get.  For Greg Gould, this album has thirteen songs in total, but then the Deluxe version has an additional six songs and then there six more songs remixed beyond that, making for twenty five total songs- nearly double the songs- on this Deluxe edition.

Greg Gould has a big sound that combines rock with pop and somewhat of the theater.  No stranger to having guests on his songs already, this makes it particularly easy to hear the remixes of these songs.  A song like "Running" comes from the soundtrack to the film "Body Blow", so in some ways the non-remixed songs on here are just also songs which have appeared elsewhere.  This would have been most helpful back in the 1990s, trying to keep track of certain artists who would appear on various soundtracks and compilations.

One of the difficult parts in the sound of Greg Gould is how to compare him with other artists, but I think of this as being something along the same lines as the band Muse or the Flaming Lips and how when you hear their songs you can definitely tell how they could be remixed.  This comes through in the song "Marching On", for example, which just carries through with bigger beats and even more energy, as if that was possible from hearing the original version.  But you don't have to be someone as well known as Muse to put out a Deluxe album such as this and I think that is something more artists should consider.