For those unaware, Chris Isaak’s brilliant Heart Shaped World is a mood masterpiece. A Double-Platinum album featuring the Smash “Wicked Game,” containing wondrous singing, and extraordinary guitar tones alike.

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, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing, strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, and featuring the bonus track “Diddley Daddy,” Mobile Fidelity’s UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP box set of Heart Shaped World unearths the staggering inner details, saturated tones, and brilliant atmospherics of the crisp production. It brings you up close and personal with Isaak’s spectacular singing — impeccably controlled, tense, brooding, steamy, smoldering, haunted — situated amidst stripped-down backdrops that allow every note 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 1962 Fender Stratocaster reissue, 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.

Experienced on UD1S with ultra-black backgrounds and a nearly invisible noise floor, Heart Shaped World is in every regard a demonstration disc.

Side One:
1. Heart Shaped World
2. I’m Not Waiting
3. Don’t Make Me Dream About You

Side Two:
4. Kings of the Highway
5. Wicked Game

Side Three:
6. Blue Spanish Sky
7. Wrong to Love You
8. Forever Young

Side Four:
9. Nothing’s Changed
10. In the Heat of the Jungle
11. Diddley Daddy

With his long and distinguished career in the music industry, Chris Isaak demonstrated - through his third and arguably most famous studio album - just how a work can endure as a classic. And whilst his moment in the burning white hot spotlight was perhaps fleeting, it does not overshadow the years he spent without releasing new music.

Although decades have passed since his debut, one might have expected a more comprehensive career with greater stylistic variety — though this is not a criticism, as I am sure he has had his reasons for stepping back within the business. Regardless, Heart Shaped World is a very solid, well-crafted record, making tentative forays into indie, blues, jazz, rock, and — to an extent — country.

The album’s highlights are undoubtedly the tracks in the middle section, including the song that became the biggest hit of his career; however, the other tracks are neither bad nor disposable — they simply serve their purpose extraordinarily well.

I mean, Chris Isaak has one of the most gorgeous voices I think we have all heard in the past 50 years and when it is allowed to shine the songs are simply perfection. For when he is in the groove, his low slung stye of singing - such as on the title track, Blue Spanish and, of course, Wicked Game (made all the more memorable for that string-bending riff, the work of guitarist James Calvin Wilsey), well, he is absolutely phenomenal.

So yeah, we’re here because of Wicked Game, I get that. Isaak’s retro synthesis of Elvis Presley’s smolder, Glen Campbell’s voice, and Roy Orbison’s haunting atmosphere wasn’t for everyone, but a boost by filmmaker David Lynch and supermodel Helena Christensen as they made his best song his biggest hit — hardly the worst thing to have people ask for again and again for the rest of a musical career.

Experience the Brooding 1989 Album in Definitive Sound: Mobile Fidelity’s UltraDisc 180g 45RPM 2LP Box Set Is Strictly Limited to 3,000 Numbered Copies and Includes the Bonus Track “Diddley Daddy.”

1/2” / 30 IPS analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe.

Official Purchase Link

www.chrisisaak.com