Review - Jailhouse Rock LP

Just three weeks ago, I received the 2025 Danish reissue of the ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ soundtrack LP, retitled ‘Piger! Piger! Piger!’ from the Danish Memphis Mansion record label. And now the producers take us to South Africa with their reissue of the only original full 33 RPM LP release of the ‘Jailhouse Rock’ soundtrack album.

 

The warden threw a party in the county jail, and you’re all invited, according to the press release. Let’s give this album a spin and see if it is a criminally good release … or if the producers need to be sent to jail for messing with a classic!

 

Design

 

Where the design of the ‘Piger! Piger! Piger!’ soundtrack was a variation of the original LP, the design for this new release follows the label’s 2023 design for their version of the ‘Blue Hawaii’ soundtrack.

 

And I can only say that designer Søren Karstensen deserves a “get out of jail free” card again. The gatefold cover is a beauty! He turned well-known photographic elements from the movie into drawings which together form an attractive and well-balanced picture.

 

Inside is a coffee table with pictures from the movie and a copy of The Middlehaven Herald newspaper containing the liner notes and recording information. 

The record label deserves a mention too, it is a lock, with the spindle of the record player “unlocking” your music. A great detail that shows that illustrates the dedication from the label to deliver a top-notch album.

The album comes on red-colored vinyl and transparent pink marble-colored vinyl. And because I already saw a translucent yellow-colored vinyl test pressing, I expect that variation to pop up soon too. As for the vinyl itself, Nordsø Records knows their vinyl, and they delivered again. 

 

Content

 

The musical part of the LP is newly created Stereo Mixes by the label’s favorite engineer, Anthony Stuchbury. We have praised his mixes plenty of times, and he doesn’t disappoint here either. In part, that's because the album contains mixes previously available on his ‘Essential 50’s Master’s box set, released here by “popular demand,” but also because he has added some nice surprises for the audio freaks out there.

 

New here is the Stereo Version of the Movie Version of ‘Treat Me Nice’, and as technology evolves, Stuchbury has created new mixes of ‘Baby I Don’t Care’ and ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’. 

The latter is the engineer’s favorite because, for the first time, he was able to do what until now only Peter Jackson’s team (that worked on the Beatles' material) was able to do, separate the acoustic guitar so it can really shine. Compared to ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ - kind-of the same type of song - it is indeed higher in the mix, so you can hear that he had more instruments to play with. 

Overall it is an album that demand to be played loud! So, here too, no reason to send someone to jail.

 

The Verdict

 

Warden Henrik Knudsen, the “executive producer” of this ‘Jailhouse Rock’ party album, delivered together with his team. This is a great-looking and great-sounding LP of the soundtrack that should have been released back in 1958; it would have been a classic album in 50’s Rock and Roll history. 

Fortunately, that has been corrected 2025 style, with a touch of authenticity in both the design and the presentation of the upgraded audio. So if you always wanted to add a full 'Jailhouse Rock' album to your collection, this edition is certainly worth considering. 

The album is available from the >>> Memphis Mansion webshop.