More of the Music of Robert Palmer
Island Is One of Our Favorite Labels
No doubt this is the best album Robert Palmer ever made. With Lowell George’s unmistakable slide guitar and members of the Meters providing backup, as well as the amazing Bernard Purdie on drums, it’s the only Robert Palmer release that consistently works all the way through as an album. The entire first side is excellent from top to bottom, with the title track being our favorite RP song of all time.
If you love the funky stylings of Little Feat, this surprisingly fun and engaging album should be right up your alley. We could play it every day for a month and never tire of it. The New Orleans-style groove of syncopated funk these guys lay down on practically every track is exactly what Robert Palmer needs to work off of as a vocalist.
Sneakin’ Sally is the closest thing to classic Little Feat — outside of the band itself in its heyday, pre-Times Loves a Hero — that we know of.
The sound on the best copies is superb as well; our old friend Rhett Davies engineered some of it — who knows what, they don’t break it down — but the other engineers must have done a great job as well as the sound is some of the best analog from the Classic Era, in this case 1974.
Side One
A++, with the analog sound we love: good and fat. The bottom end is big and solid here, and the energy is off-the-charts! When you have sound like this, this music is a ton of FUN. So good!
Side Two
A++ again, really jumpin’ out of the speakers with amazing presence and ZERO smear! There’s some real richness and fullness here as well, a combination that easily earns it two pluses in our book.
AMG Review
Before becoming a slick, sharp-dressed pop star in the 1980s, Robert Palmer was a soul singer deeply rooted in R&B and funk. Those influences are on full display on his debut album Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley. With a backing band including members of Little Feat and the Meters, the music has a laid-back groove whether Palmer’s covering New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint (the title track) or singing originals (“Hey Julia,” ” Get Outside”). While the music is tight and solid, it is Robert Palmer’s voice that is revelatory — he sounds supremely confident among these talented musicians, and they seem to feed off his vocal intensity. Fans of the Meters or people who want to discover the funky side of Robert Palmer should check this one out.
This is an older review.
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.
The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.
The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
Further Reading