More Lionel Richie

• An outstanding copy of Richie’s second solo studio album, with solid Double Plus (A++) very ANALOG sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
• Rich, smooth and natural, the sound here is guaranteed to please – recall that the 12″ of All Night Long was on the TAS List back in the day (and yes, I used to sell it!)
• 4 1/2 stars: “In 1999, Q magazine included Can’t Slow Down on its list of the best Motown records of all time and stated, “Production values are high, his songwriting craft is at its peak and at least one track – the global smash ‘All Night Long’ – is an anthem to good times that makes the heart sing and feet twitch.””

This vintage Motown pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back.

If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What outstanding sides such as these have to offer is not hard to hear:

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1983
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We Listen For on Can’t Slow Down

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Can’t Slow Down
All Night Long (All Night)
Penny Lover
Stuck On You

Side Two

Love Will Find A Way
The Only One
Running With The Night
Hello

AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review

On Can’t Slow Down, his second solo album, Lionel Richie ran with the sound and success of his eponymous debut, creating an album that was designed to be bigger and better… with Can’t Slow Down Richie reaped enormous dividends, earning not just his biggest hit, but his best album.

He has less compunction about appearing as a pop singer this time around, which gives the preponderance of smooth ballads — particularly “Penny Lover,” “Hello,” and the country-ish “Stuck on You” — conviction, and the dance songs roll smooth and easy, never pushing the beats too hard and relying more on Richie’s melodic hooks than the grooves, which is what helped make “All Night Long (All Night)” a massive hit.

All the hits showcase Lionel Richie at his best, as does Can’t Slow Down as a whole.

More Tom Waits

More Swordfishtrombones

• Insanely good Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from start to finish; we rarely have these on the site!
• Both sides here are incredible — big, rich, full-bodied and super spacious with tons of energy and presence
• “…the dominant sounds on the record were low-pitched horns, bass instruments, and percussion, set in spare, close-miked arrangements…”
• Allmusic 5 stars: “Swordfishtrombones marked an evolution of which Waits had not seemed capable”

This is yet another wonderful sounding Tom Waits recording, though it’s very different from the earlier titles from his catalog that have been featured on our site before. While we’re huge fans of the sound Waits and engineer Bones Howe put together on albums like Small Change and Heartattack and Vine, this album marked a turning point for Waits and the sound of his albums.

From Allmusic:

Swordfishtrombones has none of the strings and much less of the piano work that Waits’ previous albums had employed; instead, the dominant sounds on the record were low-pitched horns, bass instruments, and percussion, set in spare, close-miked arrangements (most of them by Waits) that sometimes were better described as “soundscapes.”

When you get a top pressing like this one, you can really appreciate the sound that Waits was going for here, and it’s exceptional. When we reach for a Tom Waits record, we’re looking for something that’s different and capable of really setting a mood, and let me tell you, this record passed those tests with flying colors.

Compared to the typical pressing, this copy is bigger, richer and fuller with more weight down low. It gives you wonderful immediacy and real punch. The vocals have real texture and character — why even bother with this record if smearing or veiling is going to rob Tom Waits of his iconic voice?

What We Listen For on Swordfishtrombones

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Underground 
Shore Leave 
Dave The Butcher 
Johnsburg, Illinois 
16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six
Town With No Cheer 
In The Neighborhood

Side Two

Just Another Sucker On The Vine 
Frank’s Wild Years 
Swordfishtrombone 
Down, Down, Down 
Soldier’s Things 
Gin Soaked Boy 
Trouble’s Braids 
Rainbirds

AMG Review

Between the release of Heartattack and Vine in 1980 and Swordfishtrombones in 1983, Tom Waits got rid of his manager, his producer, and his record company. And he drastically altered a musical approach that had become as dependable as it was unexciting. Swordfishtrombones has none of the strings and much less of the piano work that Waits’ previous albums had employed; instead, the dominant sounds on the record were low-pitched horns, bass instruments, and percussion, set in spare, close-miked arrangements (most of them by Waits) that sometimes were better described as “soundscapes.” Lyrically, Waits’ tales of the drunken and the lovelorn have been replaced by surreal accounts of people who burned down their homes and of Australian towns bypassed by the railroad — a world (not just a neighborhood) of misfits now have his attention… Artistically, Swordfishtrombones marked an evolution of which Waits had not seemed capable (though there were hints of this sound on his last two Asylum albums), and in career terms it reinvented him.

More of the music of Beethoven 

A distinguished member of the Better Records Orchestral Music Hall of Fame. 

Red Seal. This string quartet sounds like it’s in your living room. Has that immediacy that Mercury is famous for.

Many of RCA’s chamber recordings are excellent. Unfortunately for us record lovers they are quite rare.

More Big Brother & The Holding Company

More Cheap Thrills

A distinguished member of the Better Records Rock and Pop Hall of Fame.

We’ve rarely been able to get this shootout off the ground, but we finally managed to stumble upon enough clean copies to get this round going. It’s been well over two years since we’ve had any copy of this album on the site!

This album has got that trippy ’60s San Francisco sound, no doubt about it. Those of you who are familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow or the early Grateful Dead albums know what I’m talking about. The tubey magic of the guitars is worth the price of admission alone; you just don’t hear this kind of sound on modern records.

Like you might expect from this mixture of blues and psychedelic rock, the sound can be a bit raw. Of course, that’s probably the way the band wanted it to be — I don’t see what a mastering engineer might have done to make this music work any better. Much of this material is recorded at The Fillmore (check out the one and only Bill Graham introducing the band at the beginning) and the sound is surprisingly good for live ’60s sound. (more…)