- A SUPERB copy of Sade’s 4th studio album with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides
- The import sound here is richer, fuller, more musical and more natural – Sade’s breathy voice is reproduced with a kind of natural, relaxed, effortless quality that, in our experience, is only available on vinyl
- 4 stars: “Sade’s fourth album, Love Deluxe, included the hit “No Ordinary Love” and marked a return to the detached cool jazz backing and even icier vocals that made her debut album a sensation.”
- This is an album we simply cannot afford to do shootouts for these days –original import copies are currently selling for two to three hundred dollars, which means it has been tagged as never again, a record you, dear reader, will have to find for yourself.
By 1992 records like this were only released on import vinyl and typically went out of print soon after they started their descent down the pop charts. I used to sell them back in the day. Supplies were extremely limited and unpredictable – they went out of print without warning and never came back. Once they were gone they were virtually never reissued, although Simply Vinyl took a crack at filling that gap, with mixed results as I’m sure you know.
All of those factors conspire to make the cost of acquiring the mintiest pressings from overseas fairly high. It’s the main reason you have never seen the album on our site before. I’m sure we paid more than $100 for this very copy; rarely can they be found for less. And most of the pressings that came in had condition problems the way this one does.
Be that as it may, we have this copy available and it is not only wonderful sounding but the music is every bit as good as I remember it.
What the best sides of Love Deluxe 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 even as late as 1992
- 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 space of the studio
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 separates the best copies from the also-rans is more than just rich, sweet, full-bodied sound. The better copies make Sade’s voice more palpable — she’s simply more of a solid, three dimensional, real presence between the speakers. You can hear the nuances of her delivery much, much more clearly on a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
This vintage Epic pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even 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 Sade, 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 We’re Listening For on Love Deluxe
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- 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 for the guitars and drums, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
- Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering — which ties in with good transient information, as well as 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 players.
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, way behind the speakers. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put them.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
No Ordinary Love
Feel No Pain
I Couldn’t Love You More
Like A Tattoo
Side Two
Kiss Of Life
Cherish The Day
Pearls
Bullet Proof Soul
Mermaid
AMG 4 Star Review
Sade’s fourth album, Love Deluxe, included the hit “No Ordinary Love” and marked a return to the detached cool jazz backing and even icier vocals that made her debut album a sensation. Although Sade’s style is more suggestive than hypnotic and her production and arrangements are in an urbane mode rather than a jazz one, she maintained her popularity among the fusion and urban contemporary audiences. This release also includes “Mermaid,” “Pearls,” and “Feel No Pain.”