Hot Stamper Pressings of Genesis Available Now

• This early UK Charisma import boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from top to bottom
• Here’s an amazing Trick of the Tail that blows the typical pressing out of the water!
• The sound is big, bold and open, breaking free from the compressed and cloudy sound the average copy offers
• Here is the deep, note-like, well-articulated bass that the MoFi and 95% of all the other pressings don’t have
• This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once
• 4 1/2 stars: “[The] album returns the group to the fanciful fairy tale nature of its earlier records…this is about the sound of the band playing, not individual songs, and it succeeds on that level quite wildly…”
• This is our pick for the band’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best recording by an artist or group can be found here on the blog.

It was a thrill to finally hear this album sound great after all these years. The cymbals are clean and silky, the vocals are present, the bass has real weight and the overall sound is balanced and natural! You’ve got to clean and play a TON of copies to have any hope of finding one that’d come anywhere near this one.

At the end of the second track on side one, Entangled, there is a wonderful sounding choral effect which Alan Parsons liked so much he decided to use it liberally on his own recordings. He’s famous for having admitted to analyzing classic rock records, then taking the best bits and pieces, cobbling them together and producing the “music” that he is known for. I prefer the original bits and pieces myself.

What The Best Sides Of A Trick of the Tail 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 1976
• 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.

Moving Product

Classic Rock is the heart and soul of our business. Finding quiet, good sounding pressings of Classic Rock albums is what we devote the bulk of our resources (time and money) to, and if we can be indulged a self-compliment, it’s what we do best.

No one is even bothering to attempt the kind of shootouts we immerse ourselves in every day. And who can blame them? It’s hard to assemble all the resources it takes to pull it off. There are a huge number of steps a record must go through before it finds itself for sale on our site, which means there are about twenty records in the backroom for every one that can be found on the site.

If the goal is to move product this is a very bad way to go about it. Then again, we don’t care about moving product for the sake of moving product. Our focus must be on finding, cleaning and critically evaluating the best sounding pressings, of the best music, we can get our hands on.

What We’re Listening For On A Trick of the Tail

• 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.

A Must Own Rock Record

We consider this album the band’s Masterpiece. It’s a recording that belongs in any serious rock music collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

Dance on a Volcano 
Entangled 
Squonk 
Mad Man Moon

Side Two

Robbery, Assault and Battery 
Ripples 
A Trick of the Tail 
Los Endos

AMG Review

After Peter Gabriel departed for a solo career, Genesis embarked on a long journey to find a replacement, only to wind back around to their drummer, Phil Collins, as a replacement. With Collins as their new frontman, the band decided not to pursue the stylish, jagged postmodernism of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway — a move that Gabriel would do in his solo career — and instead returned to the English eccentricity of Selling England by the Pound for its next effort, A Trick of the Tail. In almost every respect, this feels like a truer sequel to Selling England by the Pound than Lamb…

… this is about the sound of the band playing, not individual songs, and it succeeds on that level quite wildly — to the extent that it proved to longtime fans that Genesis could possibly thrive without its former leader in tow.