Lindsey Buckingham / Law and Order

More Lindsey Buckingham

More Fleetwood Mac

  • An outstanding copy of Buckingham’s first solo album with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • The sound here is rich, full-bodied and lively, with solid and present vocals, as well as excellent clarity all around
  • You can thank Richard Dashut for the superb recording quality, and Better Records for finding a copy of the record that sounds as good as this one does
  • September Song was an inspired choice – it might just be the best song on the album
  • “. . . this album to me covers a wide spectrum of emotion and musicality that is hard to find in solo departures like this one. The music carries a funny, kind of goofy vibe throughout . . . but Buckingham isn’t afraid to get serious and pull out dramatic day-to-day human circumstances . . . and let the audience become captivated by his minimalist approach that seems to fit in each time.”
  • If you’re a Lindsey Buckingham fan, a killer copy of his album from 1981 surely belongs in your collection

This vintage Asylum stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can 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 the Best Sides of Law and Order 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 1981
  • 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’re Listening For on Law and Order

  • 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

Bwana
Trouble
Mary Lee Jones
I’ll Tell You Now
It Was I

Side Two

September Song
Shadow Of The West
That’s How We Do It In L.A.
Johnny Stew
Love From Here, Love From There
A Satisfied Mind

Amazon Review

This is one of my favorite albums, hands down. I am a bit biased however, as I am a huge Fleetwood Mac and Buckingham fan, and a guitarist who was exposed to FM’s music in my youth and “The Dance” in my early days of learning my instrument.

Having said that, this album to me covers a wide spectrum of emotion and musicality that is hard to find in solo departures like this one. The music carries a funny, kind of goofy vibe throughout (especially the opening track of “Bwana”, “That’s How We Do It In L.A.” and “Love From Here, Love From There”), but Buckingham isn’t afraid to get serious and pull out dramatic day-to-day human circumstances (“I’ll Tell You Now”, “Shadow Of The West”, and of course the hit “Trouble”) and let the audience become captivated by his minimalist approach that seems to fit in each time.

To me it is simply one of those albums you experience that just has a quality to it that is hard to define. If you are a Buckingham fan, I think you will like it and see where his music comes out even more in Fleetwood Mac’s sound; if you haven’t heard much of his work, give it a try and I think it might grow on you if you go in expecting some great music from a talented, yet very strange artist.

-Richy Hall

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