More of The Kinks
More Titles that Sound Best in Mono
- Kinks-Size returns to the site with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side two and excellent Double Plus (A++) sound on side one
- This tri-color label MONO Reprise pressing is lively, balanced and vibrant, with a healthy does of the Tubey Magical Richness the Kinks’ recordings need in order to sound right
- Surface issues are more often than not the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
- “From the raw, slurred ‘Louie Louie’ to the pounding rave-up of ‘Come on Now,’ this record rocks, showing off the better sides of the group’s R&B output and early, formative, Beatles-influenced experiments as well.”
Sometimes the copy with the best sound is not the copy with the quietest vinyl. The best sounding copy is always going to win the shootout, the condition of its vinyl notwithstanding. If you can tolerate the problems on this pressing you are in for some amazing music and sound. If for any reason you are not happy with the sound or condition of the album we are of course happy to take it back for a full refund, including the domestic return postage.
Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG
This vintage Reprise Mono 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 Kinks-Size 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 1965
- 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 Kinks-Size
- 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
Tired Of Waiting For You
Louie Louie
I’ve Got That Feeling
Revenge
I Gotta Move
Side Two
Things Are Getting Better
I Gotta Go Now
I’m A Lover Not A Fighter
Come On Now
All Day And All Of The Night
AMG Review
Say it’s early 1965, you’re an American record company executive who’s just seen two new singles by one of those British rock & roll bands on your label shoot up the charts, and there’s no album to go with them; what do you do? Well, if your company was Reprise Records and the singles were “All Day and All of the Night” and “Tired of Waiting for You” by the Kinks, then what you did was take five songs off of the band’s recent British singles and EPs, two cuts (“I’m a Lover Not a Fighter,” “Revenge”) that had been dropped from the U.S. version of the group’s debut album, and one (“Come on Now”) off of their second U.K. LP, throw them and the two hits together on a 12″ disc, come up with a pretty cool name, and voila — you had Kinks Size. What makes this record more enjoyable than the band’s U.K. albums of the same era is that it was made up largely of singles, albeit many of them failed ones, but still all efforts at luring in millions of listeners 150 seconds or so at a time. The American label essentially distilled the best parts of the group’s work in England, thus giving albums like Kinks Size a distinct advantage. From the raw, slurred “Louie Louie” to the pounding rave-up of “Come on Now,” this record rocks, showing off the better sides of the group’s R&B output and early, formative, Beatles-influenced experiments as well. It may be a pastiche, but it’s also more fun than their accompanying U.K. long-players of the era, and it had no equivalent in England for many years, though most of the tracks have since surfaced on expanded versions of the band’s first two albums.