More of the Music of The Eagles
Reviews and Commentaries for Hotel California
This commentary was written more than ten years ago. Wouldn’t change a thing though!
Victim of Love is a classic case of yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you Turn Up Your Volume.
It’s the sound of this five piece tearing it up LIVE IN THE STUDIO. It’s also the track where the DCC just falls apart for us. Where did the rock and roll energy go? The DCC makes it sound like the band just doesn’t care, which was certainly not our experience when were playing any of the killer Hot Stampers we came across. Just the reverse was true; we had them turned up full blast and they ROCKED.
One reason the Turn Up Your Volume Test is such a great test is that the louder the problem, the problem in this case being the kind of lifeless sound that Heavy Vinyl pressings often suffer from, the harder it is to ignore.
I might go so far as to say that Victim of Love is the best sounding track on the whole album. It’s punchy, real and MUSICAL in a way that nothing else on the album is, because it’s being played by a real band, live. The energy and coherency of the sound is like nothing else you will hear on Hotel California, and possibly on any other Eagles record.
Such A Lovely Place
Yet another example of an album that we couldn’t fully appreciate until we’d discovered a truly great copy. You may have heard these songs a million times, or what seems like a million times, but you’ve sure never heard them sound like this. We played copy after copy this week and never grew tired of the music. In fact, we like it better than ever. If you take home one of our Hot Stamper copies, we’re pretty sure you’ll feel exactly the same way. This album is a classic in the world of Classic Rock. When you can hear it right, that fact becomes all the more believable. Until then, maybe not so much.
The Search For Hotel California
Even though we’re HUGE Eagles fans at Better Records, we had never tried to do a shootout for this album until about 2008, and that’s because the typical copy doesn’t even hint at the magic found on the better pressings. After countless gritty, grainy, compressed, lifeless, veiled copies we had almost given up — until we played one that summer and heard some seriously good sound coming out of our speakers.
We checked the dead wax, and with new stamper information to go by, we hit the local stores. Let me tell you, finding any clean copy of this album is not easy. Asylum vinyl leaves much to be desired, and the average copy of this album has been played to death, on pretty bad equipment no less.
FURTHER READING
Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals