More of The Faces

More British Blues Rock

• An original Green Label pressing of the Face’s sophomore LP with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish
• Amazing live-in-the-studio sound that conveys completely the raw power of one of the hardest rockin’ bands of all time
• Click here to see more of our favorite Rock and Pop records with relatively unprocessed sound
• 5 stars in Allmusic and probably the Faces’ Best Album, for sound and music – “Maybe I’m Amazed”? Hell yeah!
• “…a ferocious rock & roll band who, on their best day, could wrestle the title of greatest rock & roll band away from the Stones.”
• This is our pick for The Face’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist or group can be found here on the blog.

We knew this album could sound good, but back in the day we sure didn’t know it could sound like this.

Both musically and sonically I don’t think the group ever recorded a better album than this one.

Take the wonderful song “Bad ‘N’ Ruin” (the opening track on side one) for example. It’s the sound of open mics in a big studio space — nothing more, nothing less. It’s totally free from any phony mastering or bad EQ, and on a Hot Stamper copy like this one, it’s absolute magic.

Martin Birch was the engineer for the first two tracks on side one. You may know him from his work with Fleetwood Mac (1969-1973) and Deep Purple (1969-1977), which include the amazingly well-recorded albums Machine Head and Made In Japan.

It’s a rare record indeed that can rock with the best of them while keeping its audiophile credentials intact. Like we said about our Hot Stampers for Never A Dull Moment, we sure wish more Rolling Stones records sounded like this.

This vintage Warner Bros. 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 Long Player 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 1971
• 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 To Listen For

A bigger presentation — more size, more space, more room for all the instruments and voices to occupy. The bigger the speakers you have to play this record, the better.

More bass and tighter bass. This is fundamentally a pure rock record. It needs weight down low to rock the way the band wanted it to.

Present, breathy vocals. A veiled midrange is the rule, not the exception. We take a lot of points off for that.

Good top end extension to reproduce the harmonics of the instruments and details of the recording including the studio ambience.

Last but not least, balance. All the elements from top to bottom should be heard in harmony with each other. Take our word for it, assuming you haven’t played a pile of these yourself, balance is not that easy to come by.

Our best copies will have it though, of that there is no doubt.

One Tough Album (To Find AND To Play)

Not only is it hard to find great copies of this album, it ain’t easy to play ’em either. You’re going to need a hi-res, super low distortion front end with careful adjustment of your arm in every area — VTA, tracking weight, azimuth and anti-skate — in order to play this album properly. If you’ve got the goods you’re gonna love the way this copy sounds. Play it with a budget cart / table / arm and you’re likely to hear a great deal less magic than we did.

It’s not often that we list a Top Quality Hot Stamper for this album. I can’t tell you how many bad pressings we’ve played in the last few years searching for the ones with the kind of Tubey Magic that we imagined was on the master tape. Many pressings are dull and lifeless, others are thick and turgid. Most are beat.

Which makes this a very special copy indeed. It surely belongs in our Top 100, but our Top 100 is pretty full up at the moment so it will just have to wait.

Side One

Bad ‘N’ Ruin
Tell Everyone
Sweet Lady Mary
Richmond
Maybe I’m Amazed [Live]

Side Two

Had Me a Real Good Time
On the Beach
I Feel So Good [Live]
Jerusalem

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

On their second album Long Player, the Faces truly gel — which isn’t quite the same thing as having the band straighten up and fly right because in many ways this is album is even more ragged than their debut, with tracks that sound like they were recorded through a shoebox thrown up against a couple of haphazardly placed live cuts.

But if the album seems pieced together from a few different sources, the band itself all seems to be coming from the same place, turning into a ferocious rock & roll band who, on their best day, could wrestle the title of greatest rock & roll band away from the Stones. Certainly, the sheer force of the nine-minute jam on Big Bill Broonzy’s “I Feel So Good” proves that, but what’s more remarkable is how the band are dovetailing as songwriters, complementing and collaborating with very different styles, to the extent that it’s hard to tell who wrote what; indeed, the ragged, heartbroken “Tell Everyone” sounds like a Stewart original, but it comes from the pen of Ronnie Lane.

The key is that Stewart, Lane and Ron Wood (Ian McLagan only co-write “Bad ‘N’ Ruin”) are all coming from the same place, all celebrating a rock & roll that’s ordinary in subject but not in sound. Take “Bad ‘N’ Ruin,” the tale of a ne’er do well returning home with his tail between his legs, after the city didn’t treat him well. It has its counterpart in “Had Me a Real Good Time,” where a reveler insists that he has to leave, concluding that he was glad to come but also glad to get home.

These are songs that celebrate home, from family to the neighborhood, and that big heart beats strong in the ballads, too, from the aching “Sweet Lady Mary” to the extraordinary reworking of Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” which soars in ways Macca’s exceptional original never did.

Then, there’s there humor — the ramshackle “On the Beach,” the throwaway lines from Rod on “Had Me a Real Good Time” — which give this a warm, cheerful heart that helps make Long Player a record as big, messy, and wonderful as life itself.