More Rolling Stones
More Top 100 Titles
- Boasting two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard Some Girls sound this good
- It’s got weight, punch, energy and fullness – qualities key to the better sounding pressings
- A Top 100 title, with a surplus of great songs – “Miss You,” “Beast of Burden” and “Shattered,” all sounding shockingly good, thanks to the engineering skills of Chris Kimsey
- 5 stars: “Opening with the disco-blues thump of ‘Miss You,’ Some Girls is a tough, focused, and exciting record, full of more hooks and energy than any Stones record since Exile on Main St. Even Their rockers sound harder and nastier than they have in years.”
This is the Stones’ last truly great album. All Music Guide gives it the same 5 star rating that they awarded Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingers. With hits like “Miss You,” “Shattered,” and “Beast Of Burden,” it’s easy to see why.
Most copies are too thin and grainy for serious audiophile listening, but this one is a different story. It’s not easy to find great sound for The Stones, so take this one home for a spin if you want to hear this band bring these songs to life in your very own listening room.
Not many copies have this kind of clarity and transparency, or this kind of big, well-defined bottom end. The sound of the hi-hat is natural and clear on this pressing, as are the vocals, which means that the tonality in the midrange is correct, and what could be more important than a good midrange? It’s where the music is.
What The Best Sides Of Some Girls 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 1978
- 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.
Fullness Is Key
One of the keys to getting this album to sound right is fullness. Many copies lack weight to the bottom end, which robs this funky music of its very foundation. Other copies suffer from lean, thin-sounding vocals — do you think that’s the sound Mick Jagger (or engineer Chris Kimsey) was going for?
Some of the qualities we found in short supply on the average copy were warmth, richness, sweetness and ambience — you know, all that Analog Stuff.
The more of these qualities we found on the copies we played, the higher the grade we gave them (all other things being equal of course).
What We’re Listening For On Some Girls
- Smoother and sweeter sound with less of the grit and congestion that plagues the average copy.
- 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 rock record. It needs weight down low to rock the way Chris Kimsey wanted it to.
- Present, breathy vocals. A veiled midrange is the rule, not the exception.
- Good top end extension to reproduce the harmonics of the instruments and other details of the recording, especially 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 always easy to find.
Our best copies will have it though, of that there is no doubt.
Not only is it hard to find great copies of this album, it ain’t easy to play ’em either, which is why this recording ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale.
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.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic that is a key part of the appeal of these wonderful recordings.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.
A Must Own Rock Record
This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious Rock Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Side One
Miss You
When the Whip Comes Down
Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
Some Girls
Lies
Side Two
Far Away Eyes
Respectable
Before They Make Me Run
Beast of Burden
Shattered
AMG 5 Star Rave Review
During the mid-’70s, the Rolling Stones remained massively popular, but their records suffered from Jagger’s fascination with celebrity and Keith’s worsening drug habit. By 1978, both punk and disco had swept the group off the front pages, and Some Girls was their fiery response to the younger generation.
Opening with the disco-blues thump of “Miss You,” Some Girls is a tough, focused, and exciting record, full of more hooks and energy than any Stones record since Exile on Main St. Even Their rockers sound harder and nastier than they have in years.
Using “Star Star” as a template, the Stones run through the seedy homosexual imagery of “When the Whip Comes Down,” the bizarre, borderline-misogynistic vitriol of the title track, Keith’s ultimate outlaw anthem, “Before They Make Me Run,” and the decadent closer, “Shattered.”
In between, they deconstruct the Temptations’ “(Just My) Imagination,” unleash the devastatingly snide country parody “Far Away Eyes,” and contribute “Beast of Burden,” one of their very best ballads.
Some Girls may not have the back-street aggression of their ’60s records, or the majestic, drugged-out murk of their early-’70s work, but its brand of glitzy, decadent hard rock still makes it a definitive Stones album.