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• An outstanding import pressing with Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
• Finding clean, quiet, early pressings of this album has been especially difficult for some time now and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier
• A Must Own for Gabriel fans, this album is widely considered his breakthrough work as a solo artist
• Listen closely and you’ll recognize Phil Collins’ now-signature (but at the time revolutionary) drum sound on several of the tracks, including “Intruder,” one of the best tracks on the album
• 5 stars: “Generally regarded as Peter Gabriel’s finest record, his third eponymous album finds him coming into his own, crafting an album that’s artier, stronger, more song oriented than before.”
• If you’re a fan, this is a Peter Gabriel classic from 1980 that belongs in your collection.

With this, his third release, Gabriel established himself as a true force in the rock world.

This vintage Charisma 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 Peter Gabriel (#3) 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 1980
• 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.

We Love this Music

I’m a huge Peter Gabriel fan, having grown up with every one of the first five studio albums, practically as they were released. The third PG album thankfully does not suffer from the digital spit, grit, and hash of So and Security. Interestingly, if you know his early work well, none of the first five albums has much in common with the others. Like Steely Dan’s body of work, each of the albums has its own production qualities, its own sound, and music that ties tightly into both.

What We’re Listening For On Peter Gabriel (#3)

• 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.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better 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 other 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 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.

Side One

Intruder
No Self Control
Start
I Don’t Remember
Family Snapshot

Side Two

And Through The Wire
Games Without Frontiers
Not One Of Us
Lead A Normal Life
Biko

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

Generally regarded as Peter Gabriel’s finest record, his third eponymous album finds him coming into his own, crafting an album that’s artier, stronger, more song oriented than before. Consider its ominous opener, the controlled menace of “Intruder.” He’s never found such a scary sound, yet it’s a sexy scare, one that is undeniably alluring, and he keeps this going throughout the record… He wound up having albums that sold more, or generated bigger hits, but this third Peter Gabriel album remains his masterpiece.