Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
For some reason, don’t ask me why, they keep hiring Chris Bellman to make Heavy Vinyl reissues of Neil Young’s albums, even though he has shown again and again that he has no idea what these recordings are supposed to sould like.
So far he’s ruined After the Gold Rush and Neil Young’s Greatest Hits, and there may be others he’s remastered to death, but no copies of those have come our way so we really don’t know, or care to know, to be honest.
If this is your idea of analog, you are most likely in the wrong hobby and should consider finding a different one. At the very least you are wasting your time and money on worthless crap vinyl pressings put out by the legion of Heavy Vinyl Grifters who emerge from the bowels of the earth on Record Store Day, targeting their rip-off LPs at the low- to mid-fi vinyl collector types who have yet to figure out what a giant scam the whole thing is.
These records have virtually no redeeming features, none that we could find anyway. Allow us to catalog the shortcomings of the three sides that comprise the 2017 Record Store Day release of Harvest Moon.
For the first time in five years we had finally been able to do a shootout for the imports we like, so we knew exactly how good the best pressings could sound. Long story short, they sure don’t sound like this!
Side One
Track Two (From Hank to Hendrix)
- Blary harmonica
- Much more treble
- Still flat and dry
- Just louder with less bottom
- Edgy vocals in the chorus
Track Four (Harvest Moon)
- Lean hi-hat up top
- Vocals are a little glarey and nasal
- Gets hard
- NFG / half a plus?
Side Two
Track Two (One of These Days)
- Big but blurry and opaque
- Not that weighty or solid
- Tonally shifted up
- NFG
Side Three
Track One (Old King)
- Sloppy snare and edgy vocals
- Loud and dry and flat
- Bass is messed up
- No definition or power
Well, I think that about covers it. Not sure what I could possibly add to this litany of bad qualities, yet another example of the purest evidence of out and out incompetence in the record making world.
You can add this disaster to the list of bad sounding Heavy Vinyl we’ve reviewed in 2024/25. This pressing of Harvest Moon is our 17th entry in the series. We’ve reviewed approximately 330 Heavy Vinyl pressings to date.
We’ll give our nose-picking friend CarmelizedGinger the last word:
Apparently he is the target market for these records. He totally recommends picking up a copy.
As of the day of this post, there are 119 copies for sale on Discogs. The average selling price is $34.88. If that’s the kind of money you don’t mind flushing down the toilet, we know a worthless record you can buy for that amount.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.
Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.