More of the Music of Peter Gabriel
- With KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish, this original UK Charisma pressing is doing practically everything right
- This has long been a favorite album of mine, a Desert Island Disc if you will, with some of the most powerfully produced, intelligently written and passionately performed songs in the entire PG canon
- We shot out a number of other imports and the midrange presence, bass, and dynamics on this outstanding copy placed it head and shoulders above most other pressings we played
- Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
- 4 stars on AllMusic: “‘On the Air’ and ‘D.I.Y.’ are stunning slices of modern rock circa 1978, bubbling with synths, insistent rhythms, and polished processed guitars, all enclosed in a streamlined production that nevertheless sounds as large as a stadium.”
- If I were to compile a list of my top twenty rock and pop albums of 1978, this album would most likely be one of the most played titles on that list, one that I still listen to regularly to this day
Peter Gabriel’s self-titled second album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:
- It’s part of the core collection of well recorded rock & pop albums
- It’s an album that we think should be more popular with audiophiles
Looking to do a shootout to find your own Hot Stamper?
- Stick exclusively with the early British pressings. Nothing can touch them for sound quality.
This vintage Charisma import 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 2 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.
What We’re Listening For On Peter Gabriel 2
- 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.
Side One
On the Air
D.I.Y.
Mother of Violence
A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World
White Shadow
Side Two
Indigo
Animal Magic
Exposure
Flotsam and Jetsam
Perspective
Home Sweet Home
Reviews
In NME, Nick Kent wrote that the album’s “brazenly left-field veneer left me cold at first, and it’s only now that its strengths are starting to come across … once past the disarming non-focus veneer, there’s a quietly remarkable talent at work – quiet in the manner of the slow fuse burn of ‘Mother of Violence’ with Roy Bittan’s piano work outstripping anything he’s turned out for either Bruce Springsteen or David Bowie. Closer to the root of the album, there’s a purity, a strength to the songs individual enough to mark Gabriel out as a man whose creative zenith is close at hand.” Wikipedia