The B-52’s / Self-Titled – A Proud Member of Our Top 100

More of the Music of The B-52’s

  • With an INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two, this vintage pressing of The B-52’s’ debut album is overflowing with analog magic in its grooves – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Talk about sound that is positively jumpin’ out of the speakers – every instrument here is clear and present, laid out from wall to wall right in your listening room
  • Tubey Magic in 1979? Somehow they managed to pull it off. So dynamic too – what a recording!
  • The sound of the best pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed
  • A New Wave Classic, 5 stars in the All Music Guide: “These songs illustrated that the B-52’s’ adoration of camp culture… was a world view capable of turning out brilliant pop singles and, in turn, influencing mainstream pop culture… a hell of a good time.”

We think you will be surprised at just how good the sound can be. And you may or may not be surprised at just how FUN the music is.

Listen to the huge, spacious soundstage and amazingly rich, full-bodied and uncolored tonality that earned this recording a place in our Top 100.

Who knew that good sounding records were still being recorded in 1979? Candy-O comes to mind, but the B-52s’ first album has virtually none of the grit and Roy Thomas Baker heavy-processing of that one, and a lot more Tubey Magic to boot — when you get a pressing like this of course.

What The Best Sides Of This Debut Album 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 1979
  • 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.

The Best of ’79

This recording reminded me of a really good Don Landee / Ted Templeman production, the kind you hear on JT or Simple Dreams or the better Doobie Brothers albums. Everything is laid out clearly: there’s a space created for every part of the frequency spectrum from the lowest lows to the highest highs, with nothing crowding or interfering with anything else. The production is professional, clean, clear and REAL sounding everywhere you look.

Chris Blackwell of Island Records produced the album, recorded it in Nassau, with engineering by a fellow named Robert Ash, whose work I was not familiar with. Turns out he’s worked with none other than Rhett Davies and Eno, two individuals we have nothing but the utmost respect for.

Ash did a great job on this album. Until we hear something better we would have to say this is the Best Sounding Album of 1979.

What We’re Listening For On The B-52’s

  • 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.

The Piano

The toy piano Fred Schneider plays on Dance This Mess Around is at the back of the stage, placed at about 10 o’clock in the soundfield. On most copies it sounds more like a glockenspiel than a toy piano; the better copies bring out the unique qualities of the instrument. Music has been written for it and classical concerts performed on it, can you imagine? And Fred plays it in concert (or used to anyway).

Side One

Planet Claire 
52 Girls 
Dance This Mess Around 
Rock Lobster

Side Two

Lava 
There’s a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon) 
Hero Worship 
6060-842 
Downtown

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

These songs illustrated that the B-52’s’ adoration of camp culture wasn’t simply affectation — it was a world view capable of turning out brilliant pop singles and, in turn, influencing mainstream pop culture. It’s difficult to imagine the endless kitschy retro fads of the ’80s and ’90s without the B-52’s pointing the way, but The B-52’s isn’t simply an historic artifact — it’s a hell of a good time.

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