Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now
- Here is a vintage copy with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides – this is the best studio album the band ever recorded
- The drums are rich and fat and deliciously analog, a perfect match for the sound of the album as a whole
- Consistently strong songwriting with dramatically more emotionally powerful tracks than their other releases
- Features great songs like “All That You Dream,” “Long Distance Love,” “Mercenary Territory” and more
The Last Record Album is one of our favorite Little Feat albums. The recording, by the estimable George Massenburg (working with Dave Hassinger), has many outstanding qualities. Among them is amazing bass; the bass goes really deep in places (“Long Distance Love”) and it’s big, punchy, rich and well up in the mix throughout the album.
The problem has always been an overly smooth top end, combined with congestion, smear, and a serious lack of presence. The good news is that if you clean enough copies with the advanced cleaning techniques we’ve developed, and you make enough improvements to your stereo, room, etc, with the right copy you can actually get this album to sound clear and rich.
What The Best Sides Of The Last Record 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 1975
- 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 The Last Record Album
- 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.
Whose Fault Is It?
Most copies of this album are shockingly dull and compressed. The band itself sounds bored, as if they lack conviction in their own songs.
But it’s not their fault. Whose fault it is is never easy to fathom; bad mastering, bad tapes, bad vinyl, bad something else — whatever it is, that thick, lifeless sound turns this powerfully emotional music into a major snooze-fest. It’s positively criminal but it happens all the time. It’s the reason we have to go through a pile of copies to find one that sounds like this.
Here you can find the kind of transparency that lets you hear the studio space around all the instruments. Many copies have a bad case of “cardboard drums.” However, when you are lucky enough to have one of our high-rez copies spinning on your table you will see immediately that the drum sound is right. The drums are rich and fat, a perfect match for the sound of the album as a whole.
One of the Greats
Little Feat is one of the ten best rock bands in the history of the world. Their live album Waiting For Columbus is, in my opinion, the greatest live rock album ever recorded. If you don’t own a copy of it make sure to put it at the top of your Must Own Little Feat Album List.
A Rock Masterpiece
We consider this Little Feat album their Masterpiece. Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Side One
Romance Dance
All That You Dream
Long Distance Love
Day or Night
Side Two
One Love Stand
Down Below the Borderline
Somebody’s Leavin’
Mercenary Territory