Hot Stamper Pressings of the New Wave Recordings Available Now
These days it’s almost silly to give out title-specific advice on the Cars second album, Candy-O. We never have any Hot Stamper pressings of the record in stock!
You can’t find vintage copies in the bins anymore, and sellers on the internet send us too many mis-graded noisy copies for us to want to spend the time returning them.
But here is a bit of advice that you won’t find anywhere else, and by anywhere else, I mean anywhere else in the entire world because nobody knows this album the way we do.
This is not a boast; this is, as far as we can tell, a fact. We’ve played scores of copies in shootouts for more than twenty years. Who else can say the same? That’s right, no one.
I bought the album in 1979 as soon as it was released and fell in love with it the way I had the first album. (The first album is still their Masterpiece but Candy-O ranks a close second.) In 2007 we played a copy that sounded so good we could hardly believe it. Regardless of the struggles involved, we hope to be able to bring more copies to the site soon.
As far as the SP label goes, in this case we noticed a pattern that we typically would let the shootout make clear to us after the fact — that the SP pressings were the weakest of the lot.
This time we needle dropped all the SP records and none of them sounded good enough to make it to the shootout. It saves us a lot of time and trouble not to clean records that have such a limited potential to sound good, so now we often do a quick “elimination round” with some titles just to make sure the shootouts are able to run efficiently. There are thousands of records to play and only so many hours in a day to play them.
This is one of our favorite recordings — a former member of our Top 100 — for one very simple reason: it’s got Big Rock Sound in spades! Drop the needle on Let’s Go and check out the sound of the big floor tom. When the drummer bangs on that thing, you will FEEL it! It’s similar to the effect of being in the room with live musicians — the difference between just hearing music and also feeling it. That’s what you get from a Hot Stamper copy.
What other New Wave band ever recorded an album with this kind of DEMONSTRATION QUALITY sound? It positively JUMPS out of the speakers. No album by Blondie, Television, The Pretenders or ANY of their contemporaries can begin to compete with this kind of sound, with the exception of the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures. The Cars very own first album is excellent, but it doesn’t have this kind of LIFE and ENERGY.
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