More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

• Boasting two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, we guarantee you’ve never heard the band’s 1973 release sound remotely as good as it does on the vintage Reprise pressing
• This copy is super open and spacious with an abundance of energy and incredible presence
• The bottom end is just killer and there’s dramatically more richness and fullness than what we heard on practically all other copies in our most recent shootout
• “Throughout Mystery to Me, the amazing and almost telepathic drums and bass of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie give this effort more panache and muscle than was represented on this effort’s predecessor, Bare Trees. The best Bob Welch offering, ‘Keep on Going,’ has a strong, soulful string arrangement and Christine McVie’s customary sensual and poised vocals … This effort is custom-made for those who like thoughtful offerings and is a valuable set in the scheme of the band.”

Mystery To Me is my All Time Favorite Fleetwood Mac album, and this copy has the sound that I always dreamed this album could have, but didn’t — until now. This is just the third Hot Stamper shootout that we’ve been able to do, since clean copies with the right stampers are ridiculously hard to come by. I’m not kidding. We must have spent the last ten years and more trying to find the right stampers for this record. I can tell you we were dead wrong so many times in the past that we had almost given up. Time and time again, just when I thought we had it figured out, we would go back and play our so-called “hot” copy, to find ourselves miserably disappointed all over again.

Half the copies you find of this record are mud and the other half have no bass. If my math is correct, that leaves zero copies that aren’t muddy and actually have bass. That comports rather well with what I was finding: under test conditions zero of the copies we played sounded any good. We were sorely vexed. Sorely, sorely vexed.

Then the skies opened up and the sun began to shine.

Getting To This

The new cleaning rituals cleared up enough of the mud to allow us to hear which stampers had promise, and the better equipment and room changes brought those hotter stampers to life, showing us which copies were worthy of the throne and which were merely pretenders.

The best copies get rid of that ridiculously smeared veiled quality that practically every copy you find suffers from. Clear and present mids and highs are essential to any copy worth playing.

An Amazing Bass Drum Awaits You

As I said above, that’s half the battle, and the other half is the bottom half of the spectrum, BASS and WHOMP. There is an amazing bass drum on this album that plays on selective tracks, most notably the song “Why,” and it will shake the foundation and knock your knick-knacks right off their shelves if you’ve got the woofers (and the room) to play it right. (I was using this record to demo my system in the mid-70s. I had a pair of Fulton Js and they could really pump out the low end this record needs.)

That bass drum tells you a lot about your deep bass reproduction, but we prize a little something called whomp here at Better Records every bit as much. It’s the weight and power you sense happening down below that translates into whomp factor. (This is the frequency area that screens and small dynamic drivers have the most trouble with. You need to be able to move lots of air under, say, 200 cycles to give the music a sense of real power down below. Few systems I’ve run into over the last thirty years can really pull it off.)

What The Best Sides Of Mystery to Me 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 1973
• 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.

“Why”

Speaking of the song “Why,” I have to confess that it’s my favorite Fleetwood Mac song of all time. Considering how many great songs this band has recorded over the decades, that’s really saying something. (“Need Your Love So Bad” off Pious Bird is right up there with it.)

Bob Weston, I learned today, did the arrangement. (I found his bio and copied it in the Review section. Check it out; what a great story!) His guitar work throughout the album, along with the wonderfully complex arrangements for the songs, make this music a powerful and engaging listening experience thirty years on.

This Hot Stamper pressing is the one that lets you hear it the way it was meant to be heard. Mid-fi quality systems are going to struggle with this one, but top quality systems are going to make this album a joy to hear, with breathy vocals, textured string arrangements, and the kind of rich, warm sound that is the hallmark of analog.

What We’re Listening For On Mystery to Me

• 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

Emerald Eyes 
Believe Me 
Just Crazy Love 
Hypnotized 
Forever 
Keep on Going

Side Two

The City 
Miles Away 
Somebody 
The Way I Feel 
For Your Love 
Why

AMG Review

At this point, the band was best-known as a British blues unit. Slowly but surely the band was becoming more acclimated with a production style that was reminiscent of the California pop sound. With the majority of the blues and psychedelic behind them, Mystery to Me finds Fleetwood Mac in a more ruminative vein. American guitarist Bob Welch established that path. Despite the all-encompassing ethos, Welch’s songwriting skills made him walk a fine line between the mystical and the silly. But luckily most everything works here.

The leadoff song, the laid-back “Emerald Eyes” matches Welch’s spacey lyrics and vocals as Christine McVie provides great backing help. The album’s best track, the gorgeous and lyrically strong “Hypnotized” has Welch matching an effortless, soothing croon with jazzy guitar riffs. Throughout Mystery to Me the amazing and almost telepathic drums and bass of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie give this effort more panache and muscle than was represented on this effort’s predecessor, Bare Trees. The best Bob Welch offering, “Keep on Going,” has a strong, soulful string arrangement and Christine McVie’s customary sensual and poised vocals … This effort is custom-made for those who like thoughtful offerings and is a valuable set in the scheme of the band.