The B-52s / Wild Planet

More New Wave Rock

  • Wild Planet returns to the site for the first time in years, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout this vintage Warner Bros. pressing – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is lively, punchy, and powerful – with all due respect, it should murder whatever copies you may have
  • Both of these sides are bigger and richer than practically all of what we played, and they also have more vocal presence and hard-rockin’ energy, two qualities that we found to be key to the best sounding pressings
  • 4 1/2 stars: “While Wild Planet is not the rarefied wonder their first platter is, it’s still darn good. The best songs here are ‘Private Idaho,’ a wonderfully jittery number that employs a variant on the famous melodic snippet from the Twilight Zone theme music, and ‘Devil in My Car,’ a delightfully loopy hoot that lays the craziness on very thickly.”

This recording, like the band’s first album, 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 — with a difference.

Like the above mentioned 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.

But…

It’s rare for those albums to sound as PUNCHY and LIVELY as the best copies of Wild Planet do. The B-52’s first album has that sound in spades. The producers and engineers apparently knew a good thing when they found it and succeeded in leaving well enough alone here (at least on the better copies; the mediocre copies are always going to be missing some of the life of the music).

Chris Blackwell of Island Records produced the album, taking the band down to Nassau to record it, with one of our favorite knob-twirlers, none other than Rhett Davies, on board as engineer.

The result is one of the Best Sounding Albums of 1980.

Rich, smooth, natural sound in the 80s? Not many have managed to pull it off, but these guys did.

What The Best Sides Of Wild Planet 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 even as late as 1980
  • 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 Wild Planet

  • 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.

More Of What To Listen For

A big, solid, punchy kick drum. It’s prominent in the mix on the best copies and really drives the music.

Side One

Party Out Of Bounds 
Dirty Back Road 
Runnin’ Around 
Give Me Back My Man 
Private Idaho

Side Two

Devil In My Car 
Quiche Lorraine 
Strobe Light 
53 Miles West Of Venus

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

Conventional wisdom has it that all the B-52’s’ subsequent releases are highly inferior to their debut. While Wild Planet is not the rarefied wonder their first platter is, it’s still darn good.

The songs here are generally faster, tighter, and punchier than previously, though production values are not as wonderfully quirky and detailed; fewer songs here are as over-the-top crazy as the first album’s “Rock Lobster” or “52 Girls.” These formless selections continue to exhibit a cunning mix of girl group, garage band, surf, and television theme song influences, all propelled along by an itchy dance beat.

“Give Me Back My Man” allows Cindy Wilson a unique opportunity to croon a broad, expressive melodic line. Fred Schneider parades his inimitably nervous vocals on chucklesome ditties like “Quiche Lorraine” and “Strobe Light.”

The best songs here are “Private Idaho,” a wonderfully jittery number that employs a variant on the famous melodic snippet from the Twilight Zone theme music, and “Devil in My Car,” a delightfully loopy hoot that lays the craziness on very thickly.

Performances and sound quality are fine. This album is well worth hearing and recommended.

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