Glam Rock – Reviews and Commentaries

City Boy – Dispatches from the Front of the Digital Apocalypse

Records We Only Sell on Import Vinyl

I like this band so much I made the mistake of buying the CD of their first two albums. Talk about No Noise! The CD had nothing on it over 8K. It sounded like someone had thrown a blanket over my speakers. It’s so irritatingly dull I can hardly stand to play it even as background music.

It seems that many of the CDs I come across fall into two categories: either mastered with little care and too bright, or No Noised with a heavy hand until they are way too dull.

Oh, and a third one: compressed to death.

That seems to cover about 80-90% of the stuff I come across. Thank god for a good turntable. For those of you without one, may I express my deepest sympathy for your unbearable — to me, anyway — loss.

Side One

Dear Jean (I’m Nervous)
Bordello Night
Honeymooners
She’s Got Style
Bad For Business

Side Two

Young Men Gone West
I’ve Been Spun
One After Two
The Runaround
The Man Who Ate His Car
Millionaire

AMG  Review

On this album, the band focuses on the glam rock sound of the mid- to late-’70s (swirling guitars, high-pitched harmonies) on tracks like “Dear Jean (I’m Nervous)” and “The Man Who Ate His Car,” but City Boy maintains its soft rock sound with light keyboard touches and soft vocals on songs such as “One After Two” and the title track.

Young Men Gone West has an interesting, albeit uneven, mix of songs that doesn’t have the same quirky, eclectic feel of the first two albums — but it is a worthy effort nonetheless.

Ryko Released This Disgraceful Bowie Set in 1989

More of the Music of David Bowie

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Bowie

This is the sound of digital mastering at its worst. Best to give this one a pass if you are looking for audiophile quality sound.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some records in the Hall of Shame the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the all-too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.

When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good record, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much more inexcusable.

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On Ziggy, Avoid the Simply Vinyl and EMI 100 LPs

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

The Simply Vinyl version of Ziggy Stardust sounds just like the EMI that came out in the 90s. Neither are very good.

Flat, compressed and badly lacking in Tubey Magic, the right CD probably sounds better than either of these Heavy Vinyl pressings.

Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.

Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.

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T.Rex / Electric Warrior – Our Previous Shootout Was in 2019

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums from 1971 Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Yes, it takes us five or six years to find enough clean copies of this album with the right stampers to get a shootout going these days.

This early UK pressing is amazing, with the kind of grungy, Tubey Magical guitars that are guaranteed to blow your mind.

It’s beyond difficult to find quiet copies of this title (same goes for The Slider), let alone those with this kind of sound, so any fan of Mr Bolan should snap this one up and be quick about it.

This pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it. (more…)

Pin-Ups – Some of His Favourite Songs

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

Bowie, writing in his own hand, describes Pin-Ups this way:

These songs are among my favourites from the “64–67” period of London.

Most of the groups were playing the Ricky-Tick (was it a ‘y’ or an ‘i’?) – Scene club circuit (Marquee, eel pie island la-la).

Some are still with us.

Pretty Things, Them, Yardbirds, Syd’s Pink Floyd, Mojos, Who, Easybeats, Merseys, The Kinks.

Love-on ya!

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Of Course This Is One of the Greatest Rock Albums of All Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

Is this one of the greatest rock albums of all time?

Unquestionably. It’s the pinnacle of glam rock. Every track is superb; not a moment is less than stellar from beginning to end.

Is it Bowie’s masterpiece?

Absolutely. No other Bowie record ranks higher in my book.

Is it amazingly well recorded?

You better believe it. This is not just Bowie’s masterpiece; it’s Ken Scott‘s as well. For BIG, BOLD, wall to wall, floor to ceiling sound, look no further. The recording is swimming in rich, sweet TUBEY MAGIC. This is a sound we cannot get enough of here at Better Records.

The guitars may not sound “real,” they way they actually do in real life, but they sure sound grungy and good.

Notes from a Recent Shootout

Just drop the needle on any song. Guaranteed you will never hear that song sound better. The mastering is beyond perfection. There’s really no “mastering” to listen for — all you’re really aware of is the music flowing from the speakers, freed from all the limitations that you’ve learned to accept.

There’s no need to go track by track trying to explain why this copy is the Ultimate Ziggy. One drop of the needle will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know. All doubts will be erased within moments. We played this copy against our best other pressings and again and again, no matter what track we played, the sound here was superior.

The Tubey Magic Top Ten

You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amount of Tubey Magic that exists on this recording. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Ziggy Stardust.

Big Production Tubey Magical British Rock & Roll just doesn’t get any better.

Ranked strictly in terms of Tubey Magic, I would have to put this album on our list of Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time, right up there with, in no particular order:

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