Singer / Songwriter – Reviews and Commentaries

Our “Hard” Work in 2005 Continues to Pay Dividends

More of the Music of Neil Young

Below you will find our first Hot Stamper listing for Neil’s masterpiece from 1970.

This is an album we admit to being obsessed with. We love the album and we hope you do too. If you have some time on your hands — maybe a bit too much time on your hands — please feel free to check out our commentaries.

Folks, your Hot Stamper collection is just not complete without a knockout copy of After The Gold Rush; that’s why we’ve named it a Better Records All Time Top 100 title. We built our reputation on finding records that sound like this, because who else can find a copy of this album that delivers so much magic? When you drop the needle on any track on side two, you’ll know exactly why we are able to charge these kind of prices for a record like this — because on the right system, it’ll sound like a million bucks! (more…)

Another Passenger – A Personal Favorite

More of the Music of Carly Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Carly Simon

This is my personal favorite of all of Carly’s albums. In terms of singing and songwriting it’s her most consistent, highest quality work. Nothing too heavy, just well crafted and enjoyable Singer Songwriter pop. If you like the kind of albums Paul Simon used to make before Graceland, or middle period James Taylor, you should find much to like here.

Another Passenger checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

Some of her albums can be badly overproduced, with monstrously reverberating drum thwacks courtesy of Richard Perry and his minions. Thankfully this is not one of them, so it tends to wear well over time. I can personally attest to that fact because I used to have a tape of the album in my car that I’d be willing to bet I’ve heard more than two hundred times (!)

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Is Mud Slide Slim in a Booth or Isn’t He?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

One thing we noticed this time around was that for some tracks James’ vocals are recorded in a booth and for others they are not. Listen to the first track — there is no ambience, no room around his voice whatsoever. He’s in a padded booth, and they sure padded the hell out of it. Now play Long Ago and Far Away on side two. No booth! Lots of studio space around the vocal. MUCH more natural acoustic.

We don’t have the luxury of playing every track on both sides for these shootouts. We pick two or three songs that have specific qualities we know to look for and play them on every copy. (Shootouts like this almost always involve at least a dozen pressings, sometimes more, and it’s impossible to keep them all straight with more copies than that.)

So here’s a potentially fun exercise — assuming you find this sort of thing fun — that we thought about doing but just don’t have the time to devote to at present, with so many other shootouts waiting in the wings. Take your own copy, assuming you have at least a decent one, and play each track listening for only one thing: does James sound like he is in a booth, or does he sound like he is in an open space in the studio? If you have the typical original WB pressing you will probably not be able to get very far and will be quickly tempted to give up, the frustration of a murky midrange being more than most of us audiophiles can bear.

But maybe you have a good copy; the possibility certainly exists. And if you find much success with this exercise we encourage you to drop us a line, we will be more than happy to print it.

Colors of the Day – DCC Discussed

A classic case of live and learn, maybe. Previously we had written:

Superb sonics. Judy has never sounded better. Not a big seller for DCC but it should have been. Those sweet acoustic guitars are hard to beat. No modern recording has sounded like this for over twenty years, so if you’ve forgotten what a real acoustic guitar sounds like, buy this record and get reacquainted with that sound. Tons of breath of life, superb production and mastering so you can clearly hear her hitting those flat notes (!), and some of the best sounding echo ever recorded.

UPDATE 2007

Addendum to the above comments, posted 11/07

I wrote the above review many many years ago. As you may have read countless times on the site by now, it is my opinion that all such dated judgments are suspect. The major revolutions in vinyl playback that have occurred over the last dozen years have turned many of these old comments on their heads.

Hot Stamper pressings again and again have revealed magic in the mass-produced copies that is simply nowhere to be found in their audiophile counterparts.

Whether this is true for this particular title I can honestly say I don’t know.  We are going to play some copies of the album and will report our findings down the road, so Judy Collins fans, stay tuned.

Tom Waits / Heartattack and Vine in 2020

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tom Waits

Surprisingly, it took us until 2025 to do our first real shootout for this album. Here is what we had written in 2020 before then.

One of the better copies of Heartattack and Vine we’ve ever heard! We enjoy listening to the music of Tom Waits here because the music and sound can be excellent. His albums are certainly a nice change of pace from the stuff that’s usually on our table. We had quite a few copies of this one and none of the other ones were in a league with this bad boy. The sound is very rich and full with incredible immediacy to the vocals. You just couldn’t get the vocals to sound any better than they do on this copy.

This obviously ain’t your everyday Classic Rock album — Waits’ music is an acquired taste and certainly not for everyone. Those of you who appreciate Randy Newman are likely to get a lot out of this one.

Side One

Heartattack and Vine
In Shades
Saving All My Love for You
Downtown
Jersey Girl

Side Two

‘Til the Money Runs Out
On the Nickel
Mr. Siegal
Ruby’s Arms

AMG  Review

Heartattack and Vine, Tom Waits’ first album in two years and his last of seven for Asylum Records, is a transitional album, with tracks like the rhythm-heavy title song and “‘Til the Money Runs Out” foreshadowing the sonic experiments of the Island albums, while piano-with-orchestra tracks like “Saving All My Love for You” and “On the Nickel” (written as a motion-picture title tune) hark back to Waits’ Randy Newman-influenced early days. It is just as well that Waits never entirely gave up on the ballad material.

For Our Sweet Baby James Shootout in 2008 We Had to Work Through 67 Copies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

UPDATE 2020

As you may have guessed from the title of this review, it was written in 2008, fairly early in our shootout history. We had been buying Sweet Baby James for decades, and by 2008 it was time to dive in to this classic from 1970, a landmark recording that single-handedly created a new genre, the singer songwriter album.

It took three days, sixty seven copies, and multiple rounds, but SWEET BABY JAMES HOT STAMPERS ARE HERE.

Both sides of this bad boy are DEMO QUALITY and ABSOLUTELY STUNNING. Add in the fact that the vinyl is unusually quiet and you’ve got one heck of a copy here.

It ain’t easy to find copies of this album with great sound on both sides and reasonably quiet surfaces — that’s why you haven’t seen more than one Hot copy hit the site since February 08. 

This was one of the most massive shootouts in Better Records history.

We started out with SIXTY SEVEN copies. After weeding out the copies with obvious condition problems and known second-rate stampers, we were left with three dozen copies to audition.

We battled through condition problems, bad stereo days [a thing of the past nowadays, thank god], and listener fatigue to end up with a select number of exceptional copies. 

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For The Roses – Our Shootout Winner from 2008

OFF THE CHARTS breathiness, delicacy, warmth and sweetness, and that’s just Joni’s voice. The sound of the ensemble throughout is amazingly natural, the recording so spacious. You may have noticed that there were no Joni records on our Top 100 List, but after hearing this wonderful LP on the original white label Asylum pressing we knew we had to add it to that very special list. [Since replaced by other titles.]

Let’s face it, we love Blue but it has its share of problems, as does Ladies of the Canyon. Court and Spark is up at the top up the list as well, but Roses seems to have the most folky recording purity. Perhaps the engineers saw this as an opportunity to address the problems with Blue on this, the followup. By the time she had fully adopted her new jazzy style with the album after this one, Court — with the multi-tracking that that music required — some of the recording quality got lost in the quest for slicker production values.

AGAIG on Side One

This copy has it all: the kind of transparency that allows you to see into the soundfield like never before; presence and immediacy in Joni’s breathy, emotional vocals; air and ambience around all the instruments; and tubey magical guitars. (Listen especially to the acoustic guitar on Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire. That’s the sound we love here at Better Records! Even if your system is all transistor (ouch), that guitar will sound like you own the most tubey magical equipment in the world.)

This copy also had REAL ENERGY and dynamics not found on the typical pressing. With dynamics AND the warmth and richness found here, we’re pretty sure this copy can’t be beat on side one. (more…)

Our Hot Stamper of Rickie Lee Jones from Way Back in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones Available Now

We know many of you have been eagerly awaiting Hot Stamper copies of this record, a longtime audiophile favorite and Demo Disc par excellence, but frankly, we’re always a bit hesitant (some might say afraid, but I prefer hesitant, thank you very much) to take it on.

So many copies of this album sound so bad — grainy, compressed and cardboardy are the first three adjectives that spring to mind. 

And so many are noisy, having been pressed on the reground dreck that passed for new vinyl in the late ’70s. Slogging through dozens of noisy, grainy sounding copies was not going to be a day at the beach. We like the music, but could it possibly be worth it? Would the ends justify the means?

Ah, but this album was such a smash last time around we felt we owed it to our loyal following to do it again, to dig them up a copy of RLJ with the kind of AMAZING sound we knew the album could have. The late 70s produced some knockout pop records; two of the best are Rumours and Rickie Lee Jones. It was time. We rolled up our sleeves and started cleaning.

The lifting was heavy right from the start. For one thing the stamper numbers are all over the map. The stampers we used to like for this album years ago turned out to be very good, but far from the best.

We basically found ourselves starting from scratch, with no choice but to throw all the old notes out the window and begin the shootout again with open minds and fresh ears.

Designed To Pop Out Of Your Speakers

On the best of the Hot Stamper copies, it becomes abundantly clear just how well the string bass was recorded — assuming you like the close-miked, maximum-presence quality they were after. You hear all the fingering, the wood of the body resonating — all the stuff you could never hear live unless you were ten feet from the guy.

Natural it’s not, but natural is not what most hit records are all about anyway.

Let’s face it: Everything on this record is designed to “pop” out of the speakers, and everything does. The important thing is that the bass sounds just as good as everything else while still staying in correct proportion to the rest of the music.

This is not an easy thing to do. Many recordings have qualities that draw attention to themselves at the expense of the overall presentation. The mix will have an “unbalanced” quality, with some elements coming on too strong and some getting lost.

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What to Listen For on Carly Simon’s Debut

More of the Music of Carly Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Carly Simon

Too many copies we played erred on the hi-fi-ish side, with not enough warmth. The copies that sound clean and clear just didn’t do much for us. They weren’t able to convey the intimacy and emotion of the music.

I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience playing CDs of some of your old favorites. You keep wondering why you liked the music in the first place.

Don’t blame the music. Blame those crappy CDs.  (more…)