More of the Music of ZZ Top
Reviews and Commentaries for Rhino Records
Sonic Grade: C
Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP. The results were mixed; most of our originals pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.
We shelved the project for another day. In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.
Fast forward and now it’s 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.
How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play it against?
Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.
But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.
The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.
I won’t say the new pressing is boring. Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)