More of The Moody Blues
Reviews and Commentaries for The Moody Blues
- Seventh Sojourn is back on the site for only the second time in thirteen months, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides of this original Threshold pressing
- Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
- Forget the dubby domestic pressings and whatever crappy Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – the UK LPs are the only way to fly
- Great sound isn’t easy to come by for the Moody Blues – it takes a lot of copies to find sound as good as this
- The Moodies’ biggest success on the American charts – “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock & Roll Band)” is the killer hit from the album
- Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
This pressing is excellent on both sides. It has lovely vocals — sweet and breathy — so critical to the Moodies sound. It’s also spacious and energetic, two qualities that the average copy simply has very little of. To top it all off, this copy rocks about as much as this album, in our experience, CAN rock. Most pressings are shockingly compressed, recessed and murky.
And the domestic copies are made from dubs; they’re brighter but grainy and transistory as hell. They convey NONE of the Moodies magic.
Moody Blues records have a marked tendency to sound somewhat murky and muddy; that’s obviously the sound these guys were going for because you hear it on every album they released.
Compound their “sound” with bad mastering, bad pressing or bad vinyl — not to mention vinyl that hasn’t been cleaned properly — and you will find yourself trying to wade through an impassable sonic swamp. With anything but a Hot Stamper the result is going to be sound so fat, thick, and opaque that it will confound any attempt you might make to hear into it. (more…)