1979

Peter Frampton / Where I Should Be – A Personal Favorite

The Music of Peter Frampton Available Now

Peter Frampton Albums We’ve Reviewed

One of my personal Records to Die For. This album presents a more mature Peter Frampton doing some of the most consistently inspired material of his career, including R&B covers like May I Baby and You Don’t Know Like I Know, with horn charts that really cook — in other words, a great album.

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing recordings can bring to your life.

Where I Should Be is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should.

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AC/DC – Highway To Hell

  • Superb sound for Bon Scott’s final outing with the band, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades throughout this vintage copy (only the second to hit the site in years)
  • These sides have plenty going on down low, real meat on the bones, and all the life, energy and richness that’s missing from the average copy
  • Forget the dubby domestic pressings, forget the later imports and other reissues, only the right UK pressings have the potential to sound the way this copy does
  • Angus Young’s guitar jumps out of the speakers here like almost no other copy we played in our recent shootout
  • 5 stars: “Filtered through Mutt‘s mixing board, AC/DC has never sounded so enormous, and they’ve never had such great songs, and they had never delivered an album as singularly bone-crunching or classic as this until now.”

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Art Pepper – Landscape

More of the Music of Art Pepper

  • You’ll find excellent Double Plus (A++) grades, or close to them, on this 1979 Art Pepper classic 
  • One of the few copies of Landscape to hit the site in a very long time – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • George Cables, Art’s longtime collaborator on piano, is nothing less than amazing on this record – this is the best I’ve ever heard him play
  • 4 1/2 Stars: “Altoist Art Pepper was in inspired form during this Tokyo concert. This particular LP features Pepper on memorable versions of “True Blues,” “Sometime” (during which Pepper switches to clarinet), “Landscape” and “Over the Rainbow.” Pepper’s intensity and go-for-broke style are exhilarating throughout.”

Recorded in Japan in 1979, this is a really interesting album for Art Pepper. If you know much about his body of work, you know there are a lot of stinkers in the Art Pepper catalog from this era. Acoustic Sounds released a few of them on 180 gram as a matter of fact, with their notoriously bad sound (notorious around these parts anyway). What a waste of good vinyl. (more…)