Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now
A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.
We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.
We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.
(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)
But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:
Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.
What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.
- Nasal, upper midrange boost
- No real space
- Hard and smeary
- Sizzly rain intro
- Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way