Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
This early pressing of EKTIN IS an amazing find, the kind of record the thrillseekers who work here at Better Records live for.
As I was reading the notes, I saw a word there that I had never associated with the sound of the album: “silky.” Since when does Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere have silky vocals?
But there it was, describing the first track on side one (Cinnamon Girl) as well as both the third track on side two (Cowgirl in the Sand) and track one (Losing End (When You’re On)).
We don’t have a tag for silky sound. About the closest we could come would be “glossy sound,” the kind of sound you might find on a Toto album, or Gauch0, or Mirage, or Gorilla, or Abbey Road. Starting in the mid-70s, anything produced by Ted Templeman and engineered by Donn Landee would be sure to have glossy sound.
But this album is from 1969. Silky vocals are not easy to find on recordings from that year, Abbey Road being the obvious exception.
And they’re not easy to find on the vast majority of copies we have played over the years. I doubt that the other copies in the shootout have notes mentioning silky vocals.
But if your equipment is good enough, and you know how to clean your records right, and you dial in your setup to a T, with a big enough stack of copies you may be able to find an Everybody Knows… with silky vocals. Twenty years ago I wrote a commentary about diminishing returns in audio being a myth. Now, finding this amazing pressing of Everybody Knows, is just one more piece of evidence to support just how precient that idea was.
Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?