Roxy Music always did have a hook on me, and they’ve done it again with their upcoming 180g 2LP best-of collection. To wit: The Best Of Roxy Music is scheduled for release on September 2, 2022 via Virgin/UMe. It's the first time this official career-spanning Roxy Music best-of collection is being made available on wax. Even better, Best of has been half-speed mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.
Reviewing The Very Best of The Beach Boys: The Sounds of Summer, the massive new 60th Anniversary 180g 6LP Beach Boys box set retrospective from UMe/Capitol/Brother Records, has been a daunting yet fun challenge. That said, having its contents mixed and mastered by the band’s longtime engineer/archivist Mark Linett has enabled a remarkable continuity from track to track — no small task, given the diversity of music and technological differences in recording across a 60-year period.
This is some most welcome pressing news indeed. To wit: Fidelity Record Pressing (Fidelity) has just announced a state-of-the-art record-pressing facility is being constructed from the ground up in Oxnard (Ventura County), California, and it will launch in Q1 2023.
There’s a striking new reissue from Craft Recordings I’m sure many jazz fans and collectors are as excited about as I am: 1957’s The Poll Winners. This LP features three of the greatest jazz musicians of their time — Barney Kessel on guitar, backed by Shelly Manne on drums and Ray Brown on bass. How does Craft's QRP-pressed 180g reissue sound and compare to my original LP? In short, it is pretty fantastic. The new edition is much bigger-sounding in many ways, notably on the low end. Read on to find out more. . .
Extra, extra, read all about it: Jethro Tull's seminal March 1972 album Thick as a Brick is soon coming our way in a 50th anniversary 1LP half-speed master in its original newspaper packaging on July 29, via Parlophone.
It's demo time! Garth Leerer of Musical Surroundings will demonstrate the new DS Audio ES-001 Eccentricity Detection Stabilizer, which was introduced at the Munich High End show, at Quintessence Audio in Chicago this Saturday, June 25, from 1 to 6 pm (Central time).
I discovered New York’s Grizzly Bear in a most typical way, for me — over the in-store PA system at Amoeba Music here in San Francisco. When their in-store play got to the band’s then-big hit — “Two Weeks,” from their May 2009 album Veckatimest — I realized I had indeed previously heard the song’s distinctive, earworm-inducing, millennial-whoop-flavored signature hook. Soon enough, I started collecting the Grizzly Bear catalog on vinyl. While I’ve enjoyed my 180g Veckatimest reissue, I’ve long suspected there might be more depth tucked away in the recording. Thus, I was excited to learn the good folks at Vinyl Me Please were re-releasing Veckatimest in a half-speed mastered, 45rpm colored vinyl edition.
It’s a new era here at Analog Planet, starting today. You’ll get all the in-depth album reviews, detailed equipment reviews, news about upcoming vinyl releases and new gear announcements, as well as deep-dive, vinyl-centric interviews with musicians, producers, engineers, and manufacturers alike, just as you’ve come to know and expect. If you are part of the great vinyl resurgence, then this is your home, and we aim to make you very welcome.
(Review Explosion, curated by contributing editor Malachi Lui, is a guide to notable recent releases and reissues. It focuses on the previous few months' new releases for which we don't have time or energy to cover more extensively.)
Whether it's the 60s material controlled by ABKCO or the 1971-onward catalog owned by the band, the Rolling Stones' discography is among the world's most tirelessly and excessively reissued; every few years, there's yet another remastered, repressed, repackaged reissue of the same decades-old classics. After several mediocre reissues of the Rolling Stones Records albums (particularly the first and best two, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street), AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer found the half-speed mastered 2018 Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 19712016 box set (now available as individual albums) to best capture the original LPs' spirit, even if sometimes lacking in transparent analog sparkle. However, I thought another perspective on the Sticky Fingers and Exile reissues, also taking into account the Japanese flat transfer CDs, would be useful.