Album Reviews

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Album Reviews
The Searchers Have Been Found! And Now on 180g Vinyl!!!!!!
Michael Fremer  |  Apr 01, 2006  |  0 comments

Note: The SACD review appeared here May of 2004. A new LP, mastered by Steve Hoffman has just been issued. Hoffman used the original 15ips Pye stereo master mixes played back on a vintage (1964)vacuum tubed Ampex MX-35. Enjoy!

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Album Reviews
The Shins Wince. Do We Blink?
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 01, 2008  |  0 comments

Head Shin James Mercer is one of those artists like James Taylor who arrived whole and utterly original, though you can occasionally hear Morrissey channeling through his high-pitched vocals and more significantly, his melodic constructs.

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Album Reviews
The Stooges Live At Goose Lake  Is An Interesting Albeit Inessential Historical Document
Malachi Lui  |  Oct 30, 2020  |  4 comments
Shortly after their 1970 sophomore album Fun House’s release, Detroit proto-punk legends the Stooges played the Goose Lake Festival in Jackson, Michigan, 80 miles west of Detroit. Intended to be a Midwest Woodstock of sorts, with acts like the Small Faces, Jethro Tull, and Chicago (among many more) the 3-day festival drew 200,000 attendees over a stifling weekend. The environment became tense; in this LP’s liner notes, Jaan Uhelszki writes of 500 people attending the Open City LSD bad trip rescue tent, with countless others also being stoned on PCP masquerading as cocaine. Still, the festival itself was well-organized. Bands played on a rotating stage, were limited to 45-minute sets without exception, and a six-foot fence and trench blocked performer/crowd interaction.

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Album ReviewsDiscographiesFeatures
The Top 15 Punk Albums!
Willie Luncheonette  |  Jan 08, 2022  |  31 comments
Punk rock is a subgenre of rock and roll with roots in garage rock, but it's generally faster and more aggressive than garage. Punk was a rebellion against the hippie culture's idealism and appearance. The flower children’s righteous idea of making the world a better place was met with the stark reality of the punks' world in disarray. New York, the birthplace of punk, was almost bankrupt in the early 70's and when the Sex Pistols appeared in England, unemployment was severe with well over a million people out of work. Crime and drugs were rampant in NYC; parks were littered with used syringes. England incurred inflation, oil shortages and strikes. So bell bottoms were out, replaced by tight pants and those beautiful long locks were gone, replaced by hair cut short, and even cut off as skinhead culture emerged.

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Album Reviews
The Tuneful Spoonful's Best on 180 Gram Vinyl
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 01, 2003  |  1 comments

One of the most underrated of all ‘60s bands, the puppy-dog earnest The Lovin’ Spoonful sounds better and better as the 20th Century fades from view. This was their 3rd album, issued late in 1966 and the first containing all originals, many of which are stamped indelibly into the brains of Baby Boomers. The band combined folk, rock, jugband, country and of course, the influence of The Beatles.

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Album Reviews
The Turtles 45rpm Box Set: "Happy Un-Together"?
Michael Fremer  |  Nov 03, 2014  |  7 comments
Either you get The Turtles (originally a dance band called The Crossfires) or you don't. Either you think of them as pop schlockmeisters or you see them as they really were: an adventurous, eclectic and sometimes deep post-Beatles psych/rock band.
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Album Reviews
The Two New* Rolling Stones Box Sets: Deal or No Deal? Part I
Michael Fremer  |  Aug 10, 2013  |  9 comments
As you know, digital is "perfect", so it shall remain a mystery why Part 1 of the Rolling Stones Box Set feature originally published on musicangle.com in 2011 got lost in the conversion to analogplanet.com. Part II made it. The omission was discovered recently when a reader asked about the recent ABKCO individual clear vinyl reissues. He was told to read the two part story because according to ABKCO, the new clear vinyl reissues were sourced from the files that produced the box set's excellent results, but of course Part 1 was nowhere to be found on the site. So belatedly, here it is.-Ed.
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AAA VinylAlbum Reviews
The White Stripes’ Heavy-Hitting 2003 Album Elephant Delivers Hard-Rock Power and Unbridled Glory in Its New, Mightily Impressive AAA 200g 2LP 45rpm UHQR Analogue Productions Edition
Mark Smotroff  |  Dec 28, 2023  |  5 comments

The inherent quality of Jack White’s songwriting and production skills ultimately elevated The White Stripes’ much-celebrated April 2003 LP Elephant to the next level — and Analogue Productions’ new AAA 200g 45rpm 2LP version takes it even higher. Read Mark Smotroff’s review to see why Elephant sets yet another benchmark in the ever-expanding UHQR series. . .

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Album Reviews
The Who's Rare UK Brunswick Debut Reissued in Glorious 200g Mono by Classic Records
Michael Fremer  |  Sep 01, 2005  |  0 comments

American Decca's inept handling of The Who (and to a lesser degree the band's inability to produce frothy pop fare) prevented The Who from breaking in the Unites States until Tommy --and even then it was the pure force of the music and the nascent FM “underground radio” scene that spelled success, with little help from the label.

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AAA VinylAlbum Reviews
The Wind of Excellence Permeates All Aspects of Peter Frampton’s All-Analog Frampton@50: In the Studio 1972-1975 180g 3LP Collection From Intervention Records — a.k.a., How Vinyl Box Sets Should Be Done
Mike Mettler  |  Jul 26, 2023  |  29 comments

Just how good is Peter Frampton’s excellent new Frampton@50: In the Studio 1972-1975 180g 3LP box set from Intervention Records? The following three numbers tell the tale in shorthand: 100, 50, and 75. Find out what they mean and why this all-analog vinyl collection of three key entries from Frampton’s early solo career sets new standards for box set presentation by reading AP editor Mike Mettler’s in-depth review. . .

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Album Reviews
The Wonderful Sounds of Female Vocals
Michael Fremer  |  Aug 16, 2018  |  19 comments
Humungous conflict of interest alert! I wrote this compilation’s liner notes and created the 22 song track order. Chad Kassem selected the female artists and the individual tracks sourced from albums he’d previously licensed and released on vinyl, SACD and high resolution download (maybe even R2R tape).

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Album Reviews
The Wonderful Sounds of Male Vocals
Michael Fremer  |  Oct 27, 2020  |  12 comments
Analogue Productions returns with another in its very popular “Wonderful Sounds” series that began with a Christmas compilation and followed up in 2018 with a female vocalist assemblage.

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Album Reviews
Thelonious Monk Plays Just For You
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 06, 2012  |  11 comments
You can tell me yours, but my first encounter with Thelonious Monk was the 1963 Columbia album Criss-Cross(CS 8838). I'd given up on rock'n'roll, which had become all Fabian and Frankie Avalon-ed out and new musical adventures of a more adult nature were in order for this high-schooler.

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Album Reviews
Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings (Mastering Info Update)
Michael Fremer  |  Jun 14, 2017  |  8 comments
In his annotation for Riverside’s 1966 reissue of the 1961 Jazzland original single LP release Monk & Coltrane (RS 390) critic Ira Gitler (who is credited for inventing the expression “sheets of sound” to describe the note cluster technique Coltrane devised during his short time playing with Monk) writes “Coltrane’s talent, set in such a fertile environment, bloomed like a hibiscus.”

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Album Reviews
There's Musical Gold in Silver Jews' Latest
Brent Raynor  |  Feb 01, 2006  |  0 comments

Maybe it's the fact that it's early Saturday morning and I've just woken up on the couch with an endless sea of empty beer bottles in front of me on the coffee table that's got me to thinking. I mean, it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time: drink as many beers as I possibly could in one night while listening to Tanglewood Numbers repeatedly in an attempt to get into the notoriously alcohol-soaked mind space of leader David Berman. After all, I'm always up for a scientifically based experiment, and considering I was using one of the great thinkers of our time, Neil Young, as my model, I figured nothing could go wrong.

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