Elton John
Caribou

Not the most consistent of Elton’s albums in the 70s, but the best tracks -- "Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me" and "The Bitch Is Back" spring to mind -- are killer, right up there with the best work the man was doing at the time.

There’s a good reason you’ve practically never seen this album for sale on our site. In fact, there are quite a number of good reasons.

The first one is bad vinyl -- most DJM pressings of Caribou are just too noisy to sell. They can look perfectly mint and play noisy as hell; it’s not abuse, it’s bad vinyl. (Empty Sky is the same way; out and out bad vinyl, full of noise, grit and grain.)

The second problem is bad sound. Whether it’s bad mastering or bad vinyl incapable of holding onto good mastering, no one can say. Since so many copies were pressed of this monster Number One album (topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic), perhaps they pressed a few too many after the stampers were worn out.

Or pulled too many stampers off the mother.

Or made too many stampers from the father.

Or used crap vinyl right from the start.

Of course there’s not an iota of evidence to back up any of these assertions, but I just thought I would throw it out there as a topic for speculation. (Have you noticed how much audiophiles and audiophile reviewers love to talk about things that they have no empirical evidence for one way or the other? Very little of that sort of thing can be found on our site. We like to stick to the sound of the records we’ve played and leave most of the “reasoning” about the sound to others.)

What The Best Sides Of Caribou Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1974
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We're Listening For On Caribou

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

More of What to Listen For – Dynamic Choruses

The choruses on "I’ve Seen the Saucers," the leadoff track on side two, get shockingly big and loud like practically no other Elton John record we know. Watch your levels!

Speaking of dynamics, listen to how quiet the intro to "Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me" is. We love the dynamic buildup of the song, but it also unfortunately means that the beginning of the track will have audible surface issues until the volume gets loud enough to mask them.

The Piano

The sound of the piano on the best copies is right on the money. This is a critical element of the recording on any of Elton’s albums. When the piano is wrong -- thin, or lost in the mix because of a lack of transparency, or missing harmonics because of a rolled off top end; whatever the reason, if that centerpiece instrument goes south, the rest of the sound, not to mention the music, falls apart right along with it.

British Only

Not surprisingly, the domestic versions of the album are made from dub tapes and sound like it. Don’t waste your money.

The Classic Lineup

• Elton John – vocals, piano
• Davey Johnstone – acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin
• Dee Murray – bass guitar, phased Pignose bass
• Nigel Olsson – drums
• Ray Cooper – tambourine, congas, whistle, vibes, snare, castanets, watergong, bells

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• The Bitch Is Back
• Pinky
• Grimsby
• Dixie Lily
• Solar Prestige a Gammon
• You’re So Static

Side Two

• I’ve Seen the Saucers
• Stinker
• Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me
• Ticking