The Faces
A Nod Is As Good As A Wink

*NOTE: This record was not noisy enough to rate our M-- to EX++ grade, but it's not quite up to our standards for Mint Minus Minus either. If you're looking for quiet vinyl, this is probably not the best copy for you.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG.

If you like your hard rock dirty and bluesy, you can’t do much better than this album! Most copies just don't do it justice, but this one really hits the nail on the head. For this kind of music, you just can't do much better than these guys. The Stones at their best may have had them beat, but it's a photo finish to say the least. With Glyn Johns at the console, the Faces behind the instruments, and the Better Records Hot Stamper seal of approval on this copy, you can be sure that this is one rockin' record. And make sure you turn it up good and loud the way The Faces intended.

This vintage Green Label pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of A Nod Is As Good As A Wink 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 1971
• 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.

Glyn Johns At The Helm

This album was produced by one of our very favorite engineers around here, Mr. Glyn Johns, the man behind tons of Better Records faves -- Sticky Fingers, The Eagles' 1st, Joan Armatrading's self-titled, Who's Next, and many, many more.

But no Faces album -- Glyn Johns-produced or not -- will ever have Demo Disc sound. It's just not what the band was going for. The proper sound for a band like this is raw and rockin'. Any phony EQ or overproduction would really make a mess of what the band does here, which put simply is kickin' out the jams. It would be fair to call these guys a bar band, but they're the best darn bar band I've ever heard!

The better Faces pressings have amazing live-in-the-studio sound that completely conveys the power of one of the hardest rockin' bands of all time. What more can you ask for?

What We're Listening For On A Nod Is As Good As A Wink

• 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.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus 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 later 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 originals.

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

• Miss Judy's Farm
• You're So Rude
• Love Lives Here
• Last Orders Please
• Stay With Me

Side Two

• Debris
• Memphis
• Too Bad
• That's All You Need

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

The Faces' third album, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink...to a Blind Horse, finally gave the group their long-awaited hit single in "Stay with Me," helping send the album into the Billboard Top Ten...

[It's] the tightest record the band ever made. Granted that may be a relative term, since sloppiness is at the heart of the band, but this doesn't feel cobbled together (which the otherwise excellent Long Player did) and it serves up tremendous song after tremendous song, starting with the mean, propulsive "Miss Judy's Farm" and ending with the rampaging good times of "That's All You Need."

In between, Ronnie Lane serves up dirty jokes (the exquisitely funny "You're So Rude") and heartbreaking ballads (the absolutely beautiful "Debris"), the band reworks a classic as their own (Chuck Berry's "Memphis") and generally serves up a nonstop party. There are few records that feel like a never-ending party like A Nod — the slow moments are for slow dancing, and as soon as it's over, it's hard not to want to do it all over again.

It's another classic — and when you consider that the band also had Long Player to their credit and had their hands all over Every Picture in 1971, it's hard to imagine another band or singer having a year more extraordinary as this.