Bee Gees
Trafalgar

*NOTE: Side two of disc two 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.

These Nearly White Hot Stamper pressings have top-quality sound that's often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers ("relative" meaning relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don't agree, please feel free to return the record for a full refund, no questions asked.

These vintage Atco pressings have 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, these are the records 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 Trafalgar 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 these records 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 pressings that sound as good as these two do.

Pop and Rock Shootouts

What are the sonic qualities by which a Pop or Rock record -- any Pop or Rock record -- should be judged?

Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.

When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.

Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.

Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing -- or your money back.

What We're Listening For On Trafalgar

• 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.

Our Famous 2-packs

Our 2-pack sets combine two copies of the same album, with at least a Super Hot Stamper sonic grade on the better of each "good" side, which simply means you have before you a pair of records that offers superb sound for the entire album.

Audiophiles are often surprised when they hear that an LP can sound amazing on one side and mediocre on the other, but since each side is pressed from different metalwork which has been aligned independently, and perhaps even cut by different mastering engineers from tapes of wildly differently quality, in our experience it happens all the time. In fact it's much more common for a record to earn different sonic grades for its two sides than it is to rate the same grade. That's just the way it goes in analog, where there's no way to know how a any given side of a record sounds until you play it, and, more importantly, in the world of sound everything is relative.

Since each of the copies in the 2-pack will have one good side and one noticeably weaker or at best more run-of-the-mill side, you'll be able to compare them on your own to hear just what it is that the Hot Stamper sides give you. This has the added benefit of helping you to improve your critical listening skills. We'll clearly mark which copy is Hot for each side, so if you don't want to bother with the other sides you certainly won't have to.

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 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

• How Can You Mend A Broken Heart
• Israel
• The Greatest Man In The World
• It's Just The Way
• Remembering
• Somebody Stop The Music

Side Two

• Trafalgar
• Don't Wanna Live Inside Myself
• When Do I
• Dearest
• Lion In Winter
• Walking Back To Waterloo

Rolling Stone Review

One of AM radio's most consistent hit single groups is back together again. Before their auspicious break-up two years ago, the Bee Gees produced some fine music -- recall "Holiday," "Words," or "Massachusetts," their three most perfunctorily titled and musically exciting records. Their tremulous vocals, vivid lyrics and brilliant arrangements of strings, horns, guitars and piano/organ, are heard again on their current AM hit, "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart," included on Trafalgar.

None of their earlier seductive, encircling harmony is gone and the arrangement, from the opening melodic piano intro to the closing blend of guitars, is letter-perfect. Add to this the lyrics, that wander from questioning title to statement ("No one said a word about the sorrow..."), to a questioning chorus and plea ("Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again...") and the result is a four-minute minor masterpiece. Like some of their earlier first-person musical forays, such as "I Started A Joke" and "I've Gotta Get A Message To You," it induces you to turn the volume up whenever it is played: the worldwide trademark of a good single.

Unlike the run-of-the-mill AM radio success stories, however, the Bee Gees have always come up with albums that, tune for tune, match their AM hits. This album is no exception -- virtually every cut has all the stylistic and fully-maturized singles potential as "How Can You Mend." From the elliptical "Israel" and "Trafalgar" (that possesses the same quasi-historical profundity as their earlier "New York Mining Disaster 1941") to the lush love tunes "Dearest" and "The Greatest Man In the World" to the melancholy "Somebody Stop the Music" and "Don't Wanna Live Inside Myself," the range is as wide as the versatile Gibbs brothers' songwriting abilities. Every tune, save one, on this album is well over the three-minute length -- and all display a melodic depth which is apt to surprise the skeptical.

In the end, any discussion of the style of the Bee Gees must return to their voices. They range from the wispy and melismatic to the swooping and tumultuous. On "Don't Wanna Live" things open with Robin singing in a quivering voice about wandering with "my right hand on the wheel" and of digging "for buried treasure," that shifts into a multi-vocal chorus which gains in intensity with each repetition -- falling off to cymbal crashes and supported by hesitant yet rising crescendoes of string embellishment -- the final few verses progress to find all three Bee Gees trading vocals in harmony. "Lion In Winter" takes a different tack, opening with a series of ominous bass-drum churnings, quickly joined by guitars and the usual restricted orchestral back-up to the gruff-voiced lead vocal, that is bolstered by soft background crooning as the stage is set lyrically: "You wanna make me big, man/ A star on the screen/ Some kind of James Brown or somethin' in between/ When I look for money/ You're soothin' me with charm/ I can't live on glory/ When you're bending both my arms..."

The mood builds frenetically after the first chorus, until, by the song's close, all three Gibbs are trading, screaming verses and parts of verses back and forth. And yet nothing is overdone. The Bee Gees and their producer, Robert Stigwood, have an unerring concept of where the musical brink of every song is and of how far they can stretch it, before they rein things in. Even the most tranquil of the album's tunes, "Dearest," which has all three Gibbs alternating the lyrics, each with a different modulation, betrays a vibrant sense of lyrical restraint that is totally unheralded in pop music -- except for, of course, their earlier epic "Words."

The Bee Gees are masters of the ballad form. I only hope they stick together now for many years to come -- AM radio needs their periodic transfusions and resultant albums of this quality are faultless. If you're in doubt as to whether to purchase the single or the album -- opt for the latter.

-Gary Von Tersch, 10/28/71