Fleetwood Mac
The Pious Bird of Good Omen

If you’re a fan of Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac -- and who in his right mind wouldn’t be? -- then you can’t go wrong with this record. "Need Your Love So Bad," "Albratross" and "Black Magic Woman" are all featured here.

Speaking of "Black Magic Woman," the better copies of Pious Bird reproduce the bass-heavy drumming on that track much better than the Greatest Hits album we also recommend. It’s very unlikely that you can find better sound for that classic than right here on this very copy.

This vintage Blue Horizon import 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 The Pious Bird of Good Omen 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 1969
• 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.

Repeat

I have the CD of Pious Bird in my car and let me tell you I’m more than happy to let it repeat for days at a time. I love the early bluesy Mac on this album, a group that’s about as far from the players on Rumours as you can imagine.

(Actually that’s not true; two fifths of the Mac, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, anchor both eras of the band, but the music made pre-1969 compared to that from 1975 onwards couldn’t be more different.)

Pious Bird is without a doubt the best introduction to the early iteration of Fleetwood Mac. It’s an album that belongs in any right thinking audiophile’s collection.

What We're Listening For On The Pious Bird of Good Omen

• 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.

The Players

• Peter Green – vocals, guitar, harmonica (left in 1970 after Then Play On)
• Jeremy Spencer – vocals, slide guitar (left in 1971 after Kiln House)
• Danny Kirwan – vocals, electric guitar (left in 1972 after Bare Trees )
• John McVie – bass guitar (still rockin’)
• Mick Fleetwood – drums (still rockin’)

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

• Need Your Love So Bad
• Coming Home
• Rambling Pony
• The Big Boat
• I Believe My Time Ain’t Long
• The Sun Is Shining

Side Two

• Albatross
• Black Magic Woman
• Just the Blues
• Jigsaw Puzzle Blues
• Looking for Somebody
• Stop Messin’ Round

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

With songs taken from Fleetwood Mac and Mr. Wonderful, Pious Bird of Good Omen serves as a worthy 12-track compilation of the band's early Peter Green days.

The album itself was released by Blue Horizon after the group's contract with them had expired, making it one of the best routes in which to explore their mingling of Chicago and British blues. "Albatross," "Black Magic Woman," and "I Believe My Time Ain't Long" are timeless Fleetwood Mac standards, representing some of the band's best pre-Rumours work. Anyone who isn't familiar with Fleetwood Mac's origins should use Pious Bird of Good Omen as a starting point in investigating the first wave of the band, which will almost certainly lead to further interests into albums such as English Rose, Then Play On, and Kiln House, and then into later albums like Bare Trees and Penguin, which reveal subtle yet effective changes in the band's blues sound.

But even aside from its purpose as a collection, Pious Bird of Good Omen makes for a terrific laid-back stroll through some of the best British blues music ever made.