Burt Bacharach
Make It Easy On Yourself

If you’re a fan of the Casino Royale soundtrack, you should definitely check out this crazy album. The best material on here is loads of fun, and when you get a great copy like this one the sound is wonderful.

This pressing is Tubey Magical -- what A&M pressing from 1969 wouldn’t be? -- but also highly resolving of subtle musical information, the kind you notice when you play a pile of copies one after another. Listen to the orchestra on "Do You Know The Way To San Jose" -- you can really hear the sound of the rosiny bows being pulled across the strings.

What the Best Sides Of Make It Easy On Yourself 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.

What We're Listening For On Make It Easy On Yourself

• 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

We played a good-sized stack of these recently, but not many of them sounded like this. Most copies have a tendency to be bright, which is murder on your ears when the horns start blaring. There are plenty of copies out there that lack energy, while others suffer from smear. It takes a special copy to make these easy listening numbers sound fresh and invigorating, and that’s what Hot Stampers are all about.

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

• Promises, Promises
• I’ll Never Fall in Love Again
• Knowing When to Leave
• Any Day Now
• Wanting Things

Side Two

• Whoever You Are, I Love You
• Make It Easy on Yourself
• Do You Know the Way to San Jose
• Pacific Coast Highway
• She’s Gone Away
• This Guy’s in Love With You

AMG Review

[T]he album is a lesson in great songwriting. Bacharach’s charm is his skill in dealing with abstracts. Songs that aren’t immediately pleasing to the ear grow on the listener. "I’ll Never Fall in Love Again," and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" are great songs that solidify Bacharach as a master of quirk.