Go For Your Guns - The Isley Brothers (SQ LP decoded by the Surround Master SQ Vinyl Edition).
The slow burn numbers on this album (Footsteps In The Dark, Voyage To Atlantis) are, for me, some of the most gorgeous 'quiet storm' numbers of all time.. and in surround they do not disappoint.. beautiful harmonies in the rears abound.. the cavernous reverb on "Voyage To Atlantis" is such a joy in the way that the mix engineer (the late great Larry Keyes) used that reverb to Quads' advantage, with expert use of delay so that lead vocals start in the front and tail off in the rear with some of them bouncing all around the speakers as the song reaches its crescendo, quite amazing... when the Brothers kick in with the "come back to you..." refrains in the rear it is just sublime.
All in with those two beautiful ballads this is a short but sweet (very short.. approx 33 MINUTES short.. or rather long..!) funky little record with quite a rocky hard edge to it (Livin in the life and The Pride really sizzle) and for me is probably their last consistently truly great album, although I enjoyed tracks here and there on the albums that followed this one, the overall quality of albums from start to finish of 3+3, Live It Up, The Heat Is On, Harvest For The World and this one is very hard to beat, so perhaps a dip in quality was to be expected due to burn out etc, I don't know..
Throughout this whole record little keyboard parts and guitar licks are brought up in the mix, with keys many times popping up in the rears, lead guitar parts are almost always up front but other guitar parts are panned to the rear with others niftily ping ponging back and forth from, say, front right to rear right and back again.. in Climbing The Ladder there's a bit where one of the Brothers shouts "Let me play it for you now!" which zooms from front to back in pretty spectacular fashion.. oh and I must say for an SQ LP there is TONS of reverb thru the whole record, which to the Involve SQ unit's credit (and to the quality of the original SQ encode?) never seems to wrong foot the Surround Master once.
The only real fly in the ointment, there's some irksome sibilance in a few places on Ronald's lead vocals on a couple of tracks (think "Footsssstepsss... in the dark.."
.. I made a stab at EQ-ing the track at various points, lowering things around 5-8khz and slightly boosting above 8k but that robbed the sound of its kind of breath of life and yet gave it a wispy quality, hard to describe.. even though it tamed those obnoxious "S" sounds and on my used copy I gave it a go with heavier tracking force which can apparently help in these situations but it only dulled the treble and boosted the already very healthy levels of bass to a muddying extent.. oh and the last track - the by and large instrumental title track - is LOUD compared to everything else on the record, like you're at a concert and they're vamping it up at the end to really get the crowd going before they leave the stage.. hence the album art which gives the appearance this might be a live album when it is in fact "just" a studio record.. aggravatingly i've found it impossible to record the last track in satisfactorily without upsetting the balance of sound levels with the rest of the album..)
ah well.. I should possibly stop seeking perfection with these nigh-on 40 year old records, this nigh-on 40 year old man is far from perfect!
..I wish there were an Audio Fidelity Surround SACD of this one, it would make life SO much easier.. but for now this will have 'to do'
)
Symbion Project Misery In Soliloquy. A surprisingly effective 4.0 effort.
