I'm not ready to rate this yet, having only listened to it once, but I wanted to say that I really agree with sjcorne's analysis of this album. I think the only thing it's guilty of is not sounding like Romantic Warrior - what I love about it is exactly what sjcorne pointed out, that if you were describing the sound, you'd have to use a combination of a whole bunch of other bands to do it. One of my first thoughts listening to this album today in quad was "I don't know how you couldn't call this album a musical achievement" - I can understand being disappointed that it doesn't sound like Romantic Warrior, but there are so many quieter more nuanced bits on this album that would have been totally obliterated by the hi-octane riffing of the Romantic Warrior lineup. It's not to say one is better and one is worse, just that they're both different and I'm glad that they both exist.
This has the same right rear drums/left rear bass layout as the Tower of Power disc, but I think it works better than ToP for some reason - maybe because in a band like this the drums don't need to dominate the mix the same way they do in a funk or R&B band. As sjcorne and dave-wave noted, there's tons of bass in the rear speakers - it really made me wish I had a setup that featured four enormous floorstanding speakers, that's for sure. It's interesting actually, there seem to be a few of these '76/'77 era Columbia quads with no quad remix engineer credited that have the same right rear drums/left rear bass type of quad mix - this and Tower of Power are two, and Fredblue tells me that the Miracles 'Love Crazy' is another. I wonder if the same mysterious engineer did them all, because aside from Sly and the Family Stone's Greatest Hits, I can't think of many (or any) other quad mixes they put out between '72 and '75 that use that type of mixing style.
The biggest revalation for me on the first listen of this disc surprisingly was the (oft-maligned) vocals. Some of the lyrics are a bit cringeworthy, but I was struck by just how lifelike the timbre(4) of Gayle Moran's voice was on the opening track was, almost enough to make your armhair stand up. I was also really taken with how much multitracked vocals there are - people think of this album as being the one where they had a singer, but some real thought was put in to the execution of the vocals (especially the harmonised chorus parts) and I think it only really shows in the quad mix when things are panned to all four speakers.
I think 'weird' is one of the best words to describe this album, but it's weird in the best way. I was a child of the 80s, where music more often than not was very strict 3 minute verse/chorus/verse type stuff, so discovering albums like this as a teenager in the 90s, i felt like Alice going through the looking glass - 10 minute songs! crazy structures! weird synthesizers! long solos!
I haven't voted on this one yet, only having listened to it once, but it will be at least a 9 from me. The only reason I could see not giving it a 10 is that there are albums I like more (what would I give them, 11?) and the drums/bass in the rear mixing style isn't my favourite. I was bowled over by how good the disc sounds though, absolute reference quality in my opinion. It's a travesty that this quad mix (and so many others) have only been heard in discrete form on 8-track tape, which has less than half the frequency response of this new SACD.
