The Magic Band – Dust Sucker

These guys heads must be filled with sawdust. This sounds great and is a great mix of demos and live recordings. There are plenty of bad sounding recordings but this isn’t one of them. Recordings like this have a special vibe to them but you just can’t compare this to anything. Take it how it is. If you think this is bad try rough raw and amazing. Which I still think sounds great. Sounds like it’s at the end of a room. It’s not just about your ears when putting on captain.

One of the worst sounding records I have ever owned. Not even worth having for the Beefheart completist. Just a warning on this to not go out of your way to try to find this... even the PVC envelope it came in smells bad. I think there are boot vinyls cut from the
Vaulternative CD out there, plus that CD is still floating around out there in quite a fine mastering. Take a look at all the official albums under the Captain Beefheart name... and look at this hideous sleeve... I'm venting here simply because I find this LP so offensive. I ended up trading my copy in a big pile of Records I didn't want or need, at a local used record store... a couple weeks later they had it on display and they wanted 50 bucks for it... (insert quizzical smiley emoticon here)

Horrendous. Poorly pressed and badly mastered. Off speed on some tracks, huge volume differences between tracks, sounding like 9th generation copies... I had the green vinyl version. Emphasis on the word "had".... Don't know how this is even legit to sell, I really don't think it came from "the Captain's original tapes"... pretty much anything on this label is extraordinarily sketchy... I'm only posting here to warn people away from wasting money... A good deal of this stuff has been reissued in far better quality elsewhere...if I'm not mistaken, the same group behind this label is also issuing a whole bunch of live stuff by the Fall... You can usually tell because it looks like the graphics and cover designs were thrown together with zero regard for aesthetic quality... In fact this may be their "best" cover design and, well, just take a look at it...ugh.

It was great to hear this stuff for the first time, even though the sound quality SUCKS. Nice pretty green vinyl though (one opaque, one translucent) though the extra tracks are somewhat..extraneous. If this sounded like it wasn't recorded on a portable four-track I'd give it a four...I have a bit of a conspiracy theory regarding this release which I will expound upon on my "Son OF Dust Sucker" review...generally I would say avoid; if you want the Bat Chain Puller material on vinyl go for the latter or seek out a decent quality boot (the plain brown purple-stamped cover in various vinyl hues is okay too though the mastering engineer seems to have fallen asleep whilst mastering the title track; it seems a little quieter than the rest of the LP)...anyway, this release is probably really only for Beefheart completists, to be honest.