#huntbrush

[vinylanswer]

I cleaned up my test pressing of Talking Heads’ genre-busting classic Fear Of Music this weekend. I don’t play it often for obvious reasons (I actually have a regular first pressing that I typically put on instead), but I wanted to enjoy it, pulled it out and yeah, it was kind of dirty—so I fixed that. On the upper left, you can see the grubby LP; to its right, I went at it with a Hunt brush, which did 70-80% of the work, getting dust out of the grooves, as you can see. Next, it took a bath in a HumminGuru ultrasonic record cleaning machine with a touch of Groovewasher G2 fluid in it, and Bam—you can see the decided improvement on the lower right. The record sounded amazing, particularly on (of all tracks) “Paper”—the ricocheting guitar echos were electrifying and Chris Frantz’s drums were right in the room. Totally worth the effort to clean this one up; it now is in a MoFi sleeve to keep it that way.

[vinylanswer]

Cleaning a really grubby record does not make its music any better. I found this remix set of Filter’s late-90s hit, “Take A Picture,” and it was a mess, covered in dust and grime. I brushed out the crud, washed it in the HumminGuru ultrasonic record cleaning machine and it was as good as new. Unfortunately, that’s not saying much. The original song may have been an overt knock-off of U2’s “Bad,” but at least they stole from the best. However, in this wretched set of trance remixes, some DJs essentially took only the title phrase and threw it over throbbing deep synths for over half an hour in total, with no sign of the melody or anything else that made the song appealing. Sparkling clean or not, it’s disappointing garbage.