The Beach Boys Surfin' USA 180g LP

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A musical legacy that began in Hawthorne, California and went on to conquer the world. Analogue Productions presents the ultimate pressings of 14 essential Beach Boys albums! Mastered by Kevin Gray, most from the original master tapes, and plated and pressed by Quality Record Pressings, the finest LP pressing facility in the world, these are awesome recordings to experience. And the look of each album befits its sonic superiority! Presented in "old school" Stoughton tip-on jackets, these time honored favorites shine brighter than the originals!

Surfin' USA was the Beach Boys' real breakthrough album, showing Brian Wilson asserting himself in the studio as both a premier songwriter and arranger on a set of material that was stronger than their Surfin' Safari debut.

Apart from Surfin' Safari, which was mono only, the Beach Boys did turn in stereo masters on all of their early albums up until 1965. The Beach Boys Today! was the first LP for which they only delivered a mono master.

The stereo editions of Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, Little Deuce Coupe, Shut Down Vol. 2, All Summer Long, Beach Boys Christmas Album and Beach Boys Concert were all mixed in stereo by their own preferred engineer, Chuck Britz, ostensibly under the group's supervision.

"Brian may or may not have been present for those mixing sessions - evidence suggests that he trusted Chuck's skills enough to let him prepare those mixes on his own - but the group held onto their multitrack tapes and delivered stereo masters to Capitol, rather than allowing Capitol to prepare their own stereo versions. Later, when Brian was only delivering mono masters, Capitol would prepare the Duophonic pseudo stereo editions for the stereo market," says Alan Boyd, producer and Beach Boys' archivist.

The Beach Boys' practice of double-tracking their vocals really lends itself to stereo mixes. Split left and right, as they are on a lot of those early stereo versions, those doubled vocal parts can really envelop the listener, surrounding them with Wilsons, Loves and Jardines!

All of the newer stereo mixes on these remastered albums (The Beach Boys Today!, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), The Beach Boys' Party, Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile) were all done by Mark Linett on behalf of the Beach Boys.

Besides the hit title track on Surfin' USA and its popular drag-racing flip side ("Shut Down"), AllMusic.com notes that Surfin' USA has a lovely, heartbreaking ballad ("Lonely Sea") and a couple of strong Brian Wilson originals ("The Noble Surfer" and "Farmer's Daughter").

There are also a surprisingly high quotient of instrumentals (five) that demonstrate that...the Beach Boys could play respectably gutsy surf rock as a self-contained unit. Indeed, the album as a whole is the best they would make, prior to the late '60s, as a band that played most of their instruments, rather than as a vehicle for Brian Wilson's ideas. The LP was a huge hit, vital to launching surf music as a national craze, and one of the few truly strong records to be recorded by a self-contained American rock band prior to the British Invasion.

Both the mono and stereo reissues sound open, transparent and full frequency. This was a well-recorded album... There's no deterring hard-core Beach Boys fans from these reissues, especially those who grew up with the original records and who want to hear them re-mastered for adult record players... These reissues restore whatever was really on the tapes... As for the quality of these reissues, it's quite clear that, whether or not you like the sonic results, Analogue Productions sets the reissue standard. The company insists upon using analog master tapes (where available), not analog copies, it uses the best available artwork, and packages in 'Tip-on'™ jackets. It masters where the tapes are located using Kevin Gray in California, Ryan K. Smith in New York and Willem Makkee in Germany.