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Overall
[Rating:4.5/5]
The Album
[Rating:4.5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:4.5/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0/5]
The Album
[Rating:4.5/5]
Rod Stewart’s seventh album A Night on the Town has a deceptively freewheeling title. Firmly separated from his former band The Faces by this time and his longtime creative partner Ronnie Wood, from all outward appearances the album would seem like a repeat of its predecessor, Atlantic Crossing. The album continued the practice of splitting the work into two halves, one fast, one slow, though A Night on the Town would reverse the order, placing the slow half first. It would also bring in the same producer, Tom Dowd, to oversee the proceedings. That’s where many of the similarities end.
On A Night on the Town, though Stewart and Dowd would continue the use of lavish orchestrations and multiple studio musicians to fill out his sound, the album ultimately marked a return to Stewart’s folk and blues roots that had previously solidified him as a bona fide rocker to be reckoned with. The first half of the album, made up of tracks mostly penned by Stewart, is a melancholy affair, apart from the seductive opener, “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)”. It includes the definitive Cat Stevens cover, “The First Cut is the Deepest”, and Stewart’s epic suite, “The Killing of Georgie”, an homage to a gay friend who fell victim to a hate crime, a topic well ahead of its time in 1976.
This first half of the album throws the album’s listener for a loop, from the on the nose, turn the lights down low sexiness of “Tonight’s the Night” to the morbid recounting of a gay bashing, in an almost Dylanesque stream of consciousness style of delivery from Stewart, because by the time we get to the end and, were we back in 1976, flip it over, he hits us with the fast side’s one and only original Stewart number, an Exile-era sounding Stonesy number, “The Balltrap” that smacks us in the face. Are we out on the town now? Stewart bounces through a rendition of Manfred Mann’s “Pink Flamingo” and Floyd Gilbeau’s “Big Bayou” complete with horn section, before a rousing and raw rendition of “The Wild Side of Life”, a country hit for Hank Thompson. The way it’s done here, it’s more out of the way roadhouse than country radio hit. But then there’s a twist. The album closes with the very lush, mellow, 70s-sounding, “Trade Winds” complete with electric piano and sax – what’s this doing on the “fast side”? A song about prostitutes, the poor, and being stuck…we’ve been thrown for a loop again, but it works.
In this album, you can almost hear the overblown funk and disco beats, silky strings, and spandex pants just waiting to escape only a couple albums down the road. Here, however, they are wrangled into gorgeously poetic folk and raunchy rock and roll, the kind that made Stewart a real force on AOR radio back in the day.
Audio Quality
[Rating:4.5/5]
This 192kHz/24-bit download of A Night on the Town from Rhino and HDtracks, while it lacks some warmth, definitely offers a lot of detail in the instrumentation and lots of natural air in the higher registers. In other words, it never sounds fatiguing to the ears, and you always want to reach for the volume to turn it up. Stewart’s vocals, however, though clear, sound oddly pinched or closed-in. It could be a consequence of the original recording, but it tends to stick out a bit here. In contrast, the HDtracks download of Every Picture Tells a Story sounds a lot more relaxed. Still, when one hears the punch of the percussion on “Fool For You” or the spread of acoustic guitars on “The First Cut is the Deepest”, it is bound to bring a smile to one’s face.
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0/5]
Only a PDF with high-res cover art is supplied.
The Definitive Word
Overall:
[Rating:4.5/5]
A Night on the Town is Rod Stewart asserting his musical influences and, with the help of Tom Dowd, cajoling them into two fantastic sides of infinitely listenable rock and roll. His smokey voice is on top, the arrangements are intricate, and together they make for a superlative album. This download from HDtracks also sounds rather rich as well, with great detail and dynamic range.
Rod Stewart: A Night on the Town High-Resolution Lossless Download (HDtracks)