Visage – Visage

Fantastic pressing of this issue. Warm analogue sound. Great dynamics.

New wave New Romantic commercial mainstream crap. This was the beginning of post punk crossover to dance bullshit. I'll give you an example. Human League Being Boiled to Human League Don't You Want Me. Look at what happened to Ultravox after John Foxx left

As the Rubellan site is shutting down, I asked the Wayback Machine to back up the page for this release: https://web.archive.org/web/20250326014922/https://www.rubellanremasters.com/visage1

At what point does a slowly dying CD industry start adding 2 and 2 together and realise that certain releases are actually wanted in a hard format ? As of today, this issue is 'worth' a fortune. The artist, the record company, the rights holders and Rubellan earn nothing from its re-sale popularity. Somebody please explain to me the sense in an industry purposefully evading healthy profit.

Ridiculous pricing due to lack of supply. This album should have had a proper reissue. The story behind it is fascinating - it was shelved for the best part of a year due to contract issues and waiting for the killer single 'Fade To Grey'. The story can be read in the books by the participants Midge Ure/ Steve Strange/ Barry Adamson etc. and online pieces.
A reissue would be appreciated - but at least I still have my vinyl.

Record played exactly as said
Sleeve less desired should read description better

Well, I'm the odd one out here, but I'm not so impressed with the remastering on this. Good decisions were made overall about what to do, and what not to do, but the intensity of what was done just a bit too much.

EQ is mostly OK. I'd probably have done it with a lighter touch, but it's not bad. What I mainly want is to dial back the noise reduction by about 75%.

I know from experience that remastering is tricky, and there's no perfect way to reduce background hiss. It's very easy to overdo it and end up with muted reverb tails and mangled or muted harmonics, which is what happened here.

I've learned to accept that part of the sound of music from this era is in that hiss; getting too aggressive about cleaning it up just results in changing the character of the music, no matter how carefully you do it.

So I give this release an A for the bonus track selection and a B+ for remastering.

I've read Scott's posts on the Steve Hoffman forum, and saw that he never wants to do any Visage reissues again because the fans are just way too nitpicky. Looks like I'm one of those fans. :(

I bought that pressing and at the time I am listening to it It really sounds fantastic !!! Highly recommended !!!

Great album! I had never heard to them until now and I got quite surprised: some really clever synths and choruses with classy arrangements that somehow sound like the past meeting the present (or, back then, the present meeting the future). Awesome mixing of tracks coming from truly varied moods and some reminiscences of Ultravox and Devo and Kraftwerk and Poni Hoax and Crystal Castles and Anamanaguchi and whatnot.

I picked up this LP in a haul of 3 for £5 in record shop yesterday along with Pretenders II and Abba Arrival and so glad I did. As an Ultravox mega fan I'm embarrassed to say that I've reached the age of 52 and never heard the album before. What an absolute treat, I can't believe how good it is! I'm now on the hunt for their second album...