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.
