Blue Öyster Cult – Blue Öyster Cult

Excellent sounding pressing, expectations were low but this is a full bodied offering on wax, brilliant.

What a debut. Hard space psychedelia. The entire album is excellent, COFWRAR & She's As Beautiful As A Foot are highlights. How about that album cover artwork?

The thinking man's hard rock band. As good as the music is, the song titles may be even better. This is their best LP IMO.

1972 first press - 1C / 1C pressed at customatrix sounds very good. Quiet press and very good mastering.

I heard it was recorded on a 4-Track machine. I like the lo-fi mysterious sound of it.

Pressed in Holland. word word word word word word word word word word word word word

Very nice sounding version. Natural and realistic. And, yes: digital can sound like analogue.

These inner sleeves don't belong to this record.
Mine got an inner cover with an seroplane PL-01 on one side , other side drawn pictures of the group members with text above: Rossignol's curious, albeit simply titl3d book.....

Not that great of pressing here. Last days of mat has a strange high pitched tone in it and the rest of the record sounds muffled. Amazing music though.

A strange band; once known as a Grateful Dead type jam band with a Doorsy influence, Blue Öyster Cult had been together for at least four years under different names but when former rock scribe turned band manager Sandy Pearlman took them under his wing and co-produced their first album. They had turned heavy, well at least a little more sonically then they had been before but even more importantly, the lyrical content of their songs took a decidedly darker turn. Pearlman had created a mythos based around a character called Imaginos who was some form of immortal alien that could assume various personas and impact moments in world history. This mythos has been featured in much of BÖC’s music throughout their fifty plus years. Almost academic in nature but nonetheless many wide ranging debates amongst Cult experts have occurred about which of the band’s songs in their long catalog constitute Imaginos songs. What seems to be apparent is that on the debut, released in the dawn of 1972, tracks such as album opener “Transmaniacon MC”, “Workshop of the Telescopes” and perhaps the record most well-known track “Cities on Flame with Rock n’ Roll” could be considered part of Pearlman’s strange occult musings on the Imaginos character. As far as the other notable songs, “I’m on the Lamb '' was a song that would be redone a year later in a much more metalicized and definitive version as “The Red and the Black” which is unusual for any band to do. Speaking of unusual, the Cult had more than one member tackle lead vocals including both the Bouchard brothers, Albert on “Cities” and Joe on “Screams” while lead guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser” sings both of his main compositions “Before the Kiss, a Red Cap” and “The Last Days of May”. Eric Bloom, who sang a majority of the leads, sang the rest and all members, including keyboardist and rhythm guitarist Alan Lanier, wrote songs - often in conjunction with Pearlman’s lyrics. One final point I would like to make about the first Blue Öyster Cult album is that even for 1972, it’s not super heavy or expertly recorded but it does contain classics that are still played today and for that it is an essential purchase. Just let that girl rock n’ roll…