There’s a debate happening among recording engineers worldwide about the death of dynamic range. Over the course of 1990s, albums got louder and louder.
A co-worker of mine e-mailed a link to a news story about Bob Dylan’s rant against CDs. Dylan may have sounded like a curmudgeon, but he was essentially complaining about the same thing — albums are compressed within inches of their lives.
I offer the original studio recording of Chess as an extreme example of an album in dire need of "louder" remastering.
I told some friends of mine about the second departure of Andy Taylor from Duran Duran, and one of them pointed me to a thread on a message board (can’t find the link at the moment) with posts reacting to the news. The first few replies snarked that we can look forward to Thunder II.
Thunder was Taylor’s debut solo album after leaving Duran Duran in 1985. Despite the commercial success of the single "Take It Easy" — which he recorded for the forgettable movie American Anthem — the album tanked. Anything associated with Duran Duran around that time lost its cachet, as the teen-aged girls who catapulted the group to phenomenal success started to grow up.
Admit it — you’ve bought an album you’ve never listened to before because you liked the cover. Before the days of 30-second online previews and evil sharing networks, buying an album just because the cover looked cool was a gamble. Oftentimes, it was a gamble I ended up losing, but once in a while, I would strike some gold.
I was intrigued by the cover All About Eve’s Scarlet and Other Stories, so I asked the guy behind the counter at the record store whether he had heard of the band. He did one better, opened up a copy of the album and played it right there. I liked what I heard and bought it. On my limited allowance, Scarlet and Other Stories ended up being a favorite of mine in 1989.
Music writers are prone to hyperbole when describing such concepts as "greatest rock song of all time" or "best album in the history of rock ‘n’ roll", and inevitably, their scope is limited to music produced in the US or UK. What about the rest of the world?
Well, it’s a pretty big place to cover, and who has time to explore an entire planet’s worth of music? As prone to hyperbole as I would like to be, I just can’t claim that AJICO’s "Hadoo" is one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
I can say, however, it’s one of my favorite songs, and it certainly stands up with the best rock music has to offer.
I was intrigued when I saw "I Know What Boys Like" included in the track listing for ACO’s 2006 mini-album, mask. When I heard a 30-second excerpt of the track, I couldn’t wait to hear the whole thing.
Although considered a one-hit wonder, The Waitresses recorded two of the smartest post-punk albums of the era. Main songwriter Chris Butler approached his songs like a theater composer. (He even admitted wanting to write a musical in the liner notes for the 1990 compilation, The Best of Waitresses.) He spun long yarns with sharp wit, made all the more sassy by singer Patty Donahue.
"I Know What Boys Like" and "Christmas Wrapping" are pretty much the Waitresses’ legacy, but even those songs are more literary than most pop confections.
Around the time I ran across ACO’s cover of Kate Bush’s "This Woman’s Work", an R&B artist named Maxwell released his own version of the song. It was the most excruciating interpretation I’d ever heard.
Singing in a painfully grating falsetto, Maxwell attempted to imbue soul into a song that, by its sparseness, had plenty of. He ended up turning it into a sentimental showcase of caterwaul.
It had me running and screaming back to ACO’s version.
Covers are a tricky endeavor. Interpreters must balance the essence of a song with their own perspective on it.
Bill Frisell’s reduction of the entire Billy the Kind orchestral score to a stage band is the extreme epitome of that balance. Guns N’ Roses’ painfully bloated cover of the Rolling Stones’ "Sympathy for the Devil" falls on the other end of that spectrum.
ACO has managed to make a number of distinct covers in the past few years. Her lush version of Radiohead’s "Creep" highlights the tenderness behind the self-loathing of the song. And she doesn’t cleanse the lyrics for a Puritanical audience either.
When I saw the commercials for the movie Happy Feet, the first thing I thought of was 8 1/2 Souvenirs. I’m probably not the only Austinite who lived through Web 1.0 to think so.
8 1/2 Souvenirs was a swing band when swing was big among the dot-com yuppie hipsters. Although anchored by the smooth guitar and suave vocals of founder Olivier Giraud, the stars of the band were singer Chrysta Bell and pianist Glover Gill. In my mind, Gill moreso than Bell.
Gill could make a piano sound like an orchestra, and his dynamic playing was a potent glue for the Souvenirs’ sound. The difference was stark on Twisted Desire, the band’s final studio album recorded after Gill left.
Even though I openly list them in my RYM vinyl collection, even though I list them in my CD collection as well, even though I think the London studio cast recording of Chess needs desperately to be remastered, I still refuse to acknowledge ABBA’s formative influence on my music fandom.
(It was ABBA, not Duran Duran, who were the first artists I saw on music video.)
Still, The Visitors is an album quite incongruous with the kitsch of ABBA’s heyday, and it’s a remarkable document of the band’s demise.
When Natalie Merchant announced she was leaving 10,000 Maniacs back in 1994, my first thought was to wish John Lombardo would rejoin the band and bring Mary Ramsey as Merchant’s replacement. And that’s exactly what happened.
Lombardo and Ramsey had been performing under the moniker John & Mary, and the duo recorded two albums for RykoDisc that sounded just like the Maniacs. Perhaps the presence of Maniacs drummer Jerome Augustinyak and guitarist Rob Buck had something to do with that.
Ramsey herself toured with 10,000 Maniacs, playing viola and singing back-up. (She can be heard on the band’s MTV Unplugged appearance.) So it seemed like a perfect match, and for a time, it was.