The "honeymoon" portion of my employment has officially ended, and just in time to get my benefits! I'm sick of ten-hour days, and I'm sick of working Sundays. And so far this month, I've only had one Saturday off. I haven't even gotten to go to a Midnight Movie at my favorite theater since November, specifically the day after my birthday. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I don't have much time on my regular work days to do anything but work and sleep. The only good thing about them is that I get three-day weekends. Having to work an extra day for overtime fucks up my entire week, and I have to cram three days worth of weekend into two days. While I guess that can still be considered rest from work, it can still be pretty stressful. I appreciate the job security, but a little more time for myself would be nice. Here's some good reading: Why we have to go back to a 40-hour work week to keep our sanity. Note that they mean 40 hours split into five 8-hour days, because working more than 8 hours in a day is counterproductive.
The only good things I can say about this week are that I got to see and meet Henry Rollins again, and I'm getting to go see Jane's Addiction for the first time tonight. In other concert news, I found out that The Psychedelic Furs will be playing in Louisville on April 4th, and the Danzig Legacy tour will play in Indianapolis on June 1st. My overtime day in June is Friday, so I'll have to remind myself to try to get a vacation day for May 30th so I can get out of working that day if OT is called, and to get a four-day weekend. I actually have a blog entry idea brewing in my head that involves both Jane's Addiction and The Psychedelic Furs, I hope I'll actually have the time sometime soon to actually write it.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Friday, March 23, 2012
Thursday, November 10, 2011
An early birthday present to myself.
I don't know where The Pixies rank on my All Time Favorite Bands list, but they're pretty high up there. When I semi-retired from concert-going, I said that it would have to be somebody really special like The Pixies to get me to go to a concert. I was seriously shocked last Summer when I saw that they would be playing in Louisville, and two days before my birthday no less! Since I'm on their e-mail list, I could have gotten a ticket during the first pre-sale, but the price was so outrageous that I thought, "Regular sale price MUST be cheaper!" It should be noted that the special pre-sale price also included a special t-shirt. The actual price when they went on sale wasn't much lower. I was really hoping to get two tickets so I wouldn't have to sit next to a stranger, but could only afford one. I almost got a cheaper ticket, but figured, "Fuck it, it's an early birthday present to myself, might as well go for the gusto!", and got the more expensive one.
So how was the show? I knew that they were going to play the entire Doolittle album along with a lot of B-sides, which I didn't even know that they had. One of the B-sides was the "UK Surf" version of "Wave Of Mutilation", which meant that they played "Wave Of Mutilation" in some form twice. They did some some songs from Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa, and that was it. I was a little disappointed that they didn't do anything off of Bossanova or Trompe Le Monde, but other than that it was a great show! I did come across one guy after the show who was absolutely pissed that they didn't do more songs. I wanted to smack him, and tell him, "Dude, you sound like a little bitch!" Seriously, this guy was even more pissed than I was when I saw Queens Of The Stone Age in 2007 and they didn't do anything off of "Rated R". But then again, "Rated R" was (IMO) the best album of the 2000s, and I was having some serious anxiety issues that night. I don't know what this other guy's excuse was.
Oh, and the sound was really good. Opening band Surfer Blood were pretty enjoyable, but with as good as the sound mix was, I couldn't help but think as I always do when I see a recent band, that "There's no way that their CD sounds as good as this does."
Update: Thinking back on it, I think my favorite thing about the show were the little things, like hearing Black Francis whistle during "La La Love You", or hearing Kim Deal do her vocal bit during "Where Is My Mind?". They could have just as easily sampled those things, but hearing them actually do it was a hoot.
So how was the show? I knew that they were going to play the entire Doolittle album along with a lot of B-sides, which I didn't even know that they had. One of the B-sides was the "UK Surf" version of "Wave Of Mutilation", which meant that they played "Wave Of Mutilation" in some form twice. They did some some songs from Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa, and that was it. I was a little disappointed that they didn't do anything off of Bossanova or Trompe Le Monde, but other than that it was a great show! I did come across one guy after the show who was absolutely pissed that they didn't do more songs. I wanted to smack him, and tell him, "Dude, you sound like a little bitch!" Seriously, this guy was even more pissed than I was when I saw Queens Of The Stone Age in 2007 and they didn't do anything off of "Rated R". But then again, "Rated R" was (IMO) the best album of the 2000s, and I was having some serious anxiety issues that night. I don't know what this other guy's excuse was.
Oh, and the sound was really good. Opening band Surfer Blood were pretty enjoyable, but with as good as the sound mix was, I couldn't help but think as I always do when I see a recent band, that "There's no way that their CD sounds as good as this does."
Update: Thinking back on it, I think my favorite thing about the show were the little things, like hearing Black Francis whistle during "La La Love You", or hearing Kim Deal do her vocal bit during "Where Is My Mind?". They could have just as easily sampled those things, but hearing them actually do it was a hoot.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
On this date ten years ago...
...Slayer released "God Hates Us All"! I'm surprised that some kooks haven't tried to say that the attacks were God's punishment for that album being released, but pseudo-Christian band P.O.D. released their "Satellite" album on the same day. If I believed in a God, I'd think he'd probably be more angry over P.O.D.. Being a fan of Slayer, I spent a good portion of 2001 looking forward to September 11th ever since it was announced as the release date for the album. Turning on the TV late that morning to find that the towers had collapsed was a surreal experience. I was unemployed at the time, and realized after a few days that although life had seemed to come to a halt, that bill collectors wouldn't necessarily stop calling, so it was time to resume the job search. I eventually did buy the Slayer album that Friday, too. It's far from being my favorite Slayer album, but it was still better than most of what passed for Metal at that time, or even now.
One thing that's a shame is that while P.O.D. thankfully no longer stink up the airwaves, songs that were out at this time ten years ago like Nickelback's "How You Remind Me", Staind's "It's Been Awhile", and Puddle Of Mudd's "Control" don't seem to be leaving anytime soon.
That's all I'm really going to say about 9/11. I share the opinion of this blog post on Buzzflash.com.
One thing that's a shame is that while P.O.D. thankfully no longer stink up the airwaves, songs that were out at this time ten years ago like Nickelback's "How You Remind Me", Staind's "It's Been Awhile", and Puddle Of Mudd's "Control" don't seem to be leaving anytime soon.
That's all I'm really going to say about 9/11. I share the opinion of this blog post on Buzzflash.com.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Metallica's "Black Album": 20 Years Later
Back in 1987, one of my brother's friends gave him a copy of Metallica's "Master Of Puppets". I didn't bother trying to listen to it until a year later. I didn't hear any "real" Metal during most of the 1980s, or any Punk/Hardcore either. By the Summer of 1988, I think the heaviest bands I heard were Whitesnake and Van Halen. I'm not even talking the good old Van Halen either, I'm talking 1984/Van Hagar era! So needless to say, I wasn't really prepared for hearing Metallica. I had never heard a guitar tone like that, nor had I heard anything that was as fast or had as many tempo changes! It seemed so skull crushingly heavy at the time that my brother and I would listen to it for a bit, and then put it away for a couple of months. It was hard to believe that there were people that could listen to this stuff all the time!
Fast forward to Summer 1991: I finally start getting into Thrash Metal, buying Anthrax's "Persistence Of Time" and Suicidal Tendencies' "Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Deja Vu." Most of the harder rock I had been listening to before just wasn't aggressive enough to help me deal with all the crap I had gone through during that previous year of school, so Thrash seemed like the next logical step up. Anyway, I remember hearing a song coming out of the upstairs bathroom at home one night (we had a boombox in there), and I was like, "What is that? It kind of sounds like Metallica, but then again it kind of doesn't." Then my brother came to tell me that a new Metallica song was on the radio. All I can say was that it was different. I wasn't 100% sure that I liked it. After hearing a few more songs, I still wasn't sure that I wanted to buy the album. During my freshman year of high school, a friend made a copy of it for me. It was on one side of a 90 minute tape, and it fit all but the last three tracks. He put a Thrash compilation called "Rising Metal" on the other side. Much like the opening track/first single, I didn't know whether I liked the Black Album or not either. It took me until 2007 to say, "Eh, what the hell, I'll buy it." And you know what? After all these years, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that album. I decided that it would be a good topic for a blog entry, but I kept putting it off because I wanted to sit down and listen to the whole thing. With this year being the 20th anniversary, I figured now would be the best time to do it.
Judging the songs: Only the first nine tracks of the album made it onto the tape that my friend made, and I've heard all of them on the radio at some point. I don't really have an opinion on a couple of the most overplayed songs, "Enter Sandman" and "Nothing Else Matters", because I've heard them so much that I fail to register any feelings either way when hearing them, except maybe "Oh god, this again?". Compared to "Nothing Else Matters", "The Unforgiven" was definitely the better ballad of the two. "Sad But True" and "Wherever I May Roam" still jam, "Sad But True" especially has a good crunch to it reminiscent of songs like "The Thing That Should Not Be" or "Harvester Of Sorrow". "Don't Tread On Me" has a good riff, but the lyrics seem like a jingoistic apology for the criticisms on "Master Of Puppets" and "...And Justice For All". (Update 6-8-2012: Lars admitted on That Metal Show that he recently listened to "Don't Tread On Me", and thought, "What were we thinking?") I really dig "Holier Than Thou" and "Through The Never", they're about the fastest that Metallica get here. Check out the live version of "Through The Never", it's a little faster than the LP version. "Of Wolf And Man" is okay, I probably would've liked it better had my dumb ass realized sooner that they were saying "Shape shift" and not "Shake Shake". As for the three less familiar-to-me tracks, "The God That Failed" and "The Struggle Within" are sorta badass, the latter being a decent album closer. "My Friend Of Misery" is okay.
Regarding the sound quality, the Black Album is arguably Metallica's overall best sounding album.The first three albums were fairly crappy sounding, and the bass guitar was virtually nonexistent on "...And Justice For All", using the guitars to fill out the bottom end. While I do enjoy the sheer crunch of "...Justice", I do feel kind of bad about Jason Newsted getting the shaft. The guitars were turned down on the Black Album, but you can hear the bass guitar, especially if you have woofers that are at least 6.5 inches. This was in the age before dynamic range compression got out of hand, and this also has the best dynamic range of Metallica's earlier albums.
The story goes that they wanted to do some leaner songs to play live after touring so long with the workouts that were the tracks from "...And Justice For All", and they liked the sound that Bob Rock achieved on Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood", so they hired him to produce. I actually believe this story, as opposed to the simple "They went Pop!" accusations that most fans would probably throw out. While it was a decent attempt at streamlining, Slayer did the "slowing down" thing better on "South Of Heaven" and "Seasons In The Abyss", and Pantera, without even trying, pretty much did what Metallica were attempting to do with the Black Album, essentially becoming the new Kings Of Metal to most of the American Metal audience while Metallica gained mainstream acceptance. I was needing something heavier at the time, and this album surely didn't do it for me. But when you get right down to it, I'd still rather listen to most of the Black Album before I'd listen to most of what passes for modern Metal. Despite "Death Magnetic"'s shitty sound quality, I still feel like DM is the album they should have made after "...Justice", then the transition to the "Black Album" style probably wouldn't have felt like such a shock.
One last thing: "Load" and "Reload" are the only Metallica studio albums I don't own, and I don't plan on owning them anytime in the near future. Most of the stuff I've heard from them, especially "Load", just seems like a bad mix of an even more watered down Black Album and too much '70s Hard Rock influence. "Reload" seems a little more inspired, like "Load" was the side of the band on "Garage Inc." that covered Bob Seger, while "Reload" was the side that covered Nick Cave. "St. Anger" was majorly flawed, possibly even crappy, but at least it was more metallic than the Loads.
Fast forward to Summer 1991: I finally start getting into Thrash Metal, buying Anthrax's "Persistence Of Time" and Suicidal Tendencies' "Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Deja Vu." Most of the harder rock I had been listening to before just wasn't aggressive enough to help me deal with all the crap I had gone through during that previous year of school, so Thrash seemed like the next logical step up. Anyway, I remember hearing a song coming out of the upstairs bathroom at home one night (we had a boombox in there), and I was like, "What is that? It kind of sounds like Metallica, but then again it kind of doesn't." Then my brother came to tell me that a new Metallica song was on the radio. All I can say was that it was different. I wasn't 100% sure that I liked it. After hearing a few more songs, I still wasn't sure that I wanted to buy the album. During my freshman year of high school, a friend made a copy of it for me. It was on one side of a 90 minute tape, and it fit all but the last three tracks. He put a Thrash compilation called "Rising Metal" on the other side. Much like the opening track/first single, I didn't know whether I liked the Black Album or not either. It took me until 2007 to say, "Eh, what the hell, I'll buy it." And you know what? After all these years, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that album. I decided that it would be a good topic for a blog entry, but I kept putting it off because I wanted to sit down and listen to the whole thing. With this year being the 20th anniversary, I figured now would be the best time to do it.
Judging the songs: Only the first nine tracks of the album made it onto the tape that my friend made, and I've heard all of them on the radio at some point. I don't really have an opinion on a couple of the most overplayed songs, "Enter Sandman" and "Nothing Else Matters", because I've heard them so much that I fail to register any feelings either way when hearing them, except maybe "Oh god, this again?". Compared to "Nothing Else Matters", "The Unforgiven" was definitely the better ballad of the two. "Sad But True" and "Wherever I May Roam" still jam, "Sad But True" especially has a good crunch to it reminiscent of songs like "The Thing That Should Not Be" or "Harvester Of Sorrow". "Don't Tread On Me" has a good riff, but the lyrics seem like a jingoistic apology for the criticisms on "Master Of Puppets" and "...And Justice For All". (Update 6-8-2012: Lars admitted on That Metal Show that he recently listened to "Don't Tread On Me", and thought, "What were we thinking?") I really dig "Holier Than Thou" and "Through The Never", they're about the fastest that Metallica get here. Check out the live version of "Through The Never", it's a little faster than the LP version. "Of Wolf And Man" is okay, I probably would've liked it better had my dumb ass realized sooner that they were saying "Shape shift" and not "Shake Shake". As for the three less familiar-to-me tracks, "The God That Failed" and "The Struggle Within" are sorta badass, the latter being a decent album closer. "My Friend Of Misery" is okay.
Regarding the sound quality, the Black Album is arguably Metallica's overall best sounding album.The first three albums were fairly crappy sounding, and the bass guitar was virtually nonexistent on "...And Justice For All", using the guitars to fill out the bottom end. While I do enjoy the sheer crunch of "...Justice", I do feel kind of bad about Jason Newsted getting the shaft. The guitars were turned down on the Black Album, but you can hear the bass guitar, especially if you have woofers that are at least 6.5 inches. This was in the age before dynamic range compression got out of hand, and this also has the best dynamic range of Metallica's earlier albums.
The story goes that they wanted to do some leaner songs to play live after touring so long with the workouts that were the tracks from "...And Justice For All", and they liked the sound that Bob Rock achieved on Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood", so they hired him to produce. I actually believe this story, as opposed to the simple "They went Pop!" accusations that most fans would probably throw out. While it was a decent attempt at streamlining, Slayer did the "slowing down" thing better on "South Of Heaven" and "Seasons In The Abyss", and Pantera, without even trying, pretty much did what Metallica were attempting to do with the Black Album, essentially becoming the new Kings Of Metal to most of the American Metal audience while Metallica gained mainstream acceptance. I was needing something heavier at the time, and this album surely didn't do it for me. But when you get right down to it, I'd still rather listen to most of the Black Album before I'd listen to most of what passes for modern Metal. Despite "Death Magnetic"'s shitty sound quality, I still feel like DM is the album they should have made after "...Justice", then the transition to the "Black Album" style probably wouldn't have felt like such a shock.
One last thing: "Load" and "Reload" are the only Metallica studio albums I don't own, and I don't plan on owning them anytime in the near future. Most of the stuff I've heard from them, especially "Load", just seems like a bad mix of an even more watered down Black Album and too much '70s Hard Rock influence. "Reload" seems a little more inspired, like "Load" was the side of the band on "Garage Inc." that covered Bob Seger, while "Reload" was the side that covered Nick Cave. "St. Anger" was majorly flawed, possibly even crappy, but at least it was more metallic than the Loads.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
I'd rather be sailing...
I had three days off this past weekend, but it was ultimately kind of depressing. The fact that Monday would've been my sister's 42nd birthday certainly didn't help, but it wasn't just that. I think I was bummed out mostly because I felt relatively isolated. Saturday, I went to Louisville. Sunday, I only left the house to get dinner for my parents and I. Monday, I went to the Hillview area (northern Bullitt/southern Jefferson County) to stop by the cemetery and to go to the theater to see Captain America. I rarely go to this particular theater because I don't care for that area, but they had a 2-D screening of the movie, which my favorite theater in the Highlands area of Louisville doesn't, and I figured I didn't really have anything to do in Louisville anyway. My only stop after the movie was a quick trip to the grocery.
One of the stations I listened to on my way home was the oldies station. "Sailing" by Christopher Cross came on, and while I'm not a fan of Yacht Rock*, I felt compelled to listen to it anyway. Here were some thoughts I had while listening to it.
1.I'd much rather be out somewhere sailing than driving home. Sure, a lot of people find living in the country to be tranquil, but the ocean just seems cooler to me. And I've never sailed, but CC makes it sound awesome.
2.I can totally imagine Christopher Cross just chilling out in the ocean, but having a 50 caliber machine gun handy in case pirates try to mess with him. In my opinion, that would make him way more badass than Chuck Norris.
3.Smooth.
*In this case, I mean the genre Yacht Rock, and not the web series, which I love.
One of the stations I listened to on my way home was the oldies station. "Sailing" by Christopher Cross came on, and while I'm not a fan of Yacht Rock*, I felt compelled to listen to it anyway. Here were some thoughts I had while listening to it.
1.I'd much rather be out somewhere sailing than driving home. Sure, a lot of people find living in the country to be tranquil, but the ocean just seems cooler to me. And I've never sailed, but CC makes it sound awesome.
2.I can totally imagine Christopher Cross just chilling out in the ocean, but having a 50 caliber machine gun handy in case pirates try to mess with him. In my opinion, that would make him way more badass than Chuck Norris.
3.Smooth.
*In this case, I mean the genre Yacht Rock, and not the web series, which I love.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Recent thoughts on music: Gen-X Radio
When we get to listen to the radio at work, we usually listen to Gen-X Radio. There are many worse stations to listen to, but it's still not good to listen to on a daily basis. If you're not familiar with the Gen-X Radio format, here's a link to the playlist. I always liked the concept, but thought the execution was way off. Here are some of my gripes.
1.Hair bands, especially Bon Jovi and Poison. If you think of Generation X as being an entire age group, then including Hair Bands kind of makes sense. When I think of Generation X, I think less of an entire age group and more of a subculture within the age group who usually listened to more Alternative forms of music, whether it was Indie Rock, Techno, or even some harder or left-of-center kinds of Metal. The rise of Alternative Rock in the early '90s had a lot to do with people being sick of Hair Bands being the dominant form of Rock on the radio, which is why I don't think Hair Bands belong on a Gen-X themed station. In fact, this is closer to what I think of as a proper Gen-X station.
2.Too much Gen-Y crap. The logical ending cut off point for a Gen-X station in my opinion would be 2000, or maybe 1999 so we wouldn't have to put up with Kid Rock. They play way too much Nickelback, Puddle Of Mudd, Evanescence, Trapt, Linkin Park, Nelly, Kelly Clarkson, 3 Doors Down, Staind, and some stuff that's only 3 or 4 years old. Part of the fun of Gen-X Radio is hearing stuff that hadn't gotten played much in years, but the crap I just mentioned have been staples of Rock and Hot A.C. stations during the past ten years, so we haven't even had a chance to "miss" these songs yet. These songs are evidently getting too "old", and it's like Clear Channel is trying to find a place to dump them so they can make room for newer songs on their other stations.
3.On a similar note, most of the '90s Rock/MOR (Middle Of the Road) portion of the Gen-X Radio playlist were permanent staples of the Rock and Hot A.C. stations for the past 20 years! That's even more music that we haven't had a chance to miss yet.
4.Lots of really odd edits, like whole portions of songs getting cut. I think they do this to make more time for commercials.
5.They don't seem to know shit about genres on their commercials. Recently, I heard them describe "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" by The Offspring as Grunge, and "Rhythm Is A Dancer" by Snap! as Hip Hop. Really?
6.The last gripe (for now) is the same gripe I have about every other god damned commercial station out there: the playlist. If you listen to it during the work day every day, you'll hear the same songs, just shuffled around. And if you hear one Prince song, it will most likely be "Kiss". If you hear a two Prince songs, it's going to be "Kiss" and a really odd sounding version of "7". Plus the combination of Nickelback, Bon Jovi, Poison, Kid Rock, and Puddle Of Mudd amounts to a Perfect Storm of shit.
1.Hair bands, especially Bon Jovi and Poison. If you think of Generation X as being an entire age group, then including Hair Bands kind of makes sense. When I think of Generation X, I think less of an entire age group and more of a subculture within the age group who usually listened to more Alternative forms of music, whether it was Indie Rock, Techno, or even some harder or left-of-center kinds of Metal. The rise of Alternative Rock in the early '90s had a lot to do with people being sick of Hair Bands being the dominant form of Rock on the radio, which is why I don't think Hair Bands belong on a Gen-X themed station. In fact, this is closer to what I think of as a proper Gen-X station.
2.Too much Gen-Y crap. The logical ending cut off point for a Gen-X station in my opinion would be 2000, or maybe 1999 so we wouldn't have to put up with Kid Rock. They play way too much Nickelback, Puddle Of Mudd, Evanescence, Trapt, Linkin Park, Nelly, Kelly Clarkson, 3 Doors Down, Staind, and some stuff that's only 3 or 4 years old. Part of the fun of Gen-X Radio is hearing stuff that hadn't gotten played much in years, but the crap I just mentioned have been staples of Rock and Hot A.C. stations during the past ten years, so we haven't even had a chance to "miss" these songs yet. These songs are evidently getting too "old", and it's like Clear Channel is trying to find a place to dump them so they can make room for newer songs on their other stations.
3.On a similar note, most of the '90s Rock/MOR (Middle Of the Road) portion of the Gen-X Radio playlist were permanent staples of the Rock and Hot A.C. stations for the past 20 years! That's even more music that we haven't had a chance to miss yet.
4.Lots of really odd edits, like whole portions of songs getting cut. I think they do this to make more time for commercials.
5.They don't seem to know shit about genres on their commercials. Recently, I heard them describe "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" by The Offspring as Grunge, and "Rhythm Is A Dancer" by Snap! as Hip Hop. Really?
6.The last gripe (for now) is the same gripe I have about every other god damned commercial station out there: the playlist. If you listen to it during the work day every day, you'll hear the same songs, just shuffled around. And if you hear one Prince song, it will most likely be "Kiss". If you hear a two Prince songs, it's going to be "Kiss" and a really odd sounding version of "7". Plus the combination of Nickelback, Bon Jovi, Poison, Kid Rock, and Puddle Of Mudd amounts to a Perfect Storm of shit.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Radio Tales, Part 1: Radio and the work place
American terrestrial radio, as opposed to satellite or internet radio, sucks. Louisville-area radio is especially lame. The main choices around here are Country, Christian, Top 40, and Dinosaur Rock. The only time I listen to the radio is on relatively short trips, usually to Shepherdsville and back. I especially hate having to listen to the radio while at work. Being forced to listen to music I don't like seems to taint my memories of working at places that were otherwise somewhat pleasant to work at. I think I was one of the only people who cheered when Main ex-Employer decided to no longer let us have radios in the warehouse.
The only station that I really wanted to hear all day at Main ex-Employer was 91.9 WFPK, a public station, but we couldn't pick it up.
Top 40 stations were the worst because they play the same songs EVERY HOUR! KISS 98.9 had a much heavier emphasis on Urban hits than 99.7 DJX did. For some parts of 2005, 98.9 felt almost like "All 50 Cent, All the time", since you could hear as many as five songs featuring 50 Cent every hour, namely three of his own singles and two of The Game's singles that he guested on. One day in particular that was really annoying was when we listened to 98.9 for a couple of hours, then I turned it over to something different for the sake of hearing something different, then this girl from the weekend shift who was there for overtime turned it back over to KISS. After a while, I changed the channel again, then after a short period of time the same girl turned it back over to KISS.
Being forced to listen to one of the Country stations was even worse because I don't like new mainstream Country at all. For some perspective, I still consider any Country going back to 1990 "new Country". I don't like '80s Country either, but I'll save a Country rant for some other day. One of the last times I was forced to listen to a Country station at work was in October 2009. I ended up hearing Carrie Underwood's then-new song, "Cowboy Casanova", twice, and found it so irritating that I (figuratively, almost) wanted to kill myself.
Classic Rock is also pretty horrible because I've been so burned out on it for so long. Hearing the openings to some songs, especially "Turn The Page" by Bob Seger, makes me want to go postal. Louisville has two Classic Rock stations. The worst of the two is 107.7 SFR because they seem to play the same five songs from any particular artist/band, and is mostly '70s-centric. It's like their playlist consists of a 20-CD changer filled with those Millenium Collection CDs, and a CD-R of one-hit wonders (ex. "Never Been Any Reason" by Head East or "Jackie Blue" by Ozark Mountain Daredevils) and single tracks from major artists, like maybe one song each from AC/DC and George Harrison ("You Shook Me All Night Long" and "My Sweet Lord" respectively). 95.7 WQMF is the better of the two because they have more of a variety from across the decades, and deeper cuts than SFR. The sad thing is that what QMF now refers to as "Deep Cuts" is stuff that they used to play regularly 20 years ago when they were an AOR station.
Now on to the stations that played newer Rock in 2004/05. The station that I preferred was 105.1 WLRS. The LRS letters had a long history, but from 1997 through 2008 it was a half assed Modern Rock station, mostly playing harder '90s stuff, Pop-Punk and Emo type crap, a lot of Post-Grunge, and occasionally some Alternative Rock. The Rock station that most people preferred was The Fox (first at 100.5, then 93.1), which was more of an Active/Mainstream Rock channel, mostly a lot of post-Grunge/Nu-Metal with some '90s Megadeth, Pantera, or C.O.C. thrown in, and of course the harder overplayed '90s stuff. While I said that I preferred LRS, asking me which channel was better was like asking me which pile of shit smelled better. I remember one time, "Jane Says" by Jane's Addiction came on, one of only two Jane's Addiction songs that get played regularly on the radio. Some kid asked me, Who's this?", and I told him Jane's Addiction. I can't remember exactly, but I think he asked me what else they sang, and I told him they were the same band that did "Been Caught Stealing". The kid said, "Man, they're horrible!" You wouldn't believe how fucking pissed I was, and I explained to him that those songs are neither their best songs, nor representative of them. Later on, the kid asked me about some Crossfade song, and I was like, "Man, fuck Crossfade!" Crossfade ultimately had one hit and faded into obscurity, while Jane's Addiction live on as legends. I thought they also had one of the absolute best singles of the 2000s, "Just Because", which like many of the great Modern Rock singles got played for a while, then disappeared.
The only station we could pick up at Main ex-Employer that I could tolerate listening to all day was the oldies station, WASE 103.5 from Elizabethtown, mostly because you were guaranteed not to hear a song more than once throughout the day, and they played only a little of the '70s Rock that was the main focus of the Classic Rock stations. There was another oldies station around at that time, 103.1 WRKA, but I didn't like it as much for some reason. The two stations just seemed to have different vibes, and 103.5 had the better vibe.
The last job where I had to listen to the radio was last Summer at a warehouse in Cecilia, on the very west side of Elizabethtown. I didn't have to listen to the radio all the time, just occasionally, and the main channel they listened to was 98.3 WQXE, I think the best way to describe it would be MOR (Middle Of the Road). I remember walking by this one woman's work area and hearing the chorus to "All The Right Moves" by One Republic. I kind of thought to myself, "Oh shit, this moment is going to haunt me for the rest of my life." What made it even odder was that I thought the line went "They've got all the right friends in all the right places, who cares, we're going down!", and thinking it made no sense, especially since I didn't know how the rest of the song went. BTW, it turns out he's not saying "Who cares, we're going down," but "So yeah, we're going down." And while I can't say I "like" one Republic, I don't dislike them, and I think they have an interesting sound, especially that ridiculously huge John Bonham-esque drum sound. Another story from that same job: The radio wasn't on, but I was trying to explain to these two girls about how I like music, but hate radio, and I also said that I liked Rock, but I didn't feel like explaining that I only liked certain types of Rock. The radio was eventually turned on. I got back to the work area after a break or lunch sooner than most of the people. The radio was on WQXE, and at one point they played "A Little Respect" by Erasure, a song that I actually like. The girls get back from the break, one of the girls hears "A Little Respect", turns the radio off, and says "It's got to be to EVERYBODY's taste. That makes me want to go to church." To which I responded, "There's really no such thing." I don't know if she mistook it for a Rock song and thought I had turned it over to a Rock station or what, but I thought that was ignorant. That pissed me off almost as the time I mentioned earlier about the boy saying that Jane's Addiction was horrible. But seriously, WQXE was about the closest thing to "everybody's taste" as you're going to get. I think the radio ended up getting turned on later anyway.
The only station that I really wanted to hear all day at Main ex-Employer was 91.9 WFPK, a public station, but we couldn't pick it up.
Top 40 stations were the worst because they play the same songs EVERY HOUR! KISS 98.9 had a much heavier emphasis on Urban hits than 99.7 DJX did. For some parts of 2005, 98.9 felt almost like "All 50 Cent, All the time", since you could hear as many as five songs featuring 50 Cent every hour, namely three of his own singles and two of The Game's singles that he guested on. One day in particular that was really annoying was when we listened to 98.9 for a couple of hours, then I turned it over to something different for the sake of hearing something different, then this girl from the weekend shift who was there for overtime turned it back over to KISS. After a while, I changed the channel again, then after a short period of time the same girl turned it back over to KISS.
Being forced to listen to one of the Country stations was even worse because I don't like new mainstream Country at all. For some perspective, I still consider any Country going back to 1990 "new Country". I don't like '80s Country either, but I'll save a Country rant for some other day. One of the last times I was forced to listen to a Country station at work was in October 2009. I ended up hearing Carrie Underwood's then-new song, "Cowboy Casanova", twice, and found it so irritating that I (figuratively, almost) wanted to kill myself.
Classic Rock is also pretty horrible because I've been so burned out on it for so long. Hearing the openings to some songs, especially "Turn The Page" by Bob Seger, makes me want to go postal. Louisville has two Classic Rock stations. The worst of the two is 107.7 SFR because they seem to play the same five songs from any particular artist/band, and is mostly '70s-centric. It's like their playlist consists of a 20-CD changer filled with those Millenium Collection CDs, and a CD-R of one-hit wonders (ex. "Never Been Any Reason" by Head East or "Jackie Blue" by Ozark Mountain Daredevils) and single tracks from major artists, like maybe one song each from AC/DC and George Harrison ("You Shook Me All Night Long" and "My Sweet Lord" respectively). 95.7 WQMF is the better of the two because they have more of a variety from across the decades, and deeper cuts than SFR. The sad thing is that what QMF now refers to as "Deep Cuts" is stuff that they used to play regularly 20 years ago when they were an AOR station.
Now on to the stations that played newer Rock in 2004/05. The station that I preferred was 105.1 WLRS. The LRS letters had a long history, but from 1997 through 2008 it was a half assed Modern Rock station, mostly playing harder '90s stuff, Pop-Punk and Emo type crap, a lot of Post-Grunge, and occasionally some Alternative Rock. The Rock station that most people preferred was The Fox (first at 100.5, then 93.1), which was more of an Active/Mainstream Rock channel, mostly a lot of post-Grunge/Nu-Metal with some '90s Megadeth, Pantera, or C.O.C. thrown in, and of course the harder overplayed '90s stuff. While I said that I preferred LRS, asking me which channel was better was like asking me which pile of shit smelled better. I remember one time, "Jane Says" by Jane's Addiction came on, one of only two Jane's Addiction songs that get played regularly on the radio. Some kid asked me, Who's this?", and I told him Jane's Addiction. I can't remember exactly, but I think he asked me what else they sang, and I told him they were the same band that did "Been Caught Stealing". The kid said, "Man, they're horrible!" You wouldn't believe how fucking pissed I was, and I explained to him that those songs are neither their best songs, nor representative of them. Later on, the kid asked me about some Crossfade song, and I was like, "Man, fuck Crossfade!" Crossfade ultimately had one hit and faded into obscurity, while Jane's Addiction live on as legends. I thought they also had one of the absolute best singles of the 2000s, "Just Because", which like many of the great Modern Rock singles got played for a while, then disappeared.
The only station we could pick up at Main ex-Employer that I could tolerate listening to all day was the oldies station, WASE 103.5 from Elizabethtown, mostly because you were guaranteed not to hear a song more than once throughout the day, and they played only a little of the '70s Rock that was the main focus of the Classic Rock stations. There was another oldies station around at that time, 103.1 WRKA, but I didn't like it as much for some reason. The two stations just seemed to have different vibes, and 103.5 had the better vibe.
The last job where I had to listen to the radio was last Summer at a warehouse in Cecilia, on the very west side of Elizabethtown. I didn't have to listen to the radio all the time, just occasionally, and the main channel they listened to was 98.3 WQXE, I think the best way to describe it would be MOR (Middle Of the Road). I remember walking by this one woman's work area and hearing the chorus to "All The Right Moves" by One Republic. I kind of thought to myself, "Oh shit, this moment is going to haunt me for the rest of my life." What made it even odder was that I thought the line went "They've got all the right friends in all the right places, who cares, we're going down!", and thinking it made no sense, especially since I didn't know how the rest of the song went. BTW, it turns out he's not saying "Who cares, we're going down," but "So yeah, we're going down." And while I can't say I "like" one Republic, I don't dislike them, and I think they have an interesting sound, especially that ridiculously huge John Bonham-esque drum sound. Another story from that same job: The radio wasn't on, but I was trying to explain to these two girls about how I like music, but hate radio, and I also said that I liked Rock, but I didn't feel like explaining that I only liked certain types of Rock. The radio was eventually turned on. I got back to the work area after a break or lunch sooner than most of the people. The radio was on WQXE, and at one point they played "A Little Respect" by Erasure, a song that I actually like. The girls get back from the break, one of the girls hears "A Little Respect", turns the radio off, and says "It's got to be to EVERYBODY's taste. That makes me want to go to church." To which I responded, "There's really no such thing." I don't know if she mistook it for a Rock song and thought I had turned it over to a Rock station or what, but I thought that was ignorant. That pissed me off almost as the time I mentioned earlier about the boy saying that Jane's Addiction was horrible. But seriously, WQXE was about the closest thing to "everybody's taste" as you're going to get. I think the radio ended up getting turned on later anyway.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Happy Dynamic Range Day! Some of my favorite recent masterings.
In celebration of Dynamic Range Day, I've decided that instead of bitching about bad mastering jobs, I'll list some of my favorite relatively recent mastering jobs, mastering engineers, etc. It will follow no real format.
Neil Young - Greatest Hits, mastered by Tim Mulligan. Original master tapes transferred by John Nowland, just thought I'd add him in there.
Rod Stewart - The Definitive Rod Stewart, mastered by Dave Schultz and Dan Hersch. I bought this expecting a compressed mess, and was pleasantly surprised when I actually heard it.
Venom - Black Metal (2002 remaster), I don't know who mastered it. Not a great sounding recording, but whoever remastered it did a great job. The Venom remasters are some of the only properly mastered Metal CD remasters that I know of. Totally makes me want to snatch up "Welcome To Hell" and "At War With Satan".
The Beatles remasters, mastered by Guy Massey and Steve Rooke. Only some very mild peak limiting was used on the stereo remasters, and no compression was used on the mono box set.
Franz Ferdinand - self titled debut, mastered by Steve Rooke. One of the best mastered popular CDs of the 2000s, proving that loudness doesn't improve sales, or makes a song louder on the radio. Seriously, I hear no difference in volume on the radio between "Take Me Out" and any other recent song.
Guns n' Roses - Chinese Democracy, mastered by Bob Ludwig. I bought this CD on the strength of the mastering alone. It's no "Appetite For Destruction", but it's pretty great compared to what passes for Hard Rock these days. One of my friends even called it GnR's "Pet Sounds".
The Clash remasters, mastered by Ray Staff and Bob Whitney, remastering supervision by Bill Price. I don't know how compressed these actually are, but I think they tend to sound good overall.
Beastie Boys - To The 5 Boroughs, mastered by Chris Athens. Seems pretty loud with all that bass thumping going on, but it's far from brickwalled.
The Essential Cheap Trick/Hall & Oates/Roy Orbison, mastered by Vic Anesini. If you see Vic Anesini's name on something, then it probably sounds good. It's a shame that he didn't do all of the "Essential" CDs, in fact the only "Essential" in my collection that wasn't mastered by him that I can recommend is...
The Essential Bruce Springsteen, mastered by Bob Ludwig. I think it sounds really good, up until you get to "The Rising". It's an interesting study in recording techniques over the years, and how the crappiness of modern recorded sound isn't always the fault of the mastering engineer. (Update, May 4, 2012: Or maybe it is. Bob Ludwig has done great work in the past, and while a lot of his recent work is nowhere near as bad as, say, Vlado Meller or Ted Jensen, I'm still not impressed with a lot of it. But Brendan O'Brien's tendency to make loud mixes still makes me think that the problem with "The Rising" is more in the mix than the mastering.)
Faith No More - Angel Dust (Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab gold disc edition), mastered by Rob LoVerde. Angel Dust was one of the most compressed CDs of its time (1992), and here it gets a more dynamic mastering. I swear I've heard things in this edition that I've never noticed before, even while listening in the car!
Alice Cooper - Love It To Death/Killer/School's Out (Audio Fidelity gold CDs), mastered by Steve Hoffman.
Now on to some Louisville music.
Brigid Kaelin - Keep Your Secrets (mastered by Chris Griffin, assisted by Ben Andrews) and West 28th Street (mastered by Duane Lundy).
Eddie & The Fuck Munkys - The World's Greatest American Barroom Rock n Roll Band Vol. 1, no mastering credit.
None of the three above seem to have been mastered with loudness in mind. The more recent of Brigid Kaelin's CDs, "West 28th Street", is even quieter than the previous one.
Blade Of The Ripper - Taste The Blade, no mastering credit. I hear some of the same kind of distortion as on "Death Magnetic", but it's only mildly compressed, and severely crankable! I wish more Metal CDs were mastered like that.
Stonecutters - self titled debut and Christhammer, no mastering credits. The first Stonecutters CD is another one that I wish more Modern Metal CDs sounded like. Christhammer is more compressed, but still not bad.
The last CD I want to mention is an oldie-but-goodie, and one of the most nut-bustingest finds in my recent used CD search. It's the 1994 reissue of Slayer's "South Of Heaven", mastered by Barry Diament. I didn't get into collecting older Slayer until after the remasters in 1998 came out. Ever since I discovered the Loudness War, I've been hoping to find earlier editions, and last Thursday I found that copy of "South Of Heaven". It's by far my best sounding Slayer CD. Here are what waveforms are supposed to look like.
Here are the same songs from the "Soundtrack To The Apocalypse" box set.
Bleargh! So we know that the remastered versions look yucky, but how does the sound actually compare? The main difference I've noticed is that the kick drums on the original almost sound like a real kick drum was miked in a studio, as opposed to just a generic thump. The original also just seems to have more "depth".
The Dynamic Range Day Award
The Dynamic Range Day site just gave out the Dynamic Range Day Award. The nominees were:
Laura Marling – “I Speak Because I Can”
LCD Soundsystem – “This Is Happening”
The Coral – “Butterfly House”
Elbow – “Build A Rocket Boys!”
Massive Attack – “Heligoland”
Neil Young – “Le Noise”
Mumford & Sons – “Sigh No More”
Four Tet – “There Is Love In You”
Norah Jones – “…Featuring”
The winner was Elbow, with "Build A Rocket Boys!"
I think I may have to get those LCD Soundsystem and Massive Attack CDs in the near future.
Neil Young - Greatest Hits, mastered by Tim Mulligan. Original master tapes transferred by John Nowland, just thought I'd add him in there.
Rod Stewart - The Definitive Rod Stewart, mastered by Dave Schultz and Dan Hersch. I bought this expecting a compressed mess, and was pleasantly surprised when I actually heard it.
Venom - Black Metal (2002 remaster), I don't know who mastered it. Not a great sounding recording, but whoever remastered it did a great job. The Venom remasters are some of the only properly mastered Metal CD remasters that I know of. Totally makes me want to snatch up "Welcome To Hell" and "At War With Satan".
The Beatles remasters, mastered by Guy Massey and Steve Rooke. Only some very mild peak limiting was used on the stereo remasters, and no compression was used on the mono box set.
Franz Ferdinand - self titled debut, mastered by Steve Rooke. One of the best mastered popular CDs of the 2000s, proving that loudness doesn't improve sales, or makes a song louder on the radio. Seriously, I hear no difference in volume on the radio between "Take Me Out" and any other recent song.
Guns n' Roses - Chinese Democracy, mastered by Bob Ludwig. I bought this CD on the strength of the mastering alone. It's no "Appetite For Destruction", but it's pretty great compared to what passes for Hard Rock these days. One of my friends even called it GnR's "Pet Sounds".
The Clash remasters, mastered by Ray Staff and Bob Whitney, remastering supervision by Bill Price. I don't know how compressed these actually are, but I think they tend to sound good overall.
Beastie Boys - To The 5 Boroughs, mastered by Chris Athens. Seems pretty loud with all that bass thumping going on, but it's far from brickwalled.
The Essential Cheap Trick/Hall & Oates/Roy Orbison, mastered by Vic Anesini. If you see Vic Anesini's name on something, then it probably sounds good. It's a shame that he didn't do all of the "Essential" CDs, in fact the only "Essential" in my collection that wasn't mastered by him that I can recommend is...
The Essential Bruce Springsteen, mastered by Bob Ludwig. I think it sounds really good, up until you get to "The Rising". It's an interesting study in recording techniques over the years, and how the crappiness of modern recorded sound isn't always the fault of the mastering engineer. (Update, May 4, 2012: Or maybe it is. Bob Ludwig has done great work in the past, and while a lot of his recent work is nowhere near as bad as, say, Vlado Meller or Ted Jensen, I'm still not impressed with a lot of it. But Brendan O'Brien's tendency to make loud mixes still makes me think that the problem with "The Rising" is more in the mix than the mastering.)
Faith No More - Angel Dust (Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab gold disc edition), mastered by Rob LoVerde. Angel Dust was one of the most compressed CDs of its time (1992), and here it gets a more dynamic mastering. I swear I've heard things in this edition that I've never noticed before, even while listening in the car!
Alice Cooper - Love It To Death/Killer/School's Out (Audio Fidelity gold CDs), mastered by Steve Hoffman.
Now on to some Louisville music.
Brigid Kaelin - Keep Your Secrets (mastered by Chris Griffin, assisted by Ben Andrews) and West 28th Street (mastered by Duane Lundy).
Eddie & The Fuck Munkys - The World's Greatest American Barroom Rock n Roll Band Vol. 1, no mastering credit.
None of the three above seem to have been mastered with loudness in mind. The more recent of Brigid Kaelin's CDs, "West 28th Street", is even quieter than the previous one.
Blade Of The Ripper - Taste The Blade, no mastering credit. I hear some of the same kind of distortion as on "Death Magnetic", but it's only mildly compressed, and severely crankable! I wish more Metal CDs were mastered like that.
Stonecutters - self titled debut and Christhammer, no mastering credits. The first Stonecutters CD is another one that I wish more Modern Metal CDs sounded like. Christhammer is more compressed, but still not bad.
The last CD I want to mention is an oldie-but-goodie, and one of the most nut-bustingest finds in my recent used CD search. It's the 1994 reissue of Slayer's "South Of Heaven", mastered by Barry Diament. I didn't get into collecting older Slayer until after the remasters in 1998 came out. Ever since I discovered the Loudness War, I've been hoping to find earlier editions, and last Thursday I found that copy of "South Of Heaven". It's by far my best sounding Slayer CD. Here are what waveforms are supposed to look like.
 |
| Live Undead |
 |
| Silent Scream |
 | |
| Live Undead |
 |
| Silent Scream |
The Dynamic Range Day Award
The Dynamic Range Day site just gave out the Dynamic Range Day Award. The nominees were:
Laura Marling – “I Speak Because I Can”
LCD Soundsystem – “This Is Happening”
The Coral – “Butterfly House”
Elbow – “Build A Rocket Boys!”
Massive Attack – “Heligoland”
Neil Young – “Le Noise”
Mumford & Sons – “Sigh No More”
Four Tet – “There Is Love In You”
Norah Jones – “…Featuring”
The winner was Elbow, with "Build A Rocket Boys!"
I think I may have to get those LCD Soundsystem and Massive Attack CDs in the near future.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Dynamic Range Day is March 25th!
I meant to mention in one of my last Loudness War entries that there seems to be a little progress being made. Bands like Pearl Jam, Weezer, and Iron Maiden have dialed the compression down on their most recent recordings compared to some of their earlier work. That makes it all the more sad when I hear something recent that's significantly louder than its predecessor. Take Kanye West for example. I think most of his CDs sound decent by modern day standards, but his latest one, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy", is significantly louder than "808s & Heartbreak" from 2008, or any of his other CDs for that matter. When I listen to my Kanye CDs in the car, I have to turn the bass and treble down a little bit, mostly the bass. The new one is so shrill sounding that I turn the treble all the way down to 0, while the bass is is probably at 3 or 4 (The highest I can go is 7, with the lowest being -7). Another example are the Dethklok/Metalocalypse CDs. The first one wasn't exactly audiophile quality, but wasn't bad by modern Metal mastering standards. The second one is significantly louder. It's nowhere near Death Magnetic bad, more like closer to your average Metal CD.
Some good recent Loudness War articles:
1.Loudness means NOTHING on the radio.
Debunks the myth that louder CDs sound better or louder than less loud songs on the radio, and in fact they just sound worse.
2.Loudness War vs. Sales - The Truth
3.Up to 11: The problem with modern music
A good overview of the Loudness War. My only gripe is the mention in this and other articles about "Songs For The Deaf" by Queens Of The Stone Age as being one of the worst. It's not.
One thing I want to do in this entry is mention pre-Loudness War CDs in my collection that are really loud and compressed, in this case I'll go by stuff released before Guns n' Roses' "The Spaghetti Incident?". I've had some of these since the early 1990s, while others have been bought more recently. I'll admit, the ones that I've had for a long time did sound pretty good on the Sony boombox that was my first CD player. I'll try to list these in order of release, and I'm judging them more by actual sound quality than the appearance of the wave forms. And NONE of these are remasters!
1991
Fishbone - The Reality Of My Surroundings, released April 23, mastered by Wally Traugott.
I bought this last year, I expected it to sound way better than it did. This is one of those that I'm not entirely sure can be blamed on the mastering. Their cover of "Freddie's Dead" from 1988 has a similar sound, so it's possible that they were going for a really compressed sound. It's no wonder that the records don't do their live show justice at all. Below is "Sunless Saturday" and "So Many Millions."
Skid Row - Slave To The Grind, released June 11, mastered by George Marino.
One of the first CDs in my collection. I think I had to turn down the treble a little in my car when I listened to it recently. Here's "The Threat".
1992
Godflesh - Pure, released Spring, no mastering credit.
Another one of my early ones, and another one that I have to turn down the treble for. Could use some more bass. Earache Records had a bad habit of not listing mastering engineers on their CDs. We'll see more from Earache later. Here's "Mothra."
Black Sabbath - Dehumanizer, released Summer, no mastering credit.
I snatched this up a couple of years ago because it wasn't a remaster, and thought there was no way it could sound bad. Boy, was I wrong. I don't know if the 2008 remaster is any better or not. The deluxe versions of Black Sabbath's albums that have come out more recently are said to be the best on CD, and supposedly "Dehumanizer" is no exception. I've heard from at least one person that the deluxe edition does indeed sound better than the original. But back to the original, here's a "typical" track, "Letters From Earth".
Alice In Chains - Dirt, released September 29, mastered by Steve Hall and Eddy Schreyer.
This one looks more typical of a 1994 release, like it was digitally limited. If so, then it would probably be one of the earliest examples. I rarely ever factor clipping into my judgments, but I swear I hear some clipping on the title track. Overall, it still sounds way better than "Black Gives Way To Blue". Here's "Dam That River".
1993 - All three of these releases are from Earache Records, released during the time that Earache was being distributed by Columbia Records. None of these have mastering credits.
Cathedral - The Ethereal Mirror, released February.
Here's "Midnight Mountain".
Fudge Tunnel - Creep Diets, I think it was released in the Spring.
Relatively lo-fi, suffers from the compression. Here's "Grit".
And last, Entombed - Wolverine Blues, I think it was released in the Summer, possibly Fall.
I think this one doesn't really sound too bad. Here's "Hollowman".
I apologize for the spacing in this entry, it was kind of a bitch to try to format.
Monday, March 7, 2011
The Loudness War, continued
It should be noted that Rock and Pop music doesn't really need the amount of dynamic range that genres such as Classical and Jazz require, they really just need enough dynamic range to keep from causing headaches.
When I said at the end of my last Loudness War entry that Fear Factory's "Demanufacture" was loud enough to not need a remaster, I meant to say that it didn't need a remaster that was even louder and more compressed. IMO it could use a less compressed remaster. (Update, July 15 2012: From what I've read, the remaster supposedly has more bass, which kind of makes me wish I still had my remaster to compare with, but I still think the old CD sounds fine.)
One of the reasons for the Loudness War was supposedly so CDs could sound better in cars, boom boxes, and other low end stereo equipment. I'll admit, with all the road and car noise going on, a lot of compressed CDs do sound better in the car than "quieter" CDs. While I don't really regret selling my remastered copy of Fear Factory's "Demanufacture", I almost do regret selling my remastered copy of their first album, "Soul Of A New Machine", just because it sounded better in the car than my original master does. I might even buy the remaster for Nine Inch Nails' "Pretty Hate Machine" because the old CD is too quiet for car listening. However, I'm keeping my old copy for home listening.
But a lot of modern CDs are barely even tolerable to listen to in the car. The worst and most documented case is Metallica's "Death Magnetic". Song-wise, I think it's the best album Metallica has put out since "...And Justice For All." I'd even go so far as to say it's one of my favorite Metal albums of the 2000s. But sound-wise, it's absolutely atrocious! There are no dynamics, and it's distorted as all get out. Not even road noise can cover up ALL of the clipping! It's one of those cases I referred to in my last Loudness War entry as being jacked up in every step of the process. They recorded everything too loud during tracking, the mix was jacked up if not compressed all to Hell, and the mastering was the cherry on top. Mastering engineer Ted Jensen claimed that the mix was already jacked up when it got to him. Whether he did any further compressing or not, he could at least have let the sound peak at something lower than 0 dBFS. The wave forms for it remind me of a fake porn title used in the movie Clerks, "All Holes Filled With Hard Cock." "Death Magnetic" is arguably the all around worst sounding CD in my collection, but it's almost saved by the fact that the music isn't as extreme as some other Metal CDs that are only marginally louder or quieter.
Metal is the biggest victim of the Loudness War, the more extreme, the worse. I'm mostly referring to Death Metal, Black Metal, and Grindcore. It's like, "Let's take something that's hard to listen to, and make it totally unlistenable!" No wonder I'm so jaded when it comes to newer Metal. I occasionally like to see Metal bands play live, and as long as the mix is okay and you're wearing earplugs, it usually sounds pretty good. The CDs don't really capture the sense of live dynamics though. The bad mastering is especially sad since modern extreme Metal is so much better recorded than the extreme Metal of the late '80s/early '90s. (Hardcore can be just as extreme and badly mastered, but I don't really care for most Hardcore made after 1986 anyway.)
When I said at the end of my last Loudness War entry that Fear Factory's "Demanufacture" was loud enough to not need a remaster, I meant to say that it didn't need a remaster that was even louder and more compressed. IMO it could use a less compressed remaster. (Update, July 15 2012: From what I've read, the remaster supposedly has more bass, which kind of makes me wish I still had my remaster to compare with, but I still think the old CD sounds fine.)
One of the reasons for the Loudness War was supposedly so CDs could sound better in cars, boom boxes, and other low end stereo equipment. I'll admit, with all the road and car noise going on, a lot of compressed CDs do sound better in the car than "quieter" CDs. While I don't really regret selling my remastered copy of Fear Factory's "Demanufacture", I almost do regret selling my remastered copy of their first album, "Soul Of A New Machine", just because it sounded better in the car than my original master does. I might even buy the remaster for Nine Inch Nails' "Pretty Hate Machine" because the old CD is too quiet for car listening. However, I'm keeping my old copy for home listening.
But a lot of modern CDs are barely even tolerable to listen to in the car. The worst and most documented case is Metallica's "Death Magnetic". Song-wise, I think it's the best album Metallica has put out since "...And Justice For All." I'd even go so far as to say it's one of my favorite Metal albums of the 2000s. But sound-wise, it's absolutely atrocious! There are no dynamics, and it's distorted as all get out. Not even road noise can cover up ALL of the clipping! It's one of those cases I referred to in my last Loudness War entry as being jacked up in every step of the process. They recorded everything too loud during tracking, the mix was jacked up if not compressed all to Hell, and the mastering was the cherry on top. Mastering engineer Ted Jensen claimed that the mix was already jacked up when it got to him. Whether he did any further compressing or not, he could at least have let the sound peak at something lower than 0 dBFS. The wave forms for it remind me of a fake porn title used in the movie Clerks, "All Holes Filled With Hard Cock." "Death Magnetic" is arguably the all around worst sounding CD in my collection, but it's almost saved by the fact that the music isn't as extreme as some other Metal CDs that are only marginally louder or quieter.
Metal is the biggest victim of the Loudness War, the more extreme, the worse. I'm mostly referring to Death Metal, Black Metal, and Grindcore. It's like, "Let's take something that's hard to listen to, and make it totally unlistenable!" No wonder I'm so jaded when it comes to newer Metal. I occasionally like to see Metal bands play live, and as long as the mix is okay and you're wearing earplugs, it usually sounds pretty good. The CDs don't really capture the sense of live dynamics though. The bad mastering is especially sad since modern extreme Metal is so much better recorded than the extreme Metal of the late '80s/early '90s. (Hardcore can be just as extreme and badly mastered, but I don't really care for most Hardcore made after 1986 anyway.)
Monday, February 28, 2011
Recent thoughts about music: The Loudness War
(DISCLAIMER, added May 4, 2012, and this applies to all my Loudness War related entries: I don't have access to the actual masters of any recordings I refer to, so some statements might be inaccurate.)
I've been wanting to do an entry about The Loudness War since I started this "thoughts about music" series, but haven't exactly known what to do with it, or what aspects to discuss. There are plenty of articles and videos that do a good job of explaining the history and technical aspects of it, so what do I have to add to the discussion? Some anecdotal evidence and waveform pictures, that's what!
I used to think that louder CDs were better. Then I read the Rolling Stone article The Death Of High Fidelity, and I realized that really loud CDs actually sounded like crap. Almost a year after I had read the article, I came across a perfect example of how crappy modern mastered music was compared to decently mastered music. I went to a friend's DJ gig at a bar, and the first two songs he played were some old songs from Parliament and Morris Day & The Time. The music was LOUD, but it sounded pretty good. Later on, he played Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl", and it sounded really harsh and headache inducing. It was obvious to me that the dynamic range of it was squashed all to Hell. Never minding the lossy compression (which is different from Dynamic Range Compression) of YouTube videos, you can probably recreate this experiment at home. Put on a Parliament video, crank it up to a loud (but comfortable) level, then put on Katy Perry, and try not to turn it down. :)
I wonder sometimes if I use the Loudness War as a convenient excuse to ignore new music, remembering that there were plenty of CDs on my "Favorites of the 2000s" list that were terribly compressed. Then I remember some of those CDs that might have been more fun to listen to had they not been so squashed. Take for example Weezer's "Maladroit". Here is a picture of the first single, "Dope Nose":
SMASH! Let's compare that to a prime slice of Power Pop of similar length from Urge Overkill's awesome 1993 album "Saturation", a track called "Woman 2 Woman":
Do you see all those spikes above and below the solid blue parts? That's a good thing! Now let's take a look at something else that's well mastered and fun to listen to, "Trash", from The New York Dolls' classic 1973 self titled debut. This seems to have no compression at all in the mastering stage:
In 2006, surviving NY Dolls members David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain reunited and released a new record, "One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This." I bought it in October of that year, mostly on the strength of "Dance Like A Monkey", and was slightly disappointed with the album as a whole. I listened to it a few times, then basically put it away, giving it another try the following Spring or Summer. I enjoyed it quite a bit more then, it's a much better Spring/Summer record than a Fall/Winter record. Some other things that would have made it better would have been if they had called the band something other than The New York Dolls, and if they had taken a couple of tracks off, namely the slower ones. Years later, I realized that it also would've been a hell of a lot more fun to listen to had they not compressed it so bad. Take a look at one of the songs that is closer in spirit to the old Dolls, "Gimmie Luv & Turn On The Light."
If you think that looks bad, then you ought to hear it! Again, you can probably look these up on YouTube and get an idea of how they sound.
One thing that I've discovered in all my research is that there is more to the problem than just compression/limiting in the mastering stage. On more recent recordings, some problems are caused by recording too loud, most others are caused by jacking up all the levels in the mix and/or compressing in the mixing stage. I wish I could say I was an expert at differentiating just plain loud mixes from those masters that are heavily compressed, but I'm not. I have a lot of CDs from the early 1990s that are really compressed, the main differences between these older CDs and the Loudness War victims are that the older CDs used analog compressors, and they usually left about a decibel of space above the main peaks of the music to give the music some "breathing room" as well as avoid clipping. What really got the Loudness War rolling was the mass production of digital brickwall limiters. The modern day Loudness War is generally considered to have started full bore with Oasis's 1995 album, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?". I don't currently own it, so I can't make my own examples from it, and using the tracks from it that are on my "Stop The Clocks" compilation wouldn't be fair because they're supposedly even more compressed than on the original album. The only decent waveform from that album that I could find online was on this guy's Loudness War blog entry. (Check him out, he's basically from my generation, and seems to have the same angst about modern music as I do.) His waveform was for a ballad called "Cast No Shadow". I listened to it on YouTube, the song is entirely too quiet to have such a squashed waveform. But it's definitely not the first example of brickwalling. While the Wikipedia Loudness War entry says that digital brickwall limiters went into mass production in 1994, the earliest example of true brickwalling in my collection is from Guns n' Roses' "The Spaghetti Incident?", which came out on November 23, 1993. Check out their cover of The Stooges' "Raw Power".
A lot of brickwalled CDs were released in 1994, but most of them were fairly tasteful compared to what came later. That year, Oasis released "Definitely Maybe", and according to a lot of people it's almost as bad, if not as bad, as "Morning Glory." A few months before "Morning Glory", Fear Factory released "Demanufacture", which is probably my second most brickwalled looking (but not loudest!) pre-"Morning Glory" CD. Check out the track "Zero Signal" below.
Here is what "Zero Signal" looks like from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack.I don't know if any compression was applied, or if it's just a really loud mix. Whatever it is, it's more reminiscent of some of those loud Metal CDs I have from the early half of the 1990s. If this is an accurate snapshot of the mix that George Marino had to work with when mastering "Demanufacture", then I'd say that he didn't have much to compress, and he actually did a decent job. (Sorry, I realized that I was definitely talking out my ass, but decided to leave it and strike through it rather than deleting it.) It's very compressed, but uses a very different kind of compression than the "Demanufacture" version. I'm not sure how these were done, but the Mortal Kombat version looks something like plain old (yet heavy) Compression, while the Demanufacture version looks like it was Hard Limited. I'm not really sure which I like better.
I almost wish I still had my "Demanufacture" remaster just to compare these with. "Demanufacture" is loud enough that it really didn't need a remaster, which is why I eventually sold it. And honestly, the original is not that bad sounding.
To be continued...
I've been wanting to do an entry about The Loudness War since I started this "thoughts about music" series, but haven't exactly known what to do with it, or what aspects to discuss. There are plenty of articles and videos that do a good job of explaining the history and technical aspects of it, so what do I have to add to the discussion? Some anecdotal evidence and waveform pictures, that's what!
I used to think that louder CDs were better. Then I read the Rolling Stone article The Death Of High Fidelity, and I realized that really loud CDs actually sounded like crap. Almost a year after I had read the article, I came across a perfect example of how crappy modern mastered music was compared to decently mastered music. I went to a friend's DJ gig at a bar, and the first two songs he played were some old songs from Parliament and Morris Day & The Time. The music was LOUD, but it sounded pretty good. Later on, he played Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl", and it sounded really harsh and headache inducing. It was obvious to me that the dynamic range of it was squashed all to Hell. Never minding the lossy compression (which is different from Dynamic Range Compression) of YouTube videos, you can probably recreate this experiment at home. Put on a Parliament video, crank it up to a loud (but comfortable) level, then put on Katy Perry, and try not to turn it down. :)
I wonder sometimes if I use the Loudness War as a convenient excuse to ignore new music, remembering that there were plenty of CDs on my "Favorites of the 2000s" list that were terribly compressed. Then I remember some of those CDs that might have been more fun to listen to had they not been so squashed. Take for example Weezer's "Maladroit". Here is a picture of the first single, "Dope Nose":
SMASH! Let's compare that to a prime slice of Power Pop of similar length from Urge Overkill's awesome 1993 album "Saturation", a track called "Woman 2 Woman":
One thing that I've discovered in all my research is that there is more to the problem than just compression/limiting in the mastering stage. On more recent recordings, some problems are caused by recording too loud, most others are caused by jacking up all the levels in the mix and/or compressing in the mixing stage. I wish I could say I was an expert at differentiating just plain loud mixes from those masters that are heavily compressed, but I'm not. I have a lot of CDs from the early 1990s that are really compressed, the main differences between these older CDs and the Loudness War victims are that the older CDs used analog compressors, and they usually left about a decibel of space above the main peaks of the music to give the music some "breathing room" as well as avoid clipping. What really got the Loudness War rolling was the mass production of digital brickwall limiters. The modern day Loudness War is generally considered to have started full bore with Oasis's 1995 album, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?". I don't currently own it, so I can't make my own examples from it, and using the tracks from it that are on my "Stop The Clocks" compilation wouldn't be fair because they're supposedly even more compressed than on the original album. The only decent waveform from that album that I could find online was on this guy's Loudness War blog entry. (Check him out, he's basically from my generation, and seems to have the same angst about modern music as I do.) His waveform was for a ballad called "Cast No Shadow". I listened to it on YouTube, the song is entirely too quiet to have such a squashed waveform. But it's definitely not the first example of brickwalling. While the Wikipedia Loudness War entry says that digital brickwall limiters went into mass production in 1994, the earliest example of true brickwalling in my collection is from Guns n' Roses' "The Spaghetti Incident?", which came out on November 23, 1993. Check out their cover of The Stooges' "Raw Power".
Here is what "Zero Signal" looks like from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack.
To be continued...
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Recent thoughts about music, Part 2: Formats
For this installment, I've decided to talk about formats, which does factor in the Loudness War somewhat, instead of talking more directly about the Loudness War. A lot of people like to pit CDs against vinyl, or CDs against MP3s/downloads. I'm not really wild about lossy downloads, and prefer just about any physical product over them, whether it's CD, vinyl, or even (*GASP*) cassette tapes. For some reason, downloading just doesn't appeal to me, I'm not sure why. I especially can't condone illegal downloading because I'm all for artists getting paid. The only time I'd really do it anymore is when I want something that is extremely rare and unlikely to get reissued, like Pantera's first four pre-major label albums.
Of the most popular physical formats, I like CD the most due to it's convenience, and since a well mastered CD can sound just as good, possibly even better, than vinyl. To get the best out of your vinyl, you need to give them a deep cleaning. With CDs, you just pop them in the player and enjoy! Unfortunately, it seems that the pooch has been screwed in the mastering department, with an assist sometimes coming from the mix. When I first learned about the Loudness War, a lot of people touted vinyl as being an alternative to ultra-compressed CDs. I soon learned though that vinyl has it's mastering issues as well. Vinyl is only as good as the source it is mastered from, and the plant that it's pressed at. Good vinyl editions are usually sourced either from analog master tapes or high resolution (or at least higher than 16/44.1) digital masters. Some vinyl are sourced from CDs, and in that case you're better off just buying the CD! One example: a record from The Who from Universal's "Back To Black" series? Bad*. The same Who record from Classic Records? Good! (*There are very few "Back To Black" series records I know of that aren't sourced from CDs, so I'm assuming that the ones from The Who are CD-sourced as well. But I could be wrong.) Before you get into vinyl, you really want to do some research. A lot of albums are licensed out to other companies, and you'll want to find out which companies are good, and which ones you'll want to avoid. You'll also want to find out about pressing plants.
Another reason that I currently prefer CDs over vinyl is that with my current living arrangement, I have nowhere to put my turntable. It's been boxed up ever since I moved out of my brother-in-law's place two years ago. That makes me a sad panda. Vinyl can be really neat sometimes. In 2008, I bought My Morning Jacket's "Evil Urges" on vinyl since it conveniently came with the CD. The CD was definitely good for car listening. One of the tracks that was getting played on the radio was "I'm Amazed", which never really impressed me. But there was something about listening to that song on vinyl that made it downright magical. Maybe it was the fact that I was sitting down and listening to it, letting it soak in, rather than hearing it on the go. The art of just listening to music is one I hope to rediscover someday, but that's another story for another day.
Cassette tapes aren't really a good format. They're probably better used to make copies of your vinyl or CDs than they are in prerecorded form, but I think I'd still rather listen to a prerecorded tape than to lossy downloads. Cassette copies of other cassettes? UGH! I seriously can't stand those.
My next installment will probably be about mastering and remasters.
Of the most popular physical formats, I like CD the most due to it's convenience, and since a well mastered CD can sound just as good, possibly even better, than vinyl. To get the best out of your vinyl, you need to give them a deep cleaning. With CDs, you just pop them in the player and enjoy! Unfortunately, it seems that the pooch has been screwed in the mastering department, with an assist sometimes coming from the mix. When I first learned about the Loudness War, a lot of people touted vinyl as being an alternative to ultra-compressed CDs. I soon learned though that vinyl has it's mastering issues as well. Vinyl is only as good as the source it is mastered from, and the plant that it's pressed at. Good vinyl editions are usually sourced either from analog master tapes or high resolution (or at least higher than 16/44.1) digital masters. Some vinyl are sourced from CDs, and in that case you're better off just buying the CD! One example: a record from The Who from Universal's "Back To Black" series? Bad*. The same Who record from Classic Records? Good! (*There are very few "Back To Black" series records I know of that aren't sourced from CDs, so I'm assuming that the ones from The Who are CD-sourced as well. But I could be wrong.) Before you get into vinyl, you really want to do some research. A lot of albums are licensed out to other companies, and you'll want to find out which companies are good, and which ones you'll want to avoid. You'll also want to find out about pressing plants.
Another reason that I currently prefer CDs over vinyl is that with my current living arrangement, I have nowhere to put my turntable. It's been boxed up ever since I moved out of my brother-in-law's place two years ago. That makes me a sad panda. Vinyl can be really neat sometimes. In 2008, I bought My Morning Jacket's "Evil Urges" on vinyl since it conveniently came with the CD. The CD was definitely good for car listening. One of the tracks that was getting played on the radio was "I'm Amazed", which never really impressed me. But there was something about listening to that song on vinyl that made it downright magical. Maybe it was the fact that I was sitting down and listening to it, letting it soak in, rather than hearing it on the go. The art of just listening to music is one I hope to rediscover someday, but that's another story for another day.
Cassette tapes aren't really a good format. They're probably better used to make copies of your vinyl or CDs than they are in prerecorded form, but I think I'd still rather listen to a prerecorded tape than to lossy downloads. Cassette copies of other cassettes? UGH! I seriously can't stand those.
My next installment will probably be about mastering and remasters.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Recent thoughts about music, Part 1: "New" Music
I've been having a bad case of Writer's Block lately. I'll start on an entry, realize it's too ambitious for me to try to finish in one sitting, and save it in hopes of finishing it another day. I've had lots of thoughts about music, and have decided that the best way to go about it is to do it in separate parts. In this installment, I'll be focusing on what I think of new music. In my case, "new" could mean in the past ten years.
Back when I was really starting to get into music in the early 1990s, my main source of discovering music outside of radio and whatever my brother brought back with him from college was magazines. I've bought tapes and CDs just on the strength of what was said about them in magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin, or various Metal mags, Rip being my favorite one. The Telecoms Act of 1996 virtually killed radio, making formats and playlists narrower and narrower. But with the rise of satellite radio and music on the internet in the early 2000s, you didn't really need radio, and you could actually sample the bands you were reading about before you bought their music. Only one problem though: there is way too much music out there! I realized in the early 1990s that for every good/great band in a particular sub-genre, there were about a thousand mediocre/bad ones. The internet seems to have expanded that ratio to at least 10,000:1. I do hear a lot of music that is pleasant enough, yet doesn't really move me. It's stuff that I would probably enjoy more if I didn't have 55 years of Pop/Rock music history filling my head as it is. I feel like I've heard it all, and heard it done better. And on that note, why bother with new music when there's still so much good old music to catch up on, especially since the older CDs or vinyl are probably mastered better than the newer stuff. But that's a topic that I'll save for another time. Extreme forms of Metal are probably the best example. I can only take so many blast beats and Cookie Monster vocals before it just gets boring, and not many bands are really doing anything that hasn't really been done before.
Here were my favorite albums released between the years 2000-2010, in mostly alphabetical order and excluding local stuff.
Anthrax - We've Come For You All
At The Drive In - Relationship Of Command
Beastie Boys - To The 5 Boroughs
Black Kids - Party Traumatic
Bleeding Through - The Truth
Cannibal Corpse - The Wretched Spawn, Worm Infested (EP)
Danzig - 777: I Luciferi
Eagles Of Death Metal - Death By Sexy
Exodus - Shovel Headed Kill Machine
Fear Factory - Digimortal
Flight Of The Conchords - self-titled, I Told You I Was Freaky, The Distant Future (EP)
Franz Ferdinand - self titled
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Metallica - Death Magnetic
Metalocalypse:Dethklok - The Dethalbum, The Dethalbum II
Ministry - The Last Sucker
Outkast - Stankonia, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Pantera - Reinventing The Steel
Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R, Songs For The Deaf
Rage Against The Machine - Renegades
R.E.M. - Accelerate
Slayer - Christ Illusion
Static-X - Cannibal Killers Live
Superjoint Ritual - A Lethal Dose Of American Hatred
System Of A Down - Toxicity, Mezmerize, Hypnotize
Tenacious D - self titled
U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind, No Line On The Horizon
Kanye West - Late Registration, Graduation, 808s And Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
To some, that might seem like a relatively lengthy list, but it's probably a fraction of most music freaks' "favorites of the decade" lists. And did you notice that there aren't a whole lot of new artists? Kanye West was one of the few to come out in the past decade that really grabbed me. Seeing as that I consider myself a "rocker" and am not really all that into recent Pop or Hip Hop, that probably says something about the sad state of Rock music. To paraphrase what I said earlier, I find a lot of newer Indie Rock fairly pleasant, but as for Hard Rock, if I had kids, I'd almost rather they listen to Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga than Shinedown or Nickelback.
My next installment will most likely be about The Loudness War. If you don't know much about it, there's a good entry on it on Wikipedia, which includes lots of entertaining links for further reading.
The Loudness War Wikipedia entry
Back when I was really starting to get into music in the early 1990s, my main source of discovering music outside of radio and whatever my brother brought back with him from college was magazines. I've bought tapes and CDs just on the strength of what was said about them in magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin, or various Metal mags, Rip being my favorite one. The Telecoms Act of 1996 virtually killed radio, making formats and playlists narrower and narrower. But with the rise of satellite radio and music on the internet in the early 2000s, you didn't really need radio, and you could actually sample the bands you were reading about before you bought their music. Only one problem though: there is way too much music out there! I realized in the early 1990s that for every good/great band in a particular sub-genre, there were about a thousand mediocre/bad ones. The internet seems to have expanded that ratio to at least 10,000:1. I do hear a lot of music that is pleasant enough, yet doesn't really move me. It's stuff that I would probably enjoy more if I didn't have 55 years of Pop/Rock music history filling my head as it is. I feel like I've heard it all, and heard it done better. And on that note, why bother with new music when there's still so much good old music to catch up on, especially since the older CDs or vinyl are probably mastered better than the newer stuff. But that's a topic that I'll save for another time. Extreme forms of Metal are probably the best example. I can only take so many blast beats and Cookie Monster vocals before it just gets boring, and not many bands are really doing anything that hasn't really been done before.
Here were my favorite albums released between the years 2000-2010, in mostly alphabetical order and excluding local stuff.
Anthrax - We've Come For You All
At The Drive In - Relationship Of Command
Beastie Boys - To The 5 Boroughs
Black Kids - Party Traumatic
Bleeding Through - The Truth
Cannibal Corpse - The Wretched Spawn, Worm Infested (EP)
Danzig - 777: I Luciferi
Eagles Of Death Metal - Death By Sexy
Exodus - Shovel Headed Kill Machine
Fear Factory - Digimortal
Flight Of The Conchords - self-titled, I Told You I Was Freaky, The Distant Future (EP)
Franz Ferdinand - self titled
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Metallica - Death Magnetic
Metalocalypse:Dethklok - The Dethalbum, The Dethalbum II
Ministry - The Last Sucker
Outkast - Stankonia, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Pantera - Reinventing The Steel
Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R, Songs For The Deaf
Rage Against The Machine - Renegades
R.E.M. - Accelerate
Slayer - Christ Illusion
Static-X - Cannibal Killers Live
Superjoint Ritual - A Lethal Dose Of American Hatred
System Of A Down - Toxicity, Mezmerize, Hypnotize
Tenacious D - self titled
U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind, No Line On The Horizon
Kanye West - Late Registration, Graduation, 808s And Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
To some, that might seem like a relatively lengthy list, but it's probably a fraction of most music freaks' "favorites of the decade" lists. And did you notice that there aren't a whole lot of new artists? Kanye West was one of the few to come out in the past decade that really grabbed me. Seeing as that I consider myself a "rocker" and am not really all that into recent Pop or Hip Hop, that probably says something about the sad state of Rock music. To paraphrase what I said earlier, I find a lot of newer Indie Rock fairly pleasant, but as for Hard Rock, if I had kids, I'd almost rather they listen to Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga than Shinedown or Nickelback.
My next installment will most likely be about The Loudness War. If you don't know much about it, there's a good entry on it on Wikipedia, which includes lots of entertaining links for further reading.
The Loudness War Wikipedia entry
Monday, January 10, 2011
Cheap an' Nasty Uber-Sluts (an oldie)
I first posted this as a Note on my Facebook page on November 16, 2009.
I'd probably do a lot more writing if I could just dictate my thoughts out onto a text document from anywhere in the world, and edit them into something cohesive later on. This is especially true while I'm at work. With my current job, I'm able to do my job while thinking about lots of other crap. The worst is when I get a bad song stuck in my head. One of these songs has been “Cheap an' Nasty” by Whitesnake, from their 1989 album “Slip Of The Tongue”. The chorus goes:
“You're cheap an' nasty,
All you want to do is give it up, give it up,
Cheap an' nasty,
Come on and do the dirty with me.”
As you can probably tell just from reading the chorus, it's just one of many Hair Metal songs about some uber-slut who is going to rock your world. You know, some girl who probably had her hair teased out to high Heaven, wore a tight mini-skirt and high heels, and probably had every STD known to man by the time she was 21. And she was probably so loose by the time she had her first kid that childbirth didn't even hurt.
When I think back about how my taste in music has evolved over the years, I try to sort things out so that I'm as honest as possible, trying not to seem “cooler” than I actually was, because somebody who knew me back then would probably try to call me out on it. Believe it or not, there was a time when I wasn't all that into music. Before middle school, I did enjoy listening to music, but didn't go out of my way to learn much about it or even collect it. We, in this case meaning my brother and sister and I, basically just listened to whatever was popular during most of the '80s, whether it was Pop, Butt Rock, or New Wave. My brother started to branch off when they got U2's “The Joshua Tree” in the mail from Columbia House. If I remember correctly, the story goes that my sister wanted to send the tape back because she didn't want it in the first place, but my brother convinced her to keep it. Before then, we had a tendency to just listen to the hits and skip the deeper cuts because we saw them as filler. “The Joshua Tree” was the first album my brother could enjoy all the way through.
I entered middle school in 1988. Sometime that Fall, WLRS 102.3 became “The new Rock 102”. Hair bands were the big thing going on in Rock around that time, so there was a heavy emphasis on them. I dug some of them, but my brother and I, through friends of his at school, were also getting into Classic Rock and Alternative. We really got into reading Rolling Stone, which is where I started learning about a lot of bands and history. And since we lived out in the sticks, we would have people tape hours of MTV for us, which sometimes included episodes of 120 Minutes. By the end of 1989, my taste was probably to the left of most of the kids I went to school with, but I was also listening to Winger. The tapes we got for Christmas in '89 probably tells you where we were heading.
My sister:
Whitesnake - “Slip Of The Tongue”
Great White - “Twice Shy”
Skid Row – (self titled)
Aerosmith - “Pump” (Can't remember if that was technically my brother's or sister's.)
My brother:
Lou Reed - “New York”
The Cult - “Sonic Temple”
The Who - “Who's Better, Who's Best”
Me:
Guns n' Roses - “Gn'R Lies”
De La Soul - “3 Feet High and Rising”
I also wanted to get Public Image Ltd.'s “9” and Red Hot Chili Peppers' “Mother's Milk”, but Santa's search seemed to be limited to Wal-Mart and Target.
Anyway, I was listening to Whitesnake's self titled album a lot in the Fall of '89, so I eventually got into “Slip Of The Tongue”. At that time, the future looked bright, and I thought there was someone for everyone, so I enjoyed listening to songs about uber-sluts who were going to rock my world. But in the Fall of 1990, there were a series of events that caused me to turn cynical, and it seemed to coincide with my brother and I's discovery of The Smiths that year. I'm definitely not blaming The Smiths for my downward spiral into teen angst, I'm just saying that they reflected my reality more than the songs about, as Henry Rollins once put it, “chicks” and “rocking”. I still enjoyed some hair bands, but couldn't listen to LRS a lot because there were so many of them, most of whom were nothing special. I was a QMF man, and was listening to a lot of Classic Rock because it was new to me, and most of the “kids” weren't listening to it yet, so it was still an “alternative” to hair bands. While I did get into my brother's Smiths and Pixies tapes, the tapes I got for Christmas '90 were:
The Black Crowes - “Shake Your Moneymaker”
Eric Clapton - “Journeyman”
Don Henley - “The End Of The Innocence”
Rush - “Presto”
Winger - “Winger II: In The Heart Of The Young”
Before 2008/2009, I considered 8th Grade to be my “Worst Year Ever”. I know lots of people, even some R.E.M. fans, really hate “Shiny Happy People”, but I love it because to me it represents the death of my first “Worst Year Ever”.
In 1991, the whole Madchester dance rock thing was at it's most publicly visible in the U.S., and Funk-Metal/Punk-Funk was also going on. Summer of '91 brought the first Lollapalooza tour and The Clash Of The Titans tour. A friend taped an episode of 120 Minutes that was done at the very first Lollapalooza show, and heard lots of bands for the first time that I had only been reading about before (Nine Inch Nails, Charlatans UK, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Butthole Surfers, etc.). My taste in music was taking a pretty big left turn before Nirvana even became huge. Winger at Cardinal Stadium during the Kentucky State Fair was my first ever concert, but I listened to them less and less as I was buying more music. In fact, I didn't listen to them much at all until Election Night in November 1992. I remember that I couldn't get to sleep around my normal bed time because I was so anxious about the election results, so I decided to listen to some music. I popped in the first Winger tape since it had been a while since I had listened to it, and thought, “God, this is horrible!” I had the same reaction when I heard “Slip Of The Tongue” for the first time after years of not listening to it.
I still bust out some Winger or Whitesnake every once in a while, but it's a weird, icky sort of nostalgia. The best way I've found to describe it is that it's like an ex-con having fond memories of being raped in prison.
I was pretty happy when Grunge killed the hair bands. What Grunge was was a post-Punk/Hardcore take on early '70s Heavy Metal, namely Zeppelin and Sabbath. While they aren't known for “flashy” solos and shit, there was still quite a bit of musicianship involved, just more in the way of using odd
tunings or time signatures than “shredding” solos. A lot of today's Hard Rock bands* sound sort of like Grunge put through a Butt Rock filter. They were people who listened to Mainstream/Active Rock during the '90s instead of Modern Rock, so instead of hearing Grunge alongside bands like The Pixies, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr, or The Replacements, they heard them alongside Foreigner, Bad Company, Journey, or (insert hair band here). They are to real Grunge what bands like Nelson and Firehouse were to Motley Crue or Hanoi Rocks. They have absolutely nothing that made the original Grunge bands interesting. The drummers play in half time, the guitarists just crank out a few chords, and they use that boring ass quiet verse/loud chorus thing that should have died with Kurt Cobain (R.I.P.). And the worst part? The singer sings about how much he hates his uber-slut girlfriend. Yes, the uber-sluts have returned. It's like these bands are what happened to the hair bands after they tried settling down with that uber-slut that they knocked up so many years ago, and picked up a guitar for the first time after years of not practicing.
(*BTW, what I'm referring to are bands such as Nickelback, Staind, Creed, Puddle Of Mudd, Shinedown, Seether, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Theory Of A Deadman, and most of those other newer bands you either hear or used to hear on The Fox.)
If I HAD to choose between listening to bad Hair Metal or bad post-Grunge, I would choose bad Hair Metal since the music is way more interesting, and it lacks most of the faux-negativity of post-Grunge. You wrote the “Sound Of Madness”? Please, get over yourself and listen to some Black Flag.
I'd probably do a lot more writing if I could just dictate my thoughts out onto a text document from anywhere in the world, and edit them into something cohesive later on. This is especially true while I'm at work. With my current job, I'm able to do my job while thinking about lots of other crap. The worst is when I get a bad song stuck in my head. One of these songs has been “Cheap an' Nasty” by Whitesnake, from their 1989 album “Slip Of The Tongue”. The chorus goes:
“You're cheap an' nasty,
All you want to do is give it up, give it up,
Cheap an' nasty,
Come on and do the dirty with me.”
As you can probably tell just from reading the chorus, it's just one of many Hair Metal songs about some uber-slut who is going to rock your world. You know, some girl who probably had her hair teased out to high Heaven, wore a tight mini-skirt and high heels, and probably had every STD known to man by the time she was 21. And she was probably so loose by the time she had her first kid that childbirth didn't even hurt.
When I think back about how my taste in music has evolved over the years, I try to sort things out so that I'm as honest as possible, trying not to seem “cooler” than I actually was, because somebody who knew me back then would probably try to call me out on it. Believe it or not, there was a time when I wasn't all that into music. Before middle school, I did enjoy listening to music, but didn't go out of my way to learn much about it or even collect it. We, in this case meaning my brother and sister and I, basically just listened to whatever was popular during most of the '80s, whether it was Pop, Butt Rock, or New Wave. My brother started to branch off when they got U2's “The Joshua Tree” in the mail from Columbia House. If I remember correctly, the story goes that my sister wanted to send the tape back because she didn't want it in the first place, but my brother convinced her to keep it. Before then, we had a tendency to just listen to the hits and skip the deeper cuts because we saw them as filler. “The Joshua Tree” was the first album my brother could enjoy all the way through.
I entered middle school in 1988. Sometime that Fall, WLRS 102.3 became “The new Rock 102”. Hair bands were the big thing going on in Rock around that time, so there was a heavy emphasis on them. I dug some of them, but my brother and I, through friends of his at school, were also getting into Classic Rock and Alternative. We really got into reading Rolling Stone, which is where I started learning about a lot of bands and history. And since we lived out in the sticks, we would have people tape hours of MTV for us, which sometimes included episodes of 120 Minutes. By the end of 1989, my taste was probably to the left of most of the kids I went to school with, but I was also listening to Winger. The tapes we got for Christmas in '89 probably tells you where we were heading.
My sister:
Whitesnake - “Slip Of The Tongue”
Great White - “Twice Shy”
Skid Row – (self titled)
Aerosmith - “Pump” (Can't remember if that was technically my brother's or sister's.)
My brother:
Lou Reed - “New York”
The Cult - “Sonic Temple”
The Who - “Who's Better, Who's Best”
Me:
Guns n' Roses - “Gn'R Lies”
De La Soul - “3 Feet High and Rising”
I also wanted to get Public Image Ltd.'s “9” and Red Hot Chili Peppers' “Mother's Milk”, but Santa's search seemed to be limited to Wal-Mart and Target.
Anyway, I was listening to Whitesnake's self titled album a lot in the Fall of '89, so I eventually got into “Slip Of The Tongue”. At that time, the future looked bright, and I thought there was someone for everyone, so I enjoyed listening to songs about uber-sluts who were going to rock my world. But in the Fall of 1990, there were a series of events that caused me to turn cynical, and it seemed to coincide with my brother and I's discovery of The Smiths that year. I'm definitely not blaming The Smiths for my downward spiral into teen angst, I'm just saying that they reflected my reality more than the songs about, as Henry Rollins once put it, “chicks” and “rocking”. I still enjoyed some hair bands, but couldn't listen to LRS a lot because there were so many of them, most of whom were nothing special. I was a QMF man, and was listening to a lot of Classic Rock because it was new to me, and most of the “kids” weren't listening to it yet, so it was still an “alternative” to hair bands. While I did get into my brother's Smiths and Pixies tapes, the tapes I got for Christmas '90 were:
The Black Crowes - “Shake Your Moneymaker”
Eric Clapton - “Journeyman”
Don Henley - “The End Of The Innocence”
Rush - “Presto”
Winger - “Winger II: In The Heart Of The Young”
Before 2008/2009, I considered 8th Grade to be my “Worst Year Ever”. I know lots of people, even some R.E.M. fans, really hate “Shiny Happy People”, but I love it because to me it represents the death of my first “Worst Year Ever”.
In 1991, the whole Madchester dance rock thing was at it's most publicly visible in the U.S., and Funk-Metal/Punk-Funk was also going on. Summer of '91 brought the first Lollapalooza tour and The Clash Of The Titans tour. A friend taped an episode of 120 Minutes that was done at the very first Lollapalooza show, and heard lots of bands for the first time that I had only been reading about before (Nine Inch Nails, Charlatans UK, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Butthole Surfers, etc.). My taste in music was taking a pretty big left turn before Nirvana even became huge. Winger at Cardinal Stadium during the Kentucky State Fair was my first ever concert, but I listened to them less and less as I was buying more music. In fact, I didn't listen to them much at all until Election Night in November 1992. I remember that I couldn't get to sleep around my normal bed time because I was so anxious about the election results, so I decided to listen to some music. I popped in the first Winger tape since it had been a while since I had listened to it, and thought, “God, this is horrible!” I had the same reaction when I heard “Slip Of The Tongue” for the first time after years of not listening to it.
I still bust out some Winger or Whitesnake every once in a while, but it's a weird, icky sort of nostalgia. The best way I've found to describe it is that it's like an ex-con having fond memories of being raped in prison.
I was pretty happy when Grunge killed the hair bands. What Grunge was was a post-Punk/Hardcore take on early '70s Heavy Metal, namely Zeppelin and Sabbath. While they aren't known for “flashy” solos and shit, there was still quite a bit of musicianship involved, just more in the way of using odd
tunings or time signatures than “shredding” solos. A lot of today's Hard Rock bands* sound sort of like Grunge put through a Butt Rock filter. They were people who listened to Mainstream/Active Rock during the '90s instead of Modern Rock, so instead of hearing Grunge alongside bands like The Pixies, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr, or The Replacements, they heard them alongside Foreigner, Bad Company, Journey, or (insert hair band here). They are to real Grunge what bands like Nelson and Firehouse were to Motley Crue or Hanoi Rocks. They have absolutely nothing that made the original Grunge bands interesting. The drummers play in half time, the guitarists just crank out a few chords, and they use that boring ass quiet verse/loud chorus thing that should have died with Kurt Cobain (R.I.P.). And the worst part? The singer sings about how much he hates his uber-slut girlfriend. Yes, the uber-sluts have returned. It's like these bands are what happened to the hair bands after they tried settling down with that uber-slut that they knocked up so many years ago, and picked up a guitar for the first time after years of not practicing.
(*BTW, what I'm referring to are bands such as Nickelback, Staind, Creed, Puddle Of Mudd, Shinedown, Seether, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Theory Of A Deadman, and most of those other newer bands you either hear or used to hear on The Fox.)
If I HAD to choose between listening to bad Hair Metal or bad post-Grunge, I would choose bad Hair Metal since the music is way more interesting, and it lacks most of the faux-negativity of post-Grunge. You wrote the “Sound Of Madness”? Please, get over yourself and listen to some Black Flag.
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