Post by Jules on Apr 13, 2016 9:28:42 GMT
Note: This is aimed directly at Roland & Curt but should also be of help for fans who might feel similar to me about the album.
When I got into Tears for Fears, there were some funny coincidences at work. After digging a compilation, I wanted to get more and ordered all three 80s albums at once. On my way back, I passed a bookstore which at the time still had a little CD rack (unfortunately gone now). And guess what CD is hidden there between other obscurities? “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending”, of all CDs. So while I knew a lot from the 80s albums, I had the chance to hear ELAHE in full before “The Hurting”, “Songs from the Big Chair” and “The Seeds of Love” (and “Elemental” & “Raoul…” – which followed later). Actually that means ELAHE was the first TFF album I heard in full. But something didn’t click with me, at least not at first. Something seemed to be lacking and I always started to lose interest after four or five songs. I probably listened to the album twice as much to get into it, compared to the first three ones. Playing the songs myself, at the piano, also helped matters, because it reassured me that the songwriting wasn’t to blame. Roland had definitely not lost it. Yeah, I’m sure that the album could have been shorter and might have been more focused in the LP era because two or three tracks probably would have ended up as b-sides. Now having said that, there’s always debate which songs are the weak ones and there’s rarely ever a consensus… Anyway, to get back on topic, I’ve always felt that ELAHE sounds quite sterile and artificial compared to the earlier albums, Seeds in particular being much more organic/natural and having more space in it. It still took me another couple of years until I learned about the differences between analog & digital audio, what compression and limiting is and how all of these things are connected in the controversy surrounding “the Loudness War”. ELAHE always annoyed me with its loudness, it must have been the loudest CD I’ve owned for years (I was mainly into older music at that time, and still am by the way) and I always had to turn it down just to listen to it at a normal level. But I wasn’t really aware of the sad fact that making a CD as loud as this compromises the sound quality to a great extent. I did notice that the CD sounded strangely ‘over the top’ and seemed to lack the quieter, less aggressive/bombastic moments.
I think it was when I bought the “GOLD” compilation [EDIT: see below] that I finally understood where the problem was. There are four songs from ELAHE on there and they sound better! The piano at the beginning of “Secret World”…sounds like a piano. Not the simulation of a piano. It’s also not as loud as the full band kicking in, which creates a dynamic jump. The drums, while still not really great, also don’t sound like somebody flattened them out with a steamroller. Because the sound is more dynamic (not at the same constant wearing volume ALL the time), my ears (or my brain) were hearing things I’d never even noticed before. So why does a band like TFF make extremely rich and nuanced mixes, with lots of little details, just to destroy all of that work by smashing the sound to pieces in the final mastering process, you might ask yourself? Well first of all, they didn’t master the album. They produced it, Tim Palmer mixed it. (Tim Palmer had started working with Roland back in 1992, and “Elemental” & ”Raoul” both sound fine, so I’m sure he knows better than to compress the sh!t out of mixes, which is why I assume that the mixes were still dynamic.) The mastering was done by a guy named Stephen Marcussen. He has gained distinction by completely destroying some of the later Rolling Stones remasters and also been criticized (among others) for making Leonard Cohen’s recent album noticeably more compressed than its predecessors, though compared to the mess that is ELAHE it’s nothing noteworthy.
Now it’s interesting to read this article: mixonline.com/mag/audio_big_squeeze/
Marcussen counters, “I don't want to be averse or buck my peers, but I don't see it as a problem. I see abuses of loudness as a problem, when the artifacts of loudness are unpleasant distortions that take away from the listening experience. But a really rocking, loud, well-mastered CD is great. It's fun, it's competitive, the music translates, the band gets its point across, the people involved with making the record are happy. What's bad about that?”
I could interject at any point (e.g. my experience has been that louder usually means ‘less rocking’) but there’s a particularly glaring word in this little quote…
The word is “competitive”. What does that even mean? In a world where Justin Bieber and Madonna are louder than Metallica (courtesy of Ian Shepherd, mastering engineer: productionadvice.co.uk) there is no standard to aim for, as everybody has taken the race as far as possible. So who do you want to compete with exactly? Pink Floyd’s records have never been compressed to hell and back, yet have been extremely successful (and continue to be). And why do you want to compete in the first place? Shouldn’t music be about catchy melodies, good grooves, and interesting arrangements? Isn’t that more important than being louder than somebody else’s record? Usually, when profit-oriented thinking enters the creative process (and mastering is part of that, as it ends up on the record) the results are compromised art. Good music grows on you; it doesn’t scream you in the face. Who wants to be screamed at anyway? We all turn down the ads on TV or radio because they are usually obnoxious and twice as loud as the regular program. What musician wants their music to have the same effect on listeners?
One thing the loudness war also brings forth is a lack of personality and distinctness. I often like to refer to the “dynamic fingerprint” of a recording or a band. When you look at a waveform (the visual representation of a piece of music showing amplitude changes) of older recordings, they are all unique. You have peaks and valleys. No two songs sound the same, so they also shouldn’t look the same. But exactly that is the way these days – unless you zoom in drastically, most waveforms of modern pop tracks all look virtually identical: a flat line from start to finish. Everything is at the same peak level, the digital maximum. On ELAHE (or on Rush’s album “Clockwork Angels”, to use another example) I had the initial feeling that a lot of the songs were similar to each other, at least once the loud choruses kick in. If the mastering had been more dynamic, chances are that I might not have felt that way. So yes, dynamics do matter. To take this a step further, it also explains why the pop charts are so hard to tell apart. There’s only so much you can do to give white noise any sort of personality, let alone make it groove. If you think I’m exaggerating – music that never changes its volume is perceived by our brains similar to noise, which is why we tend to tune out after a while *PLUS* if everything is clipped (unfortunately the standard‼ these days) you have additional unpleasant distortion in the mix. Another interesting factor is that when even tracks with human players and real instruments sound more robotic – aggressive limiting makes every snare drum hit have the same volume, which is usually a feature of drum machines. Conversely, it explains why I felt that “Uptown Funk” stood out & was such a breath of relief in terms of chart material. The stronger a beat is actually pronounced against the rest of the music, the more you are gonna be likely to feel like dancing, right?
All of this boils down to the fact that loudness rarely helps sales. It didn’t help the commercial success of ELAHE for sure. I’m sure that many others felt the same problems getting into the album and some probably didn’t have the patience to claw their way throw the noisy surface. Audio quality or the lack thereof takes its toll on many listeners, not just “audiophiles”, as it’s often a subconscious thing that affects one’s mood.
While the recent remaster of “The Hurting” was again pretty compressed, the reissue of “Songs from the Big Chair” was a glimmer of hope and especially great was the involvement of Steven Wilson (he did the new remixes of the album on the DVD-A in the box and the standalone Blu-Ray Audio), who has turned into one of the most outspoken critics of the loudness wars and doesn’t let anybody master his own albums and remixes of classic progressive rock albums anymore. His growing success also hasn’t been hindered by the lack of loudness on his records. So yes, here are the two things I hope for as a dedicated fan of this amazing band:
1. The new album needs to be listenable. If TFF want to put out something that can ‘compete’ (yes, there’s that word again) with previous works, it needs to sound ear-friendly. Not harsh or distorted and not smashed to death with no room to breathe. It needs to sound like something you’ll want to listen to over and over again without feeling the need to turn it off or getting annoyed by its sound. Something that the listener wants to pay for (alluding to the whole illegal downloading & streaming debate – perhaps people didn’t really feel the music was worth paying for, because it didn’t grab them as much as it used to?!)
2. A remaster or remix of “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending” should also happen at some point, I hope. “Quiet Ones” is one of my favorite tracks, but the song sounds like garbage… I’d also really love decent live versions of as many songs from the album on CD, DVD or Blu-Ray. While “Secret World – Live in Paris” is a somewhat lackluster release, the song “Call Me Mellow” just sounds so much more upbeat, lively and involving on there. The studio version feels suffocated by comparison.
[* The GOLD compilation uses the mastering from the US ELAHE release, as opposed to the UK/European, which seems to have been subjected to another stage of brickwalling after already being quite compressed. The mind boggles.]
When I got into Tears for Fears, there were some funny coincidences at work. After digging a compilation, I wanted to get more and ordered all three 80s albums at once. On my way back, I passed a bookstore which at the time still had a little CD rack (unfortunately gone now). And guess what CD is hidden there between other obscurities? “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending”, of all CDs. So while I knew a lot from the 80s albums, I had the chance to hear ELAHE in full before “The Hurting”, “Songs from the Big Chair” and “The Seeds of Love” (and “Elemental” & “Raoul…” – which followed later). Actually that means ELAHE was the first TFF album I heard in full. But something didn’t click with me, at least not at first. Something seemed to be lacking and I always started to lose interest after four or five songs. I probably listened to the album twice as much to get into it, compared to the first three ones. Playing the songs myself, at the piano, also helped matters, because it reassured me that the songwriting wasn’t to blame. Roland had definitely not lost it. Yeah, I’m sure that the album could have been shorter and might have been more focused in the LP era because two or three tracks probably would have ended up as b-sides. Now having said that, there’s always debate which songs are the weak ones and there’s rarely ever a consensus… Anyway, to get back on topic, I’ve always felt that ELAHE sounds quite sterile and artificial compared to the earlier albums, Seeds in particular being much more organic/natural and having more space in it. It still took me another couple of years until I learned about the differences between analog & digital audio, what compression and limiting is and how all of these things are connected in the controversy surrounding “the Loudness War”. ELAHE always annoyed me with its loudness, it must have been the loudest CD I’ve owned for years (I was mainly into older music at that time, and still am by the way) and I always had to turn it down just to listen to it at a normal level. But I wasn’t really aware of the sad fact that making a CD as loud as this compromises the sound quality to a great extent. I did notice that the CD sounded strangely ‘over the top’ and seemed to lack the quieter, less aggressive/bombastic moments.
I think it was when I bought the “GOLD” compilation [EDIT: see below] that I finally understood where the problem was. There are four songs from ELAHE on there and they sound better! The piano at the beginning of “Secret World”…sounds like a piano. Not the simulation of a piano. It’s also not as loud as the full band kicking in, which creates a dynamic jump. The drums, while still not really great, also don’t sound like somebody flattened them out with a steamroller. Because the sound is more dynamic (not at the same constant wearing volume ALL the time), my ears (or my brain) were hearing things I’d never even noticed before. So why does a band like TFF make extremely rich and nuanced mixes, with lots of little details, just to destroy all of that work by smashing the sound to pieces in the final mastering process, you might ask yourself? Well first of all, they didn’t master the album. They produced it, Tim Palmer mixed it. (Tim Palmer had started working with Roland back in 1992, and “Elemental” & ”Raoul” both sound fine, so I’m sure he knows better than to compress the sh!t out of mixes, which is why I assume that the mixes were still dynamic.) The mastering was done by a guy named Stephen Marcussen. He has gained distinction by completely destroying some of the later Rolling Stones remasters and also been criticized (among others) for making Leonard Cohen’s recent album noticeably more compressed than its predecessors, though compared to the mess that is ELAHE it’s nothing noteworthy.
Now it’s interesting to read this article: mixonline.com/mag/audio_big_squeeze/
Marcussen counters, “I don't want to be averse or buck my peers, but I don't see it as a problem. I see abuses of loudness as a problem, when the artifacts of loudness are unpleasant distortions that take away from the listening experience. But a really rocking, loud, well-mastered CD is great. It's fun, it's competitive, the music translates, the band gets its point across, the people involved with making the record are happy. What's bad about that?”
I could interject at any point (e.g. my experience has been that louder usually means ‘less rocking’) but there’s a particularly glaring word in this little quote…
The word is “competitive”. What does that even mean? In a world where Justin Bieber and Madonna are louder than Metallica (courtesy of Ian Shepherd, mastering engineer: productionadvice.co.uk) there is no standard to aim for, as everybody has taken the race as far as possible. So who do you want to compete with exactly? Pink Floyd’s records have never been compressed to hell and back, yet have been extremely successful (and continue to be). And why do you want to compete in the first place? Shouldn’t music be about catchy melodies, good grooves, and interesting arrangements? Isn’t that more important than being louder than somebody else’s record? Usually, when profit-oriented thinking enters the creative process (and mastering is part of that, as it ends up on the record) the results are compromised art. Good music grows on you; it doesn’t scream you in the face. Who wants to be screamed at anyway? We all turn down the ads on TV or radio because they are usually obnoxious and twice as loud as the regular program. What musician wants their music to have the same effect on listeners?
One thing the loudness war also brings forth is a lack of personality and distinctness. I often like to refer to the “dynamic fingerprint” of a recording or a band. When you look at a waveform (the visual representation of a piece of music showing amplitude changes) of older recordings, they are all unique. You have peaks and valleys. No two songs sound the same, so they also shouldn’t look the same. But exactly that is the way these days – unless you zoom in drastically, most waveforms of modern pop tracks all look virtually identical: a flat line from start to finish. Everything is at the same peak level, the digital maximum. On ELAHE (or on Rush’s album “Clockwork Angels”, to use another example) I had the initial feeling that a lot of the songs were similar to each other, at least once the loud choruses kick in. If the mastering had been more dynamic, chances are that I might not have felt that way. So yes, dynamics do matter. To take this a step further, it also explains why the pop charts are so hard to tell apart. There’s only so much you can do to give white noise any sort of personality, let alone make it groove. If you think I’m exaggerating – music that never changes its volume is perceived by our brains similar to noise, which is why we tend to tune out after a while *PLUS* if everything is clipped (unfortunately the standard‼ these days) you have additional unpleasant distortion in the mix. Another interesting factor is that when even tracks with human players and real instruments sound more robotic – aggressive limiting makes every snare drum hit have the same volume, which is usually a feature of drum machines. Conversely, it explains why I felt that “Uptown Funk” stood out & was such a breath of relief in terms of chart material. The stronger a beat is actually pronounced against the rest of the music, the more you are gonna be likely to feel like dancing, right?
All of this boils down to the fact that loudness rarely helps sales. It didn’t help the commercial success of ELAHE for sure. I’m sure that many others felt the same problems getting into the album and some probably didn’t have the patience to claw their way throw the noisy surface. Audio quality or the lack thereof takes its toll on many listeners, not just “audiophiles”, as it’s often a subconscious thing that affects one’s mood.
While the recent remaster of “The Hurting” was again pretty compressed, the reissue of “Songs from the Big Chair” was a glimmer of hope and especially great was the involvement of Steven Wilson (he did the new remixes of the album on the DVD-A in the box and the standalone Blu-Ray Audio), who has turned into one of the most outspoken critics of the loudness wars and doesn’t let anybody master his own albums and remixes of classic progressive rock albums anymore. His growing success also hasn’t been hindered by the lack of loudness on his records. So yes, here are the two things I hope for as a dedicated fan of this amazing band:
1. The new album needs to be listenable. If TFF want to put out something that can ‘compete’ (yes, there’s that word again) with previous works, it needs to sound ear-friendly. Not harsh or distorted and not smashed to death with no room to breathe. It needs to sound like something you’ll want to listen to over and over again without feeling the need to turn it off or getting annoyed by its sound. Something that the listener wants to pay for (alluding to the whole illegal downloading & streaming debate – perhaps people didn’t really feel the music was worth paying for, because it didn’t grab them as much as it used to?!)
2. A remaster or remix of “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending” should also happen at some point, I hope. “Quiet Ones” is one of my favorite tracks, but the song sounds like garbage… I’d also really love decent live versions of as many songs from the album on CD, DVD or Blu-Ray. While “Secret World – Live in Paris” is a somewhat lackluster release, the song “Call Me Mellow” just sounds so much more upbeat, lively and involving on there. The studio version feels suffocated by comparison.
[* The GOLD compilation uses the mastering from the US ELAHE release, as opposed to the UK/European, which seems to have been subjected to another stage of brickwalling after already being quite compressed. The mind boggles.]