Hear That Sound

I've been listening to the new National album, High Violet, a lot this week - thinking about it a lot. I like the album. Not as much as 2007's Boxer, but much more than 2005's Alligator. High Violet has some of the same charm as Boxer - nice drums, (mostly) nice lyrics, and a general feeling of anxiety laced with hope that I guess I connect to.

But there are some notable differences, too. Matt Berninger's vocals often have more echo to them and the general sound of the album is more open, which I guess makes sense since they recorded it in Aaron Dessner's garage. These changes are fine, except that part of the charm of Boxer was how soft, close, and intimate the album felt and sounded. Boxer sounds like it was recorded in your living room; like they're playing the album right there in your room and Berninger is talking to you. With the rather personal, albeit cryptic, nature of Berninger's lyrics, I think the closer sound serves his voice and lyrics better.

And the music? Well, songs like "Terrible Love" and "Lemonworld" feature a noticeably more grungy sound. As simply a taste issue, I prefer their smoother sound - again, Boxer, excels at this. But some discussion among some friends of mine wondered whether this grungy sound was a conscious musical decision, or just a crappy recording. I'm not a skilled enough listener, nor do I have the hi-fi system to really make such a judgment (though my Sennheiser PX 100 headphones are a respectable way to listen to the recording quality of an album - at least for a layperson like myself). I tend to think the gritty sound was a conscious decision rather than an ignorant blunder. Whether or not High Violet's recording contains blarring flaws doesn't change that there's more to the album than just the quality of its recording, and, in the end, I think the pros outweigh the cons. When I listen to the disc, the thing that really frustrates me is the album's rather limp conclusion; the last two tracks, "England" and "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks" just aren't that interesting to me, regardless of how good or bad the recording is. There's more to a song than its recording, but the quality of the recording is still interesting to think about sometimes, and I feel like writing about that for a few paragraphs.

I like a good recording as much as anyone, but I'm willing to forgive some poor production, mixing and mastering if the songs are strong. There are a number of poorly recorded albums out there that are still really great - I'm thinking of things like The Sisters of Mercy's First and Last and Always, Redemption (Bound)'s Home (Again), Skinny Puppy's Rabies (though that was a pressing error, more than a recording flaw; the album was later remastered and reissued), Metallica's ...And Justice For All and Death Magnetic, Simple Minds's Reel to Real Cacophony; even my favorite album, The Cure's Disintegration sports some rather murky recording (lucky for us, in less than a week that will hopefully be rectified, as it has been for The Sisters and Simple Minds albums).

The issue of an album's recording has become more of a thing after indulging in a long(ish) Metallica binge. During this heavy metal indulgence, I read a less than impressive book on Metallica's songs, which drew my attention to ...And Justice For All's (poor) recording quality. I've always really liked the Justice album. It appealed to me much sooner than Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and even Metallica (the Black Album). But I didn't notice the crappy recording. I knew it sounded different, but seeing how I was in jr. high at the time, an album's recording quality wasn't the thing I was most interested in when it came to listening to music. Anyway, after recently listening to the disc a couple times, I can see the problems that people have been talking about - the biggest issue being that you can hardly hear the bass, which you think I'd have picked up on since I am such a fan of the bass guitar.

Recently, while reading some reviews of the Metallica documentary, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, I stumbled across some posts on the recording quality of Metallica's most recent album, Death Magnetic. They weren't very nice, complaining about how loud the album is - meaning how loud the album is recorded. Again, I had noticed the album sounded different and was loud, but I failed to notice that it was how loud the recording was, not just how high I had the volume. This explained why I've often found myself turning Death Magnetic down more and more while listening to it. The disc is too loud, and it's really too bad, because the songs are really good (except for the closer "My Apocalypse", which is just kinda there). I could argue that part of the reason why I missed the recording issue on Death Magnetic is that I've been listening to a 192 kbps mp3 rather than the CD or vinyl, but the truth is I just missed it.

So what does it matter that Death Magnetic is recorded too loud? Well, it's a matter of compression, as was explained in a very enjoyable article in the now canceled magazine Stylus. Writer Nick Southall explains how the new thing in recording is compression. The more you compress a disc, the louder it gets; if you compress it too much the album will be so loud that it clips (basically, the sound is shot and sounds bad). Even if you don't compress an album to the point of clipping, it still pushes all the volume levels on the album to one average level, which is unnatural and weird to listen to. Variation in sound levels is a natural thing to music and the ear likes it much better - listen to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, to see what I mean. In the case of Death Magnetic, the whole album sounds like it's being played at maximum volume, so maximum that the instruments begin to blend together and the sounds distort, which make the album less appropriate for your headphones and more appropriate for a Gitmo torture cell. When I don't even need to drive my speakers beyond their limits to get clipping, there's a problem.

Unfortunately, Metallica isn't the only sinner when it comes to high compression recordings. It's actually becoming the norm amongst the big music industry studios. Pop in an older disc and then compare that to a more recent one and it's almost guaranteed that there will be a noticeable difference in recording volume. A little compression isn't bad, but like anything there's a threshold that shouldn't be crossed.

The problem basically boils down to laziness; studios want an immediately attention-grabbing record. And listeners don't wanna turn the volume up anymore and aren't really paying attention to what they're listening to. Music wallpapers our lives - it's everywhere, and we've kind of stopped listening to it (if we ever really did). It's now just a sensory thing - a stimulant - rather than an art form, or even an entertainment. The lazy listener isn't interested in what is really going on in what they're listening to, just that they're listening to something that appeals to the most superficial needs of the listener - a beat, a melody, even just an image rather than a sound. The lazy recording artist wants their record to appeal to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible; enter high compression and botched music.

This seems another example of how the lazy, yet mainstream, use of modern technology actually creates a poorer quality product and a poorer quality experience with that product (even if we don't consciously notice, our body can tell). It's like crappy cell phone cameras being used as the primary camera rather than the emergency camera for those out of nowhere moments you just gotta have a picture of. Or watching movies on iPods, and rubbish quality YouTube videos. Again, sometimes the quality is gonna be shot and there's nothing to be done about it; but for somethings (i.e. movies; music videos; heck, even many digital cameras for home movies shoot a decent picture - is uploading them at decent quality too much to ask?) ruddy quality is rather inexcusable, especially when we dismiss cassette tapes and VHS as obsolete and poor quality - my VHS music videos look and sound better than most of the videos I've watched on YouTube.

The digital age and the mp3 explosion have saturated the music world with poor quality mp3s - they take up less space; naturally, when you cut out all those frequencies that really fill a song out, your file sizes will be smaller, but so will one's listening pleasure (give Dead Can Dance's Within the Realm of a Dying Sun or Mike Oldfield's Light + Shade a cd vs. 192kbps mp3 comparison and it becomes really obvious how much is lost in the conversion). We absorb all these things because they're easy and convenient, not because they're better. It also doesn't help that we're often listening to our music on junky speakers/headphones - iPod and Skullcandy headphones are good for wasting resources and feeding landfills, not for listening to music; that single miniature speaker in our laptops is also hardly a listening device, but it can be temporarily useful when it's all you have available.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit pretentious, elitist, and preachy. Fair enough. Sometimes we should be a little elitist about things. I happen to feel like talking about music recordings this time. It's what has my interest at the moment. As one with some technology issues and a perhaps unhealthy love of music, I've just been thinking that we could stand to pay attention to what we're listening to a little more, and paying attention to how the music is recorded as well as the music itself. It's good to sometimes sit down and just listen to an album and really focus on the album - like we would (hopefully) focus on a movie we're watching or a book we're reading.

Photo by Mothslayer