I Will Break Your Fall

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

How to Destroy Angels Gets It Right

I already blogged about this on that other blog that no one reads. But I felt like quickly doing so again here, so this news can reach my entire reader fanbase.

All week I've been enamored with the EP from How to Destroy Angels. I kinda think they have one of the best band names in recent times. And it only gets better when you see the music video for opening track "The Space in Between." Like the band name, this video is so goth, especially when you notice that the dead couple is Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) and his wife Mariqueen Maandig, who, with Atticus Ross (the smoking guy), comprise the band. That Reznor and his wife have now done a nice, gothic, industrial rock album together is cool enough, but to then do this video is just really awesome to me. Though others may find it to be a bit much.

The video is rather intense and gruesome, but effective and well put together. I can't get over how fabulous it is that Reznor and Maandig, married as of last year, decide to be the dead married couple in their video. It's pretty awesome in that suffocatingly or masochistically gothic way that really intrigues and amuses me. Reminds me of that great Buffy line: "When you kiss me, I want to die." As dark as this video may be, there's something really charming about this married couple collaborating on a project like this. Paradoxically, it seems to dispel some of the darkness, if that makes sense. "The Space in Between" lays the darkness on thicker than many of the other tracks on this EP, and is a track that deserves to be performed by a band called How to Destroy Angels. With a band name like that I expect their music to blot out the sun. They come closest to achieving supreme darkness on "The Space in Between" and "A Drowning." The others seem to sport a touch less of that really dark Reznor edge found in some of his Nails work. But then I remember that this is Reznor working on an album with his wife, and then it seems to make sense that the songs here would be dark, but not suffocating; they're just darkly charming, which is a really nice thing.

If you dig what you see and hear, you can download the EP for free. How to Destroy Angels has released this EP as a free download, winning them big points. Offering free downloads of albums is a really fabulous and ultimately financially successful move, as proven by Radiohead's pay-what-you-want initial release of In Rainbows, and Nine Inch Nails's, post-record label releases Ghosts I-IV and The Slip. Giving your music away for free doesn't mean you lose money. Radiohead and Nails have both made plenty of cash off the CD and vinyl releases of those free albums, not to mention the people who then went to their concerts and bought other merchandise. Yeah, these two bands are doing alright. Granted, they were both already successful and basically able to do whatever they wanted, but the principle behind file sharing and offering free music still seems sound; I've attended many concerts and purchased many CDs of bands far less successful than Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails that I discovered through "illegal" means. I have CD versions of all the aforementioned albums, because I not only like to have a tangible copy of the music I love, but also because I like to support the artists I love. What I don't support are music industry executives controlling an album's cost and the profits, keeping most of the cash for themselves instead of letting most of the cash go to the artists who made the album. The music industry has been wringing everything they can out of consumers for a long time and it has only gotten worse with the digital iTunes age.

But for now I can thank Reznor and his band mates for releasing How to Destroy Angels's EP as a free download and later offering a CD issue for me to buy (which will sound even better than the 320 kbps downloadable version). Reznor has pretty well figured out how to succeed as a musician while also pleasing fans, as evident by advice he offered last year to new/unknown bands. A band who is generous to its fans is much more likely to receive a bit of money, not just from me, but from fans at large. Aren't we all more willing to support someone who we feel is considerate of us as fans and not just as numbers to suck money out of? Such a band is much more likely to get a bit of my money through a CD purchase - or a vinyl purchase, if I could ever get a functioning, quality record player (vinyl still sounds the best, too). How to Destroy Angels, working outside the industry, is succeeding where the industry continues to fail; they've released a good EP of songs made with complete creative control, they've released it for free, and will then release a purchasable album version of the disc so that those who wish to pay - and there are many - will do so. Only the industry loses on this one, and that's fine with me.

Song of the Week: 'Worlock' - Skinny Puppy & Rabies Review

As a partial follow up to my earlier post on Skinny Puppy's concert at Salt Lake City's Club Vegas, I have chosen to spotlight their track 'Worlock' from their 1989 release Rabies as this week's Song of the Week. It might seem a cop out since 'Worlock' is overwhelmingly accepted as one of Skinny Puppy's finest moments, leaving little to still be said about why the track matters. All the same, I'm gonna go on about it for a few lines.

'Worlock' still remains my favorite Skinny Puppy song. I've listened to it and loved it since I was nine or ten years old, though at that age I had little idea what the song was about and why it was good. I liked it because my brother liked it and it sounded weird, but intriguing somehow. It still intrigues me and still blows my mind when I listen to it. 'Worlock' shows Skinny Puppy at their best, proving their incredible talent for creating solid pop beats, put to haunting, sad and pained music that is both abrasive and, at times, rather beautiful (just listen to that chorus and the rising finish). Ogre's ragged, raspy, cutting vocals transition for the chorus to a heavily computer-altered delivery that becomes almost overwhelmingly heartbreaking. During that final vocal delivery his voice soars to a flayed agony that suggests tragedy as much as it does horror. The lyrics are tough to follow and understand (this is Skinny Puppy after all), so here they are, so you can read along. In many ways the song is as significant today as it was upon its release - audio sample: "the police used to watch over the people, now they're watching the people", as just one example.

The 'Worlock' video has a long controversial history. It's a compilation of film clips from gore horror films linked together in a long montage. It covers over 20 films and is just one grotesque image after another. The video received an X rating for being pornographic. It is. But the images, combined with shots of slaughterhouse blades and uncooked hamburger suggest that what these images are saying is that the violence we do to each other has created a human slaughterhouse that we all should be disgusted by. We're killing ourselves, committing global suicide. Not a happy message, but one that the modern horror film often adopts and that many in the world at large seem to agree, giving rise to the opinion that it is really within the last century that the world went to hell. In the last century human destruction has accelerated at an alarming rate, with the nightly news is in danger of becoming more and more like the 'Worlock' video, or that we as viewers only see one gratuitous, pornographic image of violence and atrocity after another. Skinny Puppy might just be showing us a rather accurate portrait of the world, or at least how some people are beginning to see the world, and that should deeply trouble us and, like The Cure's blistering track 'Pornography', move us to demand, despite the overwhelming opposition, that we "find a cure".

Yet the problem still stands: even if Skinny Puppy wishes and pushes for change, they are still clearly enamored with their own brutality, creating a paradox that is as messy as their music, or at least as messy as the Rabies album, which has received mixed reviews since it was first released. But people are complicated and the art we make can be equally so. Perceived flaws in behavior don't always count as grounds for condemnation and dismissal, in my mind, both for art and people alike. People, and the art they make, misbehave - we are human after all. Sometimes it's those very flaws, fractures, and incongruencies that make the art or the person so interesting and wonderful.

Rabies is a case in point. This album is very close to my heart - admittedly for nostalgic, childhood reasons, as well as more stuffy critically analytical ones. I'm no music critic and speak here as an enthusiastic, obsessive layperson. Rabies was for a long time my favorite Skinny Puppy album (though Last Rights has since claimed that honor). It was the album that introduced me to the band; it's also one of their most accessible records, which turns some fans off (it always seems that 'accessible' is a big buzz-kill for hardcore fans, because it suggests the band has sold out to aspirations of top 40 radio fodder stardom). But it's also inaccessible because the record is uneven. 'Fascist Jock Itch', placed between 'Two Time Grime' and 'Worlock' seems a bad move. Maybe it is. But the track's spewed speed metal is so frantic and out of control that it actually helps us notice 'Worlock' better, because we're so out of breath and in need of a relaxant that 'Worlock''s soft synth fade-in sounds like the most blessed opener we've ever heard. It might be a stretch to say the uneven shift from the one track to the other is intentionally done to draw our attention to the tone of both tracks, and this tonal juxtaposition improves both songs. But it's an idea worth thinking about.

The album takes another strange shift from 'Rivers' to the end of the record. Here Ogre takes more of a back seat as cEvin Key and D.R. Goettel take over, working their instrumental and sampling magic. 'Rivers' is a strange compilation of audio samples and gentle synths. This atmospheric tone continues with 'Choralone': a bleak, strange track that isn't much of a song at all. It's more just stream of conscious thoughts supported by very effective textures and atmospherics. 'Amputate' follows nicely and seems to round out a trio of songs that don't work as well individually as they do together. But we're ground out of this bizarrely comfortable space that 'Rivers', 'Choralone', and 'Amputate' take us to with the sixteen minute concluding live brap 'Spahn Dirge'. Like 'Fascist Jock Itch', this mammoth ender undermines our position and leaves us feeling rather puzzled and unsure if we'd just heard the most vacuous, bloated waste of music Skinny Puppy ever made. I think they know it's a tough tonal shift and did it anyway to try something bizarre and difficult to test the limits and barriers of music and albums. I don't think it was to please listeners.
Maybe the album fails in what it's trying to do, but the attempt is the attraction for me. Some criticize Skinny Puppy for bringing in Alain Jourgensen to help produce. Some are just upset that Rabies wasn't VIVIsectVI, an attitude that I'm so bored with - they already did the VIVIsectVI album, why would you want them to just rehash it? When you try repeating what you've already done all you get is the likes of Godsmack, where every album sounds like the last; or Moby's 18, which sounds like a pile of forgettable outtakes from Play. If Skinny Puppy has proven anything it is that they are not afraid to push in a different direction and do something new for the sake of trying something yet unexplored - fans and critics be damned.

The album is an intriguing look at a band continuing to experiment and see what they can find and learn. At times they really capture something fantastic: 'Rodent', 'Two Time Grime', 'Worlock', 'Tin Omen'; sometimes they make something hypnotic and otherworldly: 'Rivers', 'Choralone', 'Amputate'. Sometimes it's just kind of perplexing: 'Fascist Jock Itch', 'Rain', 'Spahn Dirge'. But all of it combined makes for a real emotional, conceptual roller-coaster that leaves me still trying to grasp why it is so appealing. In the end, I think it's that the album isn't easy to explain or compartmentalize that makes it such a stand-out and important album.

To conclude, I have this video of 'Worlock' from the Salk Lake show. The quality is as we've come to expect from such raw video recordings. Such low-quality videos are often rather boring for me, but since I was there and saw this performance, it helps preserve that night in my memory. So I'm grateful to the person who shot this video for capturing one of the best moments from that night's show.