Yet More Gushing Overflow
Must listen! In case you missed it on the Twitter feed, there is a great deconstruction of The Beatles’ remasters over at NPR. Host Bob Boilen has Beatles expert and historian Kevin Howlett on to discuss stereo vs. mono, fidelity, and why you should listen to Sgt. Pepper’s in mono (if not all of the albums up through The White Album!). They have great side-by-side examples that are really insightful.
On digitally cleaning The Beatles’ masters:
[The recording process] has developed so much over the years. Now you can go back to those (original recordings) and clean them up and remix the whole thing. What they’ve done, the whole amazing team at Abbey Road Studios, is gone to meticulous care and attention to clean up any blemishes that might have been on the original master tapes that you can now correct. Dropouts on the tape. Or any kind of microphone pops when people were singing too close to the mic. Just smoothing out any kind of blemishes and making it as pristine as possible, but not altering the integrity of the original mixes.
The last of the Beatles remasters reviews are up at Pitchfork: The Beatles, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, Let It Be, Past Masters.
On Sounds of Buzz, The Top 12 Things The Beatles Ever Said. #10 and #12 are great.
Also on Sounds of Buzz: Girl Talk interview video on favorite albums, Twilight, vampires.
Listen to all of Muse’s The Resistance here. You can read a pretty charitable first-listen review at Drowned in Sound.
Check out Lou Barlow’s “The Right.” Very enjoyable listen.
Interview with Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater. Their Rook was HeiBräu’s #1 album of 2008.
The soaring vocals towards the end of “The Snow Leopard” – were they recorded in one take? Did you pass out?!
Yes and no, I think, but my memory of a vocal session from two-and-a-half years ago isn’t too good. That’s actually not a very hard note to sing, for some reason; other, lower notes at full voice are much more difficult. On the new record I sang a note higher than that, just for fun, but I also sing lower than on the previous records. It’s always interesting to push the boundaries of your voice and see what it’ll let you get away with.
Your records, particularly Rook, have this knack of creeping up on the listener and revealing themselves more and more with time. Is this deliberate? How are they crafted? Are the intricacies deliberate?
That’s very kind of you to say. I would hope that that’s the effect. They certainly sneak up on me as I’m writing them, and they take a while to record. But when you’re the one that’s making the album, you never have the luxury of hearing it for the first time; by the time you’re done, everything feels very well-worn and familiar. All you can do is try to remember the little flashes of fun and inspiration that led you to make certain decisions, and hope that you’ve assembled the thing in a way that preserves the life of those moments and presents them to other people.
I’m kind of upset with the way that Apple Corp. is packaging the Beatles sets. I really, really want to purchase the Mono Box Set, but of course it doesn’t include their two final albums, as they were only ever released in stereo. And it costs $50 more than the Stereo Box Set to boot. Would it really have been hard to include Abbey Road and Let It Be in stereo just to round out the package?
I guess I’m stuck with buying the Stereo set for Christmas and being an evil pirate for the Mono versions, since I can’t afford to shell out $500 on the Beatles, as much as I’d like to.