The production is head-widening. The studio resources and talent that made possible recordings of this complexity and quality are simply not an option for contemporary musicians. Millennials' archly superior "lo-fi æsthetic" [barf - Ed.] is the street bum "choosing" to wear the same clothes again today. It's all they have. The studio system - now dismantled - that grew from Hollywood movie studios branching out into pop music came with a legacy of exceptionally gifted musicians, arrangers, and studio technicians, and that legacy can be heard here, in this last gorgeous flowering of sixties pop. It's an album that validates stereo recording, itself sneered at by pop purists, and demands a great set of headphones, preferably leopardskin.
We'd have to wait six years for the next - and last - S&OG studio album, the equally ignored (and beautiful) Change, where the patchouli and love beads had been completely replaced by woodsmoke and stetsons. Just in time for Richard Hell to rip everything to shreds.
ReplyDeleteEarmuffs
Hi. Just added your blog on our Blog list.
ReplyDeleteI didn`t find Hotter Rats (as you mentioned).
Really like your blog!
Regards
Java
ReplyDeleteNone more hot!
I like this one a lot for all of the reasons you cited. I blame Apple earbuds for all of the audio ignorance you describe. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteApple earbuds are such a missed opportunity. There's nothing wrong with the concept of earbuds - I have plenty of cheap ones that sound pretty astonishing - and the actual innards of Apple's doohickeys are high quality. Their problem has always been in the casing, the way that delivers the sound to the eardrum. The first earbuds/pods were designed to look like sculpturally beautiful objects if they were twenty feet high. Nobody apparently realised that we spend more time listening to them than looking at them. And nobody at Apple realised that putting the surface of the speaker flat against the inside of the ear - not pointing it down the canal - was going to compromise the sound. Those little fuckers were on the market for years. When the new and slightly improved model came out they were still way too concerned about the looks, and too damn snooty to use the soft grommets nearly every other manufacturer uses. So basically you're pushing a smooth, hard, basically conical object into your ear and hoping it stays there. Which it won't, because the human ear is designed to expel anything like that pushed into it. I've been a Mac user since the mid-seventies, so I have reason to be enraged by the post-Jobs corporate culture of dithering and fucking-with rather than real innovation.
ReplyDeleteI like Apple design and hardware, but hate the predatory refusal to interact with other systems.
ReplyDeleteMy explanation of the mistake they made with the new earbuds was sticking with a one size fits all approach instead of accommodating some complexity (with a greatly improved result) for the consumer.