HW: EMI Reissues

[Steve Youles]

Oh all right then, I'll bite...

'Warm' for Quark and 'Clean' for Hawklords are perfect one-word
characterisations of those albums, although Hawklords could be
considered 'clean' only by HW's standards, I suspect - cf. the muddier tone
of, say, Doremi.  (BTW, the single version of 25 Years is far
from 'clean' ; it snarls!)  PXR5 is like a box of chocolates with soft- and
hard-centres, dark and light chocolate etc.

WOTEOT has too much going on for one word to charactise it as successfully,
but if anything I would take 'Lush' away from ASAM and apply it to Warrior.

Astounding Sounds - the word I would use is 'Hollow'.  I don't mean this
perjoratively, but all the instruments sound as though they're circling
around the periphery and in the middle is...nothing.  (On Quark, you would
find Ade Shaw's bubbling basslines and Simon House's excellent keyboard
work at the eye of the hurricane -avoided saying 'cyclone' there, Tom!  On
Space Ritual everything sounds as though it's built around Dave & Lemmy.)

Not being an audiophile or conversant with some of the technical terms you
used, Doug (RIBAA curve, was it?) I can't explain why I generally prefer
the sound of vinyl to CD, but the latter medium often sounds to me like the
upper and lower frequencies have been boosted and the middle cut.  Well,
Astounding sounded like that even when it was on vinyl!  Not that I dislike
the album - au contraire, I think the *material* is excellent.  I wonder if
it would be theoretically possible to remix it, as you described your
friend Karl doing, and discover the hidden centre of this album?  Not that
you can 'put back in' what was never there in the first place, of course.


Steve


--Doug wrote:--------------------------------------------------------------

'Warrior' - "powerful";
'Astounding Sounds' - "lush";
'Quark' - "warm";
'Hawklords' - "clean";
'PXR5' - hmmmm ... that one's tough since there's no consistent overall
sound to it because of the different sources [studio vs. live vs. demo],
the way there is for the other four ... (I'd be very curious to hear if
anyone particularly agreed or disagreed with my rough characterization of
those four albums.)