BOC: Remasters??

[Jon Jarrett]

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004, Stephen Swann wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 02:05:42AM +0100, Jon Jarrett wrote:
> >         I would dearly love to hear _Imaginos_ remastered. I find its
> > thick overcrowded sound and its low volume levels, on CD or on cassette
> > (have never heard the vinyl) put me off listening to it (after all,
>
> If you listen to it on a sufficiently revealing sound
> system, the sound of the CD isn't so much "thick" as complex
> and layered.  The vinyl sounds rather worse - the album is
> really too long for a vinyl release, and they had to squeeze
> the grooves too tightly together.  Can't speak for the
> cassette, although it's just a truism that commerically
> produced cassette tapes are going to muddy the sound.

        I confess I haven't played it on my borrowed decent set of
speakers yet. I should fix that de pronto, see what I make of it. I also
tend mostly to play it when drunk, because of a certain friend of mine who
really likes it but doesn't have a copy demanding it be played when pub
trips end here.

        Possibly my critical opinion needs better foundations.

> >         Failing that though, I confess that _Spectres_ and
> > _Mirrors_ are my two least favourite BOC albums (with
> > _Club Ninja_ wandering around in a kind of
> > Neptune-Pluto-Charon configuration so that sometimes it's
> > my least favourite) almost entirely because of the way
> > they sound, which again I accept is period detail but
> > which I would love to lose so that the material doesn't
> > sound so dense and wooly.
>
> I think that Spectres is probably the worst mastered BOC
> album ever.  To me it sounds worse (more boomy/muddy) than
> the debut album, which people have described as sounding
> like it was recorded on a 4 track recorder buried in sand. :)
> Which sucks, because Spectres is one of my favorite BOC
> albums...

        The first album's problem was maybe eased by the fact that the
bottom end had been so MC5'd out of existence that it couldn't really boom
too much. No such luck with _Spectres_... But that first album's remaster
with bass you could hear without trying, that was rather a revelation.
Al's drumming also suddenly shone out and one could hear the link to
The Stalk Forrest Group's twin-lead guitar and drums style much more
easily. What can we hope for from _Spectres_ I wonder?

> And did you just describe the sound of _Mirrors_ as dense
> and wooly?  Mirrors is probably the brightest, openest
> sounding BOC album ever recorded, so much that people have
> harshed on it for being "too light", and sounding "like
> a pop album"!  :-)

        I agree with you up to a point, it's certainly mixed like a pop
album, but, perhaps it's just the age and use of my vinyl copy,[1] it
still doesn't sound exactly well-defined to me. It's one of the things
that annoys me about it, that it doesn't even make it as a Fleetwood Mac
soundalike because it doesn't glisten and shine in the same way. I have to
confess I'm not going to try and buy the current CD to make sure I'm
giving it a fair opinion :-) Apart from anything else, the minute I found
one, the next remasters would come out... Yours,
                                                 Jon

[1] Previous owner must have liked it better than I do, if so...
ObCD: Pressurehed - _Sudden Vertigo_
--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)