R.E.M. - Murmur Deluxe (Compressed) Edition

R.E.M.'s "Deluxe Edition" of Murmur has been getting a lot of good notices, including a rare 10/10 review at Pitchfork. Most of the reviews I've read, in addition to praising the original album and the killer 1983 live set included as a bonus, note that the remastered CD is a distinct sonic upgrade over previous editions.

But as BangSplat notes, mastering engineer Greg Calbi was fairly liberal in his use of dynamic range compression on this reissue. According to BangSplat's measurements, on the original CD the first track, "Radio Free Europe," averages -19.73 dB and -20.85 dB (left and right channels, respectively), while the remaster clocks in at -12.76 dB/-12.93 dB. In other words, the remaster is around 7 dB louder on average than the original. I recently transcribed the album from vinyl and after normalizing "Radio Free Europe" to 0 dB got a result that looks very similar to the original CD (-19.1 dB/-19.6 dB). You can see what the difference between the LP and remastered CD looks like below.

R.E.M. - "Radio Free Europe" LP (1983)

R.E.M. - "Radio Free Europe" Remastered CD (2008)

So what does the difference sound like? Not as dramatic as you might think. I hate to admit it, given the obvious application of dynamic range compression, but the deluxe edition sounds pretty good to my ears. Whatever peaks got compressed out are (in my opinion) not entirely essential to enjoying the music. I would have preferred a reissue that matched the original master tape a little more closely, but sonically the new version is decent.

In fact, I'm not at all surprised that many of the reviews of this set claim the deluxe edition is a sonic upgrade over previous editions. Compared to the original domestic CD, it almost certainly is an upgrade. The original CD of Murmur (released sometime in the mid-eighties) was a nasty sounding thing. It featured a harsh, grating midrange that made it all but unlistenable to my ears. I sold my copy a long time ago. It was exactly the kind of poorly mastered CD that forced me to the conclusion that "perfect sound forever" was a big lie. It was my repeated experiences with crummy sounding CDs like Murmur that made the idea that CDs are inferior to LPs something of a sacred cow for me.

But whatever the original CD's problems were, lack of dynamic range was not among them. As you can see from BangSplat's measurements, the original CD pretty closely matches the LP in terms of dynamic range.

Listening on headphones on my computer or my iPod, the new deluxe edition sounds particularly good. The version I ripped from LP also sounds good, but (after adjusting for volume differences) the new version sounds slightly more focused. I've always felt like there was a slight gauzy haze that hung over Murmur, and I hear less of that on the remaster. The version I ripped from LP sounds kind of like the album cover looks; like everything is in soft-focus. The remastered CD brings everything into sharper focus without really changing the way the album sounds too dramatically (don't worry--you still won't be able to figure out what Michael Stipe is singing).

But when I compared the two versions on my stereo it was a different story. The CD-R I made of the version I ripped from vinyl sounded far more appealing to me than the remastered CD. While listening through speakers instead of headphones, the remastered CD did not sound harsh or fatiguing in the way that overly-compressed CDs often do, but the LP sourced CD-R bettered it in ways that are difficult to quantify. The LP sourced version sounded bigger and more involving, and the gauzy, soft-focus quality of the album sounded both less noticeable and more appealing than it did through headphones. I'm honestly not all that inclined to pick apart the differences in sound quality between the two versions, the fact was the LP sourced CD-R was the version I wanted to keep listening to.

Honestly, I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why I preferred a version of the album sourced from an LP and digitized using an $80 analog to digital converter, but I don't think it had anything to do with dynamic range compression. Some of you will no doubt think I'm either nuts or deaf, but I know what I heard; at least when played through speakers, my LP sourced CD-R sounded better than the remaster done by a professional with access to the original master tapes. A lot better to my ears. I can think of a few possible explanations for this, but none of them involve me being some kind of sonic wizard; I'm just a nerd with a semi-decent turntable and a cheap USB analog to digital converter.

Analog and LP boosters are often quick to dismiss digital sound altogether, but my experience with digitizing music from vinyl has convinced me that there is nothing inherently wrong with digital sound. Even resolution limited 16 bit, 44 kHz CDs are capable of fantastic sound quality. This experience has forced me to the (inescapable?) conclusion that some aspect of LP playback adds something to the sound of music that I happen to find appealing, but which is not strictly speaking "hi-fi." And whatever that LP magic is, it can be captured digitally (or at least most of it can).

To sum up, the deluxe edition of Murmur will likely sound like a major sonic upgrade to anyone who is only familiar with the original CD. Those familiar with the LP (or Mobile Fidelity's mid 90s audiophile reissues) might feel differently. Oh, and sacred cows make delicious hamburger meat.

Found For $1: Peppermint Stick Parade

I've always been a big advocate of scouring record store bargain bins. That is in part because I'm cheap, but also because I enjoy the feeling of surprise when you turn up something really cool among the discarded Boston LPs and Hanson CDs (that's actually how I found my original pressing of The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat).

Recently I found a CD called Peppermint Stick Parade, a compilation of singles released on Iowa's Bus Stop label, nestled among the $1 flotsam and jetsam. It's a real treat for anyone who is a fan of Velvet Crush with no less than 8 tracks by such V.C. related acts as Bag-O-Shells, Honeybunch, The Stupid Cupids, The Springfields, Paulie Chastain, and Velvet Crush themselves.

I really do hope there is another CD compilation of early Menck/Chastain stuff in the works, because between Paul's Halo EP and stray cuts by The Stupid Cupids, Bag-O-Shells, etc. there is a lot more tuneful ground left to be covered. If you don't already have them, Hey Wimpus and The Ballad of Ric Menck are essential purchases for fans of 60s flavored pop music (I know I've mentioned this before, but that doesn't make it any less true).

These two tracks from Bag-O-Shells have yet to be released on CD anywhere oustside this rather obscure compilation. They're both killer cuts. In fact, I'd rank "Whatever Happened To My Life" right up there with the best tunes on any Velvet Crush album--it's that good. Not bad for a buck. Sometimes checking the bargain bins pays off.

Pylon - Chomp

Well loved in their home town of Athens, GA, but little known outside of it, Pylon broke up too early to capitalize on the brief media fascination with the town in that wake of R.E.M.'s success.

R.E.M. regularly cited Pylon as an influence, but it's often hard to hear it in the music. Pylon were far more interested in dance beats coupled to angular, post-punk guitar than R.E.M.'s Byrdsian jangle pop. To my ears, Pylon usually sounded closer to the aesthetic of British post-punk acts like Gang of 4, Delta 5, and Au Pairs than to the music Athens became briefly famous for.

The closest Pylon got to jangle-pop was "Crazy," a song best-known for R.E.M.'s cover of it. Pylon's version is superior, and remains my favorite track by the band.

Pylon's first album, Gyrate, was reissued by DFA Records last year. Hopefully they'll reissue Chomp in the near future as well. I always considered Chomp the better album, but Gyrate seems to be the one that has acquired the posthumous reputation as a source of inspiration on today's indie scene. This probably says a lot about how out-of-touch I am with recent developments in indie rock.

Of course the coolest thing about the LP is the way the serrated top edge of the record cover kinda, sorta, not really looks like it's been "chomped" on by a dinosaur.

Close Lobsters - What Is There To Smile About?

Native to Scotland, the Close Lobster is considered a delicacy among connoisseurs of melodic, neo-psychedelic, jangle-pop. Unfortunately, the lifespan of a Close Lobster is known to be quite short, typically on the order of three to four years. Close Lobsters were thought to have gone extinct sometime around 1989, but there were reported sightings as late as 1991.

Several ethnographic field recordings of Close Lobsters are known to exist, but most of them are out-of-print. The first full-length recording, called Foxheads Stalk This Land, is no longer available on the format known as the compact disc, but can be downloaded in the MP3 format. A subsequent EP, What Is There To Smile About, and final album, Headache Rhetoric, are more difficult to locate at the moment.

So Much Younger Then

R.E.M. is back from the dead. Or so says Time Magazine anyway. For the first time in years there is a positive buzz surrounding a new R.E.M. album (Accelerate, released today). Inherent in the buzz around the album is the admission, even on the part of the band itself, that the last several R.E.M. albums have been duds.

So is the band's revitalization real, or a bunch of hype? I'd like to believe it's real, much in the same way that I'd like to believe that--with proper diet and exercise--I'll one day be able to bench press twice my body weight again, just like when I was seventeen. I don't know how good Accelerate is, I haven't heard it yet. But I guarantee you it's better than the last three R.E.M. albums, if for no other reason than it clocks in at a succinct 35 minutes.

Late career artistic revitalization is not exactly unheard of--Bob Dylan and Neil Young released some great albums after long fallow periods. But Dylan and Young are solo artists, and R.E.M. is a band (or is supposed to be a band anyway). I think it's a taller order for a group of forty-something millionaires who live in castles in different cities to get together and make a great rock and roll album. A better point of comparison is probably The Rolling Stones. The Stones have cranked out some decent, workmanlike albums late in their career, but--face it--Bridges To Babylon isn't going to make it to anyone's desert island discs list, and I predict Accelerate won't either.

Don't get me wrong, Accelerate might turn out to be a very good album, but R.E.M. is never going to sound like the hungry, driven, life force they were in their early days. They're not going to bench press twice their body weight, if for no other reason than they're older and fatter than they used to be.

Anyway, on the occasion of R.E.M.'s purported rise from the grave, I wanted to give you a rarely heard peek back at those early days. These tracks come from a bootleg called, appropriately enough, So Much Younger Then. It's a group of very good quality live recordings from 1981 composed of covers and originals that never made it onto the group's proper albums. Listening to these tracks today I'm amazed at just how vital the band sounded way back then. The ingredients that made the group such a revelation when Murmur was released in 1983 were already in place here with an added dash of rock and roll excitement and youthful energy that the group has never recaptured.

Time will tell whether the narrative of R.E.M.'s phoenix-like rebirth is more hype than reality. But these tracks are a reminder that, whatever the band does going forward, they truly once were a great rock and roll band.

Chris Stamey - It's Alright

Chris Stamey was simultaneously both the more pop-oriented and the more experimental songwriter in the dBs. That much is made clear not only by listening to Stamey's contributions to the first two dBs' albums, but also by listening to how the band became a much simpler roots rock combo after he departed. (This is not a knock on Peter Holsapple, who I think is also a first-rate songwriter).

While Stamey's initial solo releases emphasized the knottier, more experimental side of his songwriting, It's Alright highlights Stamey the pop songwriter without totally abandoning his experimental tendencies. Artistically, it was a rousing success, commercially, not so much. After It's Alright's poor sales, A&M rejected a second album Stamey recorded for the label (later released by Rhino as Fireworks). Stamey mostly moved on to production work, and only recently resumed his solo career with a couple of albums for Yep Roc, including the outstanding Travels In The South.

Used copies of It's Alright are getting harder to find, but it is well worth tracking down. "Cara Lee" which leads off the album, is a simple, sweet pop song that should have gotten more radio airplay at the time. "From The Word Go" is a gorgeous ballad with a haunting minor-key melody, and can stand proudly alongside anything from Stamey's tenure with the dBs. The album is occasionally marred by typical late 80s over-production, but it never gets in the way of the songs, many of which ("When We're Alone," "It's Alright," "The Seduction," "Of Time And All She Brings To Mind," "Incredible Happiness," "27 Years In A Single Day") are terrific. For some reason It's Alright never grabbed the attention of the jangle pop/R.E.M. fans that were its natural audience, nor the larger market that it coulda/shoulda broken through to. It's an unjustly overlooked classic.

Tommy Keene

There are many enduring mysteries from the 1980s. Why did people like Ronald Reagan? What did he know about Iran Contra and when? Was The Safety Dance a real dance like The Twist or The Mashed Potato or a metaphor for nuclear war? Who let Bruce Willis record an album?

But perhaps the greatest mystery of all is why Tommy Keene--a man who wrote some of the catchiest pop songs imaginable--failed to break through to a mass audience while acts like Mr. Mister were able to rule the charts.

I was lucky to be exposed to Tommy Keene through a local "progressive rock" radio station, WHFS in Annapolis, MD. Tommy Keene was a D.C. area fixture, and WHFS played his music alongside Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw, Nick Lowe, and others.

Back in 1993 Alias Records did the world the favor of compiling some of Keene's pre-Geffen material and some unreleased material on The Real Underground CD. "Nothing Happened Yesterday" was originally released on the excellent Places That Are Gone EP, while the wonderful cover of the Who's "Tattoo" first appeared on the CD. Keene's latest release is a collaboration with Guided By Voices' Bob Pollard.

Fetchin' Bones

All Music Guide says Fetchin' Bones were a proto-grunge act, but that in no way does justice to what a quirky and unique band they were. In reality Fetchin' Bones music was a joyous mishmash of punk, funk, rockabilly, surf, and jangle-pop, filtered through a quirky, uniquely Southern, sensibility. Musical boundaries meant nothing to this band. Fetchin’ Bones were fun in a way that grunge could never be.

Talk about an energetic live act. Fetchin' Bones could really get a crowd of white people moving (their live cover of "Superfreak" could easily have caused the floors of many indie clubs to collapse). I remember they always had a big box of odd percussion instruments on stage that lent an element of mysterious alchemy to their show. And lead singer Hope Nicholls seemed like a real wild woman. What fun.

Fetchin' Bones put out three wonderful albums, Cabin Flounder, Bad Pumpkin, and Galaxie 500, before they produced Monster, an album that smoothed off some of their quirkier edges and moved the band closer to heavy metal territory. When that bid for mainstream acceptance flopped, the band called it a day. They deserved better. How can you not love a band that named an album Bad Pumpkin? (Hope Nicholls and guitarist Aaron Pitkin later founded the bands Sugarsmack and Snagglepuss. They also own a clothing store, Boris & Natasha, in Charlotte, NC.) I think Fetchin' Bones might have a myspace page if you want to be one of their "friends."

"Asteroid" is one of the many excellent cuts from their first album, 1985’s Cabin Flounder, on DB records.

Bag O Shells

Before they settled on the name Velvet Crush, Paul Chastain and Ric Menck (both separately and together) issued music under a bewildering array of monikers; Choo Choo Train, The Springfields, The Paint Set, Paul/Paulie Chastain, The Nines, The Reverbs, The Big Maybe, Stupid Cupids, etc. I have never been entirely clear on what distinguished one project from the next, and I doubt even Paul and Ric could explain the difference between all of these bands. (To make matters more confusing some of these early recordings were later collected under Ric Menck's name on the wonderful Ballad of Ric Menck CD.)

This song comes from a 1990 Bus Stop 7" credited to "Bag O Shells." It's hard to imagine that they ever envisioned Bag O Shells as anything other than a temporary moniker, but for all I know they thought that was the name they were going to ride to the top of the charts. More pre-Velvet Crush material has recently been collected on the appropriately titled, Hey Wimpus: The Early Recordings Of Paul Chastain & Ric Menck, but for some reason none of the Bag O Shells material is on it. It's hard to understand why, because this is wimp rock in its purest form, I mean, this song is even called "Pocketbook" for crying out loud.

Like most of the pre-Velvet Crush material, this is more twee and cutesy than anything Paul and Ric did as Velvet Crush, which makes it pretty darn twee and cutesy. It's easy to hear their infatuation with the baroque pop of the The Left Banke on this cut. I like it.