Here's a Valentine for your heart (your actual heart, the organ that pumps blood through your body).
I've been posting 30 minute mixes optimized for cardio workouts over at Mixcloud. The idea is pretty simple: each song averages between 120 and 160 beats per minute (generally considered the ideal range for cardio exercise). Personally, I've found it really is easier to keep moving at a brisk pace when the music falls in this ideal range. I've got a number of other cardio mixes up at Mixcloud as well.
There's a Mixcloud app for both iPhone/iOS and Android devices, so it's quite easy to access these mixes on the go.
Tracklist:
The Replacements - "Valentine"
Rockpile - "If Sugar Was As Sweet As You"
Talking Heads - "Love → Building On Fire"
The Modern Lovers - "Someone I Care About by The Modern Lovers"
David Bowie - "Modern Love"
The Slits - "Love Und Romance"
The Undertones - "Valentine's Treatment"
ABC - "Valentine's Day"
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours"
Marvin Gaye - "This Love Starved Heart Of Mine (Is Killing Me)"
Despite my complaints about Rhino's remaster of Pleased To Meet Me, I went ahead and picked up the reissue of Tim as well. I'm glad I did. To make a long story short, they got this one right.
I wish I could compare the remaster to my original LP, but I can't. Years ago I loaned my LP copy of Tim to a friend who made the mistake of leaving it locked in his Ford Fiesta on a hot day. When he returned it to me it was warped to the point of being unplayable. I replaced the LP with a new-fangled CD, but I have never been happy with the way the album sounded on CD.
The remaster makes for a much more satisfying listen than the older CD (which was probably issued a couple years after the album was released on LP and cassette). The older CD suffered from the kind of thin and tinny sound I often associate with CDs from the mid 80s (which is what initially turned me off about the medium). Tommy Erdelyi's production had a tinny quality to it anyway, and the flaws in the original CD only exacerbated the problem. The remaster, while preserving the original qualities of the recording, sounds richer and fuller. So yeah, the snare drum still sounds like it's being channeled through a tin can, but it least it sounds like it's coming from a bigger tin can.
Unlike the Pleased To Meet Me remaster, Rhino preserved the dynamic range of the original this time. Yes, the volume is boosted a bit compared to the older CD, but I see (and hear) little, if any, evidence of dynamic range compression. Likewise, the dynamic shifts between songs have been preserved on this remaster (the quiet songs don't sound as loud as the loud ones). I'll try to post images when I get a chance, but for now you'll have to take my word for it.
Tim was the first Replacements album I bought, and as such holds a special place in my heart. And I have to say, nostalgia aside, I still think it's a kick ass album. Look at that album cover. What the fuck is that? It's awesome. And the songs. Nearly every song on this album is killer. Yes, the hard-rock numbers "Dose Of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown" sound a little forced. But even though "Clown" is the weakest song on the album, it still contains the classic line "the only exercise you get is the shakes" (which I have to believe was written about Bob Mould). You can't entirely slag a track with a line like that. Every other song on the album is a bona-fide classic.
I'd go so far as to say that it is very difficult to think of a run of classic albums as strong as the Replacements had from Let It Be through Pleased To Meet Me. Maybe the Stones from Beggar's Banquet through Exile On Main Street were better. But as great as those Stones albums were, I'll always have more affection for the Replacements, because they were a band that I felt belonged to me, not to some bunch of sell-out old farts whose primary pleasure in life seem to consist of lecturing me about how much cooler everything was when they were my age. On these albums Paul Westerberg and his crew spoke directly to the issues and concerns of alienated kids coming of age in the late 80s in a way that "classic rock" couldn't.
Little things: There's a little less bonus material on Tim, but what's there is great. As others have noted, the short bit of studio chatter that precedes "Left of the Dial" has been eliminated on the remaster (personally, on a scale of 1-10 this rates somewhere between 0-1 as a concern for me, although I realize others feel differently). "Nowhere Is My Home" an Alex Chilton produced track previously only available on the Boink! EP is clearly sourced from vinyl (it doesn't say so in the liner notes, but I guarantee it). I have no problem with this whatsoever. The truth is, sometimes a vinyl copy is the best source available. I'd rather hear a good vinyl transcription over an attempt to reconstruct a deteriorated master tape any day. (And who knows, maybe this is one of those masters sitting at the bottom of the Mississippi?) They got the cover image right, with yellow text that matches the original LP art instead of the white text on the old CD (that always bugged me more than it probably should have). The liner notes by Bob Mehr are first-rate, shedding a lot of light on Westerberg's songwriting and the creative tensions within the band at the time.
This goes a long way toward restoring my faith in Rhino as a premier reissue label and trustworthy guardian of our musical legacy. This reissue is a nice, I would say essential, upgrade. Oh yeah, one more thing: Hey kids, things were so much cooler when I was your age.
Something else is bugging me about the remastering job on the recent Rhino deluxe reissue of Pleased To Meet Me. Listening to the whole thing, rather than frantically comparing tracks drove home an important point: more than just dynamic range within the songs has gotten lost in the remastering, perhaps just as importantly, dynamic contrasts between songs have also been lost.
Comparing tracks to tracks--as I have been doing--is a useful exercise, but it only tells part of the story. So I compiled visual images that represent the first five tracks on Pleased To Meet Me (just for kicks, I'll call this "side one") taken from the original CD and the remastered reissue respectively.
Take a look at what I found:
Pleased To Meet Me (Side One: Original CD, 1987)
Pleased To Meet Me (Side One: Remastered CD, 2008)
It's pretty easy to see what's happened here. Beyond the obvious fact that each track has been made louder on the remaster, it's clear that the volume of some tracks has been boosted more than others. On the original CD, "Nightclub Jitters" is a fairly quiet song relative to the first three tracks ("I.O.U.," "Alex Chilton," and "I Don't Know"). But on the remastered CD it's been boosted to the point that it is nearly the same volume as the other tracks. Likewise, on the original "The Ledge" is louder than "Jitters," but still quieter than the first three tracks. Those shifts in dynamics between songs have been totally obliterated on the remaster. On the new version, each track appears to have been normalized to around -.3 db with respect to itself, making each song sound as loud as the other.
How loud the individual tracks sound with respect to one another is an important component in how the songs cohere as an album, rather than just as a collection of tracks. I don't believe "Nightclub Jitters" just happened to be quieter than the other songs on side one by accident; Pleased To Meet Me was carefully recorded and mastered the first time around. The song has to be quieter to set the right mood. Hearing Westerberg's whispered vocals on "Nightclub Jitters" sound just as loud as the ones he was screaming on "I Don't Know" is disconcerting, and intuitively sounds wrong.
There's an irony in the fact that an album that has been designated as worthy of the deluxe reissue treatment has been treated like this. On the one hand, the album is presented as a work of "art" worthy of serious evaluation and scrutiny, complete with extended liner notes and a premium price. On the other hand, it's been mastered as though it was never anything more than a collection of unrelated tracks, like some sad-sack Journey "best of" you might find for sale at a truck stop.
I accept that I may be clinging to a completely outdated conceptual framework in thinking about the album this way. Maybe the iPod and iTunes have killed the rock album and there's no point looking back. Perhaps whole the idea of an "album" (a term carried over from the days in which 78 rpm records were packaged together in binders) is simply hopelessly passe. We live in a world where playlists and portability have supplanted coherence and quality. Perhaps in such a world every track has to be the same volume in order to be heard over the background noise of everyday life. But if that's the case why even bother with these deluxe reissue packages at all? Aren't they intended for people who still have enough attention span left to sit down and listen to a whole album from start to finish?
I haven't done one of these comparisons in a little while, but I do plan to keep doing them occasionally. Take a look at the remastering job Rhino did to The Replacements' 1987 album Pleased To Meet Me. The diagrams below represent the waveforms of original and remastered versions of the track "Alex Chilton."
The Replacements - "Alex Chilton" (Original CD, 1987)
The Replacements - "Alex Chilton" (Remastered CD, 2008)
I'll just go ahead and state the obvious: Rhino has squashed a lot of dynamic range out of "Alex Chilton" to make it sound "louder." This is hardly one of the more egregious examples of heavy handed peak-limiting and compression in the loudness wars, but it's still wrong. The remaster hasn't been compressed to the point that it sounds aggressively bad, but the drums occasionally lack the impact of the original. Subjectively, the differences between the reissue and the original are small, but to my ears the reissue certainly doesn't improve on the original in any way.
I hope you enjoy the bonus material and liner notes on this updated edition of Pleased To Meet Me, because when you shell out $17 for this remastered CD, you're paying for worse, not better, sound. My advice: don't sell your original.
"How can The Replacements be the best band of the 80s when I've never even heard of them?" - Jon Bon Jovi, Musician Magazine (10/89)
The Replacements Twin/Tone catalog gets the deluxe Rhino reissue treatment today. Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Stink, Hootenanny and Let It Be were a big part of my misspent youth in the 1980s. Now thanks to Rhino I can enjoy them remastered and with bonus tracks during my misspent middle age.
I can still can still recall straining to hear the mighty Replacements' glorious noise outside a club in Washington D.C. after having my obviously doctored ID rejected by the club's bouncer. It was my 17th birthday, but I doubt I looked a day over 15.
"How young are you? How old am I?"
I can vividly remember the nervous feeling building in the pit of my stomach as the bouncer took what seemed like an eternity to study my driver's license. I had strategically placed a little daub of paint over the "9" in 1969 in order to make it look like a "7." After a long look at the ID the bouncer eyed me skeptically and said "Happy Birthday. How old are you today?" I was so flustered I didn't know what the answer was supposed to be. My throat was dry and my head was spinning. After a few seconds I think managed to say "umm." He told me to hit the bricks.
"19." Damn, the answer should have been 19. 19 would have been old enough to drink in the District of Columbia in 1986. More importantly, 19 would have been old enough to see The Replacements on July 30, 1986. If I had managed to keep my wits about me enough to say "19" I just might have gotten in.
"How smart are you? How dumb am I?"
I didn't know it at the time, but I missed my only chance to see The Replacements with original guitarist Bob Stinson that night. Think about that. I missed out on seeing The Replacements with Bob Stinson because I was too stupid to add 17 + 2. I suppose--given the band's occasional willful stupidity--that there is something appropriate about that. But that was small comfort to me on my 17th birthday. The worst part of having my ID rejected was that it also kept my buddy Peter (whose doctored ID passed muster) out of the show. I carry that guilt with me to this day. A lesser friend would have probably just headed into the club anyway, but Peter stuck with me. (Then again, maybe he just needed a ride home, I can't remember who drove). It is one of my greatest regrets that I never saw the original Replacements line-up in their loud and sloppy prime. As greatest regrets go that's probably not such a bad one to have, but over twenty years later my ears still burn a bit when I remember getting turned away from that club. Mark Richardson at Pitchfork does a good job of reviewing the reissues. It's good to see someone who is (I assume) younger than me conclude that these albums have much more going for them than Gen X nostalgia. I generally don't like assigning number values to album reviews, but his ratings strike me as fair. It's important to keep in mind however that the albums' flaws are an intrinsic part their "lovable loser" appeal. "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" and "Gary's Got A Boner" may not be Cole Porter, but Let It Be wouldn't be as great without them.
