Thursday, May 17, 2007
New Smasing Pumpkins! [Yawn]
This ain't your older sister's Smashing Pumpkins, mind you. This is the New, Improved Version! Hey this is 2007 man! We gots to have flying cars, world peace, and top-fucking-notch audio production quality! Just go to their myspace page, and listen to the old stuff. Then check out the track Let me give the world to you from their upcoming, inappropriately named album, 'Zeitgeist'.
....
um, What the Fuck?
WHY DOES THIS SOUND LIKE SHIT?
Oh, that's right, it's the Smashing Pumpkins; they always were always hit-n-miss. Their good songs were great, like "Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" - good enough for me to overlook (overlisten?) Billy Corgan's voice which is, at times, *Worse* than Ozzy Ozborne. :( But if this is the single, how bad will the rest be?
The new S.P. single sounds like it was recorded on a rusty shoelace using a microphone that was stuffed in a shoebox full of those orange circus peanut candies. Listen closely, you can almost hear the band playing the song in the next room....
So instead of becoming some kind of 'New' sound, and amazing us with ingenuity, the new SP is sounding awfully indie. I would call it grunge without the harshness that made SP interesting in the first place. Watered-down-grunge? Wouldn't that be Sludge? Yep, I think Sludge is the new Grunge, just add water.
Well, the good thing is that squishing the piss out of the file by compressing it into .mp3 format can't possibly have an adverse effect on the audio quality.
-Zero
3 Comments
Links to this post
....
um, What the Fuck?
WHY DOES THIS SOUND LIKE SHIT?
Oh, that's right, it's the Smashing Pumpkins; they always were always hit-n-miss. Their good songs were great, like "Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" - good enough for me to overlook (overlisten?) Billy Corgan's voice which is, at times, *Worse* than Ozzy Ozborne. :( But if this is the single, how bad will the rest be?
The new S.P. single sounds like it was recorded on a rusty shoelace using a microphone that was stuffed in a shoebox full of those orange circus peanut candies. Listen closely, you can almost hear the band playing the song in the next room....
So instead of becoming some kind of 'New' sound, and amazing us with ingenuity, the new SP is sounding awfully indie. I would call it grunge without the harshness that made SP interesting in the first place. Watered-down-grunge? Wouldn't that be Sludge? Yep, I think Sludge is the new Grunge, just add water.
Well, the good thing is that squishing the piss out of the file by compressing it into .mp3 format can't possibly have an adverse effect on the audio quality.
-Zero
Labels: Is This Art?, music
3 Comments:
[UPDATE: Check this out:
http://www.myspace.com/amylavere
New stuff from named Amy LaVere, a little Memphis belle-ette who plays a great big upright bass. Check the track 'Killing Him'. While the content is a little country-esque for me, I Love Love Love the voice, and it sounds like she is in the room with me. Clean, crisp, clear. Talented performance and tasteful production, not the swampwater I'm hearing from the New And Improved Smashing Pumpkins.
Of course, it isn't fair to compare the different genres, so I'm not. Instead, listen to the quality of the production, listen for the shine on the lyrics and the accuracy and clarity of the bass tone, and how it works to make the song better. It just sounds so...present.
Then listen to Smashing Pumpkins again, and listen for the same thing. The difference is that when you listen to the Smashing Pumpkins track it sounds like somebody rolled you up in a burnt-orange deep shag carpet and then played the track on a walkman.
..in the next room.
Guess I expected more from the man who produced Cheap Trick, Queen, The Cars and Devo.
-Z]
It's a weird world; so much music is over-produced, but the reaction seems to be to make it sound like shit and pass it off as some sort of "statement."
The proliferation of cheap studio gear allows, in theory, infinite experimentation: you can undo everything, and don't have to commit to anything until the mix.
But it seems to have homogenized music production to the point where there are only two buttons to reach for: the Shiny!!!! Fader and the Suck! Fader.
You either sound like Disturbed or the White Stripes. What happened to sounding like, uh, YOU?
"Days from Evil" may not sound like it cost a million bucks, but it sounds pretty damn good.
that was me btw.
-josh
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