Are there ANY plans to reissue Husker Du?

i've said this before but the LPs sound great, Zen Arcade & New Day Rising in particular. they have the low-end that the digital transfers have always lacked, without sacrificing any of that sheet metal roar. hearing "Chartered Trips" on vinyl for the first time was an incredible experience. although it's my favorite Hüskers record, Flip Your Wig has that horribly dated gated reverb on the drums, and there's no remaster that can fix that.

sheet metal roar is so OTM

i saw them for the first time in early '85 at the Peppermint Lounge in NYC and they were... very roarish.

The sound of Flip Your Wig was a total letdown for me even though the songwriting was of a piece, after ZA and NDR made them my favorite band. Never been able to pinpoint why, but yeah, it's the drum sound. So thanks for pointing that out! That improved on Candy Apple, but I only like Grant's songs on that one. Warehouse, the songwriting comes back but the sound is thinner than ever.

Purely from a production standpoint, I'd rank the studio work Zen Arcade = Everything Falls Apart > New Day Rising = Metal Circus > Candy Apple Gray > Flip Your Wig = Warehouse. Maybe I would rank them that way overall. The Spot albums sound better than the final three self-produced ones. "Eight Miles High" is a brilliant piece of production in a lot of non-standard ways. The snare falls out when the lead riffs are foregrounded, then comes back in and dices up the blur-guitar verses to make them sharper. The vocals have really long delay that's basically smothered under the blur, but seems accidentally in counterpoint to the chime of the open strings. A lot of their later material potentially could have that kind of dynamics, but they just seemed to nudge all the sliders to the same place went for it.

are there *any* american indie bands from the 80s who have "good" production, really? replacements are pretty iffy, sonic youth's early stuff is muddy as hell, ditto dino jr ... all the SST bands obviously. i mean, for me, this production is part of the overall appeal of these bands, an amateurish/rawness that is maybe not *pleasant* but is kind of un-ignorable when it's playing.

guess i think of spot's production as matching pettibon's SST art — scary, stark and tasteless!

hard disagree on Dinosaur Jr., those records have heft & Mascis' guitar is soaring. Sister & EVOL sound fantastic, but Daydream Nation is v flat & muddy. I'm not suggesting the HD records would've been better with Butch Vig producing, it's just a matter of mixing & EQ really. Like, the rehearsal tapes of them doing Zen Arcade sound SOOO much better than the album. Skip to 6:25 to hear "Chartered Trips" in all its punishing glory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q95JFFe0Bsg

yay I got my MP3s!

are there *any* american indie bands from the 80s who have "good" production, really?

late in the decade but i always thought bitch magnet's 'umber' sounded great - spacious, powerful, love the way some of those songs (e.g. goat-legged country god, punch & judy) leap right out of the speakers. i think working with albini on the previous record must've really made them think hard about the basics of how to record instruments

those Butthole Surfers records sound great, imo (at least Psychic, Locust, and Hairway, never liked Rembrandt as much)

REM had pretty pro/solid production from the start

I.R.S. not an indie iirc (takes off 80's cool hat)

i actually got an early-ish CD of zen arcade this year and thought it sounded awesome. i don't know why. just some sort of compression thing with the drums that sounded cool to me and the digi-sound seemed to make the guitars sound even more like killer bees than they already did. i kept it for myself. and it was loud in the right way. i can crank it.

But honestly the truth is that if these bands had gotten "good" production it would have been some BoDeans ass bullshit not like going to Electrical Audio in the 2000s or something

woah wrt IRS they fooled me (and the police connection!)

es Copeland III, the son of CIA agent Miles Copeland Jr., played many roles in the U.K. punk rock and new wave music industry of the middle to late 1970s: agent, manager, producer, magazine publisher, record company and label owner. His brother Ian was the head of a talent agency, Frontier Booking International (F.B.I.), while his brother Stewart played drums for The Police, a band that Copeland managed. The Police's first album was released on A&M Records in 1978 with a hit single, "Roxanne", that Copeland called a turning point in his life.[2]

Building on success with the Police, Copeland convinced Jerry Moss, co-owner of A&M, to establish the I.R.S. division in 1979. I.R.S. stood for International Record Syndicate.[3]

wait - Double Nickels on the Dime, that record sounds great! (in a pretty conventional way)

wow there are six "unknown date" SST CD pressings of Zen Arcade listed on Discogs :(

SST keeps fucking all this stuff up so bad, I think I saw something on the Hoffman thread about them pressing vinyl reissues with worn-out stampers which explains some things

Ginn is such a piece of shit, sad he has control over such an important part of American rock music

and X - Los Angeles was on Slash, and sounds great but not too slick god bless Ray Manzarek #strangedaysmono

the roar of the mascis could be um, worn-out stampers

oh yeah, X's Los Angeles and Double Nickels do sound good — i mean, i wouldn't really want any of these records to sound different (maybe zen arcade is the exception? i'll check that rehearsal).

X albums got remastered in early 2000s.

Meat Puppets Up on the Sun sounds fantastic. As do Mirage and Huevos.

I always thought NoMeansNo's Wrong sounded fantastic

Pretty sure not all of Spot's records sound like the Huskers (My War, Meat Puppets).

Damaged sounds pretty fuckin good as well, y'all

(that being said, there are other engineers credited)

Spot also had to deal with getting all these fucking nutcases to record albums

Also based on the records that Mould produced in the early 80s, Man Sized Action & Impaler, he was into that harsh/thin sound. And no less of an authority than Terry Katzmann once told me that "those records sound exactly how they want them to"

We can talk about terrible cd transfers from the early 90s but those original SST LPs sound great. Weird, bracing, eccentric, sure, but still great.

yeah the Impaler record is a blast but sounds v thin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSP1s3WA2_8

I think the Minutemen were easier to record well because there was more space in their sound and arrangements rather than the sheets of metal and cardboard box drums. All the 80s Feelies albums sounded great in different ways, as did Mission Of Burma. Wipers sort of had similar issues as the Huskers.

good call on MoB, Vs. sounds incredible

Context is a factor. I remember one hot summer day moving into a house with some friends after my first year of college and the first thing we did before anything else was moved was set up the stereo with big heavy beat-up 70s-era speakers. We blasted Zen Arcade at window-shaking volume and it sounded amazing. But in the context of say, a digital playlist next to other recordings, it kind of sounds like ass.

Yeah Burma records were great, Roger Miller was a schooled musician so maybe he liked it more pro

Ex: The fact that they deliberately meant for the vocals on "Chartered Trips" to sound like Squidwad trapped in a garbage can amazes me.

It's more jarring to me as HD had a big sound that was anthemic in its own way. And the biggest selling act on SST by far (according to the Azerrad book).

Minutemen, by contrast and by design, were never going to be mistaken for an arena band.

Though Minutemen were apparently SUPER loud

Out there in the desert, I see trees on every wall
Nothing's ever solved

"Yeah Burma records were great, Roger Miller was a schooled musician so maybe he liked it more pro"

tons of boston records sound great. indie and punk and hardcore and new wave. all kinds. maybe in the back of their minds they thought they could be the cars.

i was listening to this today. sounds so cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=65&v=7iAzxE8S3XI

'Squidward trapped in a garbage can' - I will never be able to unhear that.

Norman Records are indeed selling the vinyl in the UK - £79 delivered which isn't too harsh given the shit nature of the pound vs dollar

Confession: I've never had a problem with the way my Husker Du discs sounded. I remember reading Christgau's reviews of the albums, and even he would bring up the bad production, but it's always been exactly what I wanted from the band. I even like the drum sound, which I don't think is gated reverb. It's something a lot more eccentric.

I cant imagine the albums sounding any other way. If they had been more polished I doubt we would like them as much.

totes agree with those 2 posts

MoB sounded great on Vs. in part because Rick Harte (Ace of Hearts) was Ginn's exact opposite, and the mensch of Boston label owners. Everything done right.

I've listened to the NPR streaming, and it feels like the remasters have done the standard thing—fill in the bass to make the sound fuller. (And also to bring everything up to current loudness standards, of course, which is fine.) But I'm not sure a fuller Husker Du is always a better Husker Du. You can subtly take the edge off the sound and make it a touch sluggish, too. It'll probably sound great on cheap headphones, though, which is too frequently the target of remastering nowadays.

Thing is I don't think it's lack of polish that's the problem with the production on Husker Du records. There are loads of punk/hardcore records with way cruddier lo-fi production than Husker Du/other SST records from that time that still manage to sound good. I think it's the mixing? Maybe just a bit of EQ-ing would make them better, I dunno. Obviously this is a taste thing as well, I'm used to "raw" punk production and generally dislike "slick" production on punk records.

Mind you the only Husker Du I have on vinyl is Flip Your Wig, the rest is all on CD, so it could be the bad CD transfer or whatever.

Would also say my issues with Husker Du production mostly go away if you crank it loud enough!

Pretty fair to say, I think, that Copper Blue or maybe Beaster is what HD might have sounded like with traditional "good" production, but that would not have worked well. It needs that jagged in the red feel. There's a reason they call it stun guitar.

Wait what are blue oyster cult doing in the huskers thread???

Seriously though, does anyone have a line on some decent huskers vinyl rips? In my original fandom I had them all on cassette, and those were replaced by CDs. I never heard them on vinyl... and people's description intrigues me.

I love those first two Sugar records so much