Sade: Classic or Dud?

they don't swing, but they do sound more like they're listening to each other, which is what over-quantizing a track takes away - most of this record you don't get the feeling you're listening to a band, whereas on love deluxe you feel like no matter how many punches & overdubs there are the unit is playing together - which this doesn't sound like, to me

i see what you guys are sayin - i mean, love deluxe, iirc, had a bigger impact on me right off the block than this one. it's quite possible that several of her earlier albums are better than this one. BUT, i liked it a lot the first time i heard it, i have yet to EVER turn it off mid-album (which i'm very very prone to do to almost anything else) even after many many playthroughs, and something tells me it's gonna keep growing on me. lord knows lovers rock was a grower, in the best way possible - i'm kinda only just now realizing how awesome that one is cause i only gave it, like, 5 chances back when it came out. don't know what the hell i was thinking then back then, not loving LR to death!?!?! anyway i suspect this one will hold it's place proudly among the cannon of sade albums, some of which are inevitably better than others, but all of which are unquestionably awesome.

re:quantitization: i think none of the core members of sade (the band) are drummers - thus their growing use of drum machines over the years. therefore, the drums are almost by definition very highly quantized - and as a guy who messes with drum machines and software a lot, i suspect they program, not input by hand, their drum patterns... so almost by definition they're 100% quantized, period, and perhaps have been since love deluxe. any looseness you hear is from the musicians playing around the beat, not the drums themselves. i think this one's just pretty slick, not too lose, lots of takes to get everything perfectly perfect... hell it's their first album in like 10 years and its FUCKING SADE so i think they were really trying to get everything sounding polished...

...what am i trying to say? basically i think their drum machines have always been quantized, it's not any different here from their last 3 albums. and i suspect this album sounds more polished cause they WANTED it to sound more polished, perhaps as a turn-around from the looseness and simpleness of lover's rock...

Lyrics to Baby Father :
We were waiting for the bus
No-one much around but us
Then I see this young boy cut a look at me
I’m stunned
In a daze
He had the whole street set ablaze
It’s only love they say
Makes you feel this way

She liked his eyes she wanted more
The baby gonna have your smile for sure
He saw a lovely girl
Smelling sweet and soapy like fresh air
She saw him looking acted like she didn’t care
That’s how we knew
And so love grew a flower
A flower that is you

this kills me...

is she saying "Your daddy knows you're a fling"? If so, it's a devastating lyric.

this album really hit for me when the lyrics sunk in - inc, yes, "your daddy knows you're a fling"

Bimble.

He just knew, didn't he?

wtf?

listening to sweetback right now (ie. sade without sade singing) it's like love deluxe, except with someone else on vox...

...obviously. definitely very nice. and not completely unlike portishead as well. which is not a bad thing... like if portishead was more Adult Contemporary? no, wait, it's like this: it's like if this incredibly talented backup band was just dicking around, recording the tripout album they always wanted to do while the diva was disappearing to jamaica and port au prince for years at a time...

wow, nice rapper chick on "au natural" too... who is that?

bahamadia.

is she saying "Your daddy knows you're a fling"? If so, it's a devastating lyric.

― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:10 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
this album really hit for me when the lyrics sunk in - inc, yes, "your daddy knows you're a fling"

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:24 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i asked upthread & its apparently "flame." the 'fling' lyric would be devestating if it made any sense w/ the rest of the lyrics but there are no references to him ditching or whatever, they talk about the kid being a flower-product of 'love' not 1nitestand

& messiah totally otm about the quantizing, i really have no idea what j0hn is on about -- theyve never been some loose live-sounding band, its been a huge knock against them for years that they sound all studiofied

the problem with the drums on this record isn't that they sound too quantized, it's that they sound too tinny

Yes. I had to look up "quantized."

i read "flame" on the lyrics site, but i always heard it clearly as "fling" before i saw it written out. fwiw according to wikipedia she had a child out of wedlock about a year after getting divorced in 1995, and that the relationship was somewhat shortlived and is definitely now over - thus "you're a fling" makes perfect sense

the drums are just incredibly bland and insipid (and tinny yes, though i dont know if the reverend is being sarcastic or not).

babyfather is just sublime tho.

when i saw Sade at Madison Square Garden her drummer was playing MIDI triggers iirc

what is this fixation on Sade's drums?

they detract from this record?

i haven't noticed anything egregiously bad or off about the drums tbh

Me neither.

but is that something you usually notice when listening to music? some people think focusing on things like that is overly anal. i dont like the production of the last 2 records all that much to begin with anyway personally. its like listening to a dido record really. bad hip hop programming.

"Drums" is actually code for "tittays."

they detract from this record?

^^^

it's not like the record sucks but the performances are for the most part uninspired (in the drums imo obv)- unlike lovers rock which was one big rush of understated feeling after another, waves-on-the-beach action, or love deluxe which was like that only more intense. I dig about 1/3 of this record to pieces & like the rest well enough but anybody saying "it's just like her other stuff" is drinkin crazy juice, this is a minor entry in the sade catalog

HISTORY WILL VINDICATE ME

her next record in 2024 will be a return to form, trust me

j0hn i feel you to a certain degree, inasmuchas love deluxe> promise > diamond life > lovers rock > soldier of love > stronger than pride (album not the song)

but it's frikkin SADE man! her weaker albums are manna from heaven compared to 99.9% of all other tripe out there, and i'm counting the days till 2024

I am with you! I am stoked to have a new Sade album! it's just that the groove isn't as mmmmmm as I'd like & I'm putting that on the degradation of production techniques & standards over the years - I know this is corny decrepit listener central but if these guys were tracking to tape with an engineer who knew his way around a big analog console, every mind on this thread would be completely blown by these exact same songs

the whole albums a bit slower and less sexy, more introspective. i put it down to mrs. adu herself, like it's just where she is in her life and so that's what her album sounds like...

actually you can see her whole catalog through this kinda mental filter - diamond life = young n carefree, promise = budding young love with the guitarist, stronger than pride = difficult relationship choices, getting married (not to the guitarist), love deluxe = clock ticking, i'm super horny someone please get me pregnant asap, lovers rock = concerns over stability in relationships...

soldier of love = ...looking back on the past, reminiscing at 50 etc? fuck it, i'll listen to sade reminisce if thats what she wants to sing about

if these guys were tracking to tape with an engineer who knew his way around a big analog console, every mind on this thread would be completely blown by these exact same songs

sad but truth bomb

if these guys were tracking to tape with an engineer who knew his way around a big analog console

are you sure they aren't? sade's "the most successful solo female artist in British history.[2]" so if she wanted to track to tape with the same engineer who recorded promise, i'm sure that's exactly what she did, industry trends be damned.... though if anyone has a link to a sound on sound article about this joint, i'd be happy to be proven wrong, just to read what studio/mics/preamps etc she DID use

ok enough sade stanning from me for a while

i bet she doesnt give a shit about tracking to tape or recording in a nice studio blah blah audiophile blah. wouldnt be surprised if most of this album was done in a home studio. could be totally wrong of course - i dont have the cd to check. but a lot of artists think that sort of talk is for saddos and geeks. plus recording to tape and all that is more expensive these days. a lot of artists seem to prefer being able to record in their own studio or a small home setup rather than going to a professional one.

but comparing the sonics of this album in terms of richness/expansiveness etc to the older ones is just :( which is sad, cos yknow, its SADE.

im gonna listen to it again now anyway.

are you sure they aren't?

I would bet money on it.

the whole thing sounds thin so im guessing it was straight to digital.

it's that + I would also guess that an above poster is correct: that the guitars are being tracked in the console room and treated in the HD with various processes that simulate amp tone - which may some day provide the varieties of tone you can get with guitar + pedals + amps, but sure doesn't at this stage imo, or which doesn't anyhow outside of the hands of some really forward-looking engineers

I could be completely wrong tho gotta say I am just estimating on what I hear. for all I know it's just a lazy mastering job.

to my ears it sounds pretty much like the same sort of production values of a james blunt album.

xpost - why dont people just actually use guitar pedals and amps?

it costs a lot of money to run a big studio & upkeep good vintage gear & there's a general movement toward soft emulators of amps & effects - convenience & the unassailable truth that most people don't give a shit & won't notice the difference

one can have v. long discussions about this, it's hard not to sound like an "oor it were much better before awl the CHANGES, yargh" person on the one end but I've tracked electric guitars in both contexts with world-class engineers and imo plugging directly into the board is borderline criminal; room tone is hugely important, and it's something people pay less & less attention to

"most people don't give a shit & won't notice the difference"

these people are listened to far too much.

I have no idea where she actually recorded it but she's got a studio in the basement of her house in Islington.

J0hn maybe this is all a set-up to prime you into purchasing "Soldier of Love - Unplugged"? Only half joking..

"most people don't give a shit & won't notice the difference"

also, i think these people do notice the difference, they just arent able to verbalise it.

well - on this - the liner notes say "recorded at realworld studios uk & el cortijo spain." realworld is world-class, was state of the art when it was new & I'm assuming is still something special - its website is droolworthy stuff. El Cortijo looks if anything more amazing. so if there is a problem, it's not in the environment - there is no reason, given enough budget, not to make an album full of "soldier of love"s in these rooms. "soldier of love" is to me sonically on par with plenty of other sade tracks.

but it does have this one sampled guitar hit throughout that I find distracting - it can't really hurt the track, but that's partly because the track is made of really strong stuff - and this is part of the sonic picture that isn't working for me - this sort of frankenstein feel. I look toward the digital treatment of percussion & of performance for a culprit here, and sometimes to mastering. the album was mastered at metropolis - I don't know anything about them, but john davis, the mastering engineer here, has a strictly a-list bunch of recent clients - snow patrol, stereophonics, arctic monkeys, bloc party - whose records I haven't heard, so I can't say what his aesthetic is.

so, I don't know. the problem isn't the studio, and it's probably not the mastering job. as an analog dude I'm inclined to point fingers at changes in technique ushered in by the wholesale transition to digital - I listen to that monochromatic beat on "babyfather" and think "if you'd tried to bring that blah sound into a love deluxe session you'd have been laughed out of the room." but maybe I just ain't feelin the songs as much? I don't know.

Derail: just noticed how she's sloowly turning away...

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b356/olem/sadeturns.jpg

(I'd estimate the time of orbit at abt 58 years (ie 2042), except a couple of them I had to l/r-flip so it doesn't really work)

j0hn you got called on the quantizing thing already so now you're changing yr argument & real talk you sound exactly like every sade critic ever. TOO MUCH LIKE A STUDIO. i dunno. it strikes me as fronting. i just listened to 'cherish the day' seconds ago & the drums are just as 'quantized' as ever. they never sounded like a live band, or when they did, they sounded like a live band that was TRYING to sound as mechanistic/studioized as possible, clean & antiseptic in the rhythmic department.

i dont hear any problems with the sound quality on this record, really struggling to hear what everyone's problem is tbh

it doesnt help that u keep shifting the goalposts. is it 'tinny'? those drums dont sound tinny to me. they sound ... like regular sade drums. i dont hear, like, compression problems. can u guys try to tease out exactly whats so annoying about the sound because i dont get it

when did I say "tinny"? you're so busy insisting that everybody (which is a bunch of people) who hear this record as quite different from other sade records are somehow kidding themselves, etc., that you can't even distinguish between who's arguing what. there is kind of no point in trying to make a case to you - you're just going to reject the argument anyway owing to your lack of interest in discussion - glad you think the album sounds exactly like every other sade album ever, plenty of people who've been listening to sade for 20+ years don't hear it that way, w/e dude

like this

they never sounded like a live band, or when they did, they sounded like a live band that was TRYING to sound as mechanistic/studioized as possible, clean & antiseptic in the rhythmic department.

not going to dispute that that's how they've always sounded to you, but "mechanistic" is about the last word I'd've used to describe the band playing "cherish the day" - they always sounded like a live band

also, the diff between a band TRYING to sound mechanistic or whatever as opposed to a band that DOES sound mechanistic is pretty big.

though i wouldnt say they sounded mechanistic either.

Sade's on Jonathan Ross!