https://www.stereogum.com/2108943/elvis-costello-steve-albini-pj-harvey/news/
― piscesx, Monday, 30 November 2020 19:20 (three years ago) link
first & hopefully last time I've agreed with Costello
long post a couple of posts above is otm. the free pass this prick gets in certain circles is galling
― Left, Monday, 30 November 2020 19:42 (three years ago) link
nah he's a great producer, prick or otherwise
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 19:46 (three years ago) link
well, sound engineer, as he protests
I find his sound pedantic
― Left, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:12 (three years ago) link
i wouldn't dispute that, but its deliberate clarity is quite literary imo
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:13 (three years ago) link
one really fucking annoying thing about this is did it occur to anyone that Rid of Me sounds like PJ Harvey wanted it to sound? or was just just in thrall to the evil Abini?
Harvey herself was pleased with the end result. "I do everything for myself primarily," she said, "and I was happy with it. I don’t really listen when people say good things about my work because I tend to not give myself praise about anything. But I was really pleased with Rid of Me. For that period of my life, it was perfect. Well, it wasn’t perfect but as near to as I could get at that time".[7] She remained friends with Albini afterward, finding in him a kindred spirit. "People read things in and make him what they want him to be," Harvey said. "He's the only other person I know that that happens to besides myself. People have a very specific idea of what I am- some kind of ax-wielding, man-eating Vampira- and I'm not that at all. I'm almost the complete opposite."[34]
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:20 (three years ago) link
people talk about "deliberately" ugly are generally talking about a small handful of the high profile records he did 30 years, he's recorded so many bands and artists
is this deliberately ugly? flawless
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaHRBRkDW4g
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:21 (three years ago) link
the nina nastasia albums do sound good
tbh I didn't bother to read costello's rant bc he's also a dick. I just wanted to take another shot at albini
― Left, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:28 (three years ago) link
what's a pedantic sound?
― early-Woolf semantic prosody (Hadrian VIII), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:29 (three years ago) link
Fussy and unfuzzy.
― pomenitul, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:29 (three years ago) link
one really fucking annoying thing about this is did it occur to anyone that Rid of Me sounds like PJ Harvey wanted it to sound?
Exactly. Like he's not without his issues and there are people who stick him too high on that ultimate alternative producer pedestal but his key thing has always been "find the best way to make it sound like the artist wants it to sound"
― Clean-up on ILX (onimo), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:30 (three years ago) link
I think it is safe to assume EC would not be a fan of Tweez
― chr1sb3singer, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:30 (three years ago) link
i'd say his sound is very clear and specific more than pedantic
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:31 (three years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMttXqBl2uQ
from 18.57 until the end of this song is some of the most glorious production i have ever heard
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:33 (three years ago) link
just listen to this pedantic shit, that typical albini sound
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l_5nW0SUNw
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:34 (three years ago) link
well that^ is very clear, very defined, but i wouldn't call that pedantic, it sounds great
perhaps musicians appreciate crisp recording, who knows
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:41 (three years ago) link
you don't go to albini if you don't want the sound to be crisply conveyed
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:42 (three years ago) link
2xpost Well, that for sure sounds pretty band in a room, which was probably the intent. Albini's done all sorts of stuff, to his (literal) credit, but I think his claim that he only does what the artist wants is a little misleading, since there is a pretty identifiable Albini sound/approach on a lot of his records. Now, it's very possible, if not likely, that a lot of the acts he works with go to him *for* that sound, but I do wonder what it would be like if someone went to him and said "I want to make a record that sounds like Rumours," or whatever. Or, say, an extreme or proggy metal band that doesn't have a lot of room for his drum sound. He's come close to both kinds of bands before, I guess.
I *think* he's worked with hip-hip, or jazz, acts before, but I don't know who off the top of my head. He'd probably make a great jazz producer.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:42 (three years ago) link
lol i wonder if part of the issue i will sometimes have with albini is that the rooms he records the artists in are .. bad rooms? like their sonic character might be interesting but possibly not the greatest match for the artist. i love the idea of recording a performance in a room but the room shouldn't have what sounds like hard glossy walls if it's a country song imo?
― cosmic vision | bleak epiphany | erotic email (map), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:42 (three years ago) link
He did an album for Mats Gustafsson's band The Thing. It's good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezvZ1_J8aR8
― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:43 (three years ago) link
He takes pride in his purportedly perfectly designed studio, doesn't he?
Which, yeah, implies that he does have an identifiable sound and approach, and it's more than just him trying to capture what it is that the artist wants, right?
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:44 (three years ago) link
― imago, Monday, November 30, 2020 2:41 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink
i know i was joking haha like if you played that for someone who didn't know fulks and said who produced this they'd guess thousand times before they said albini
he's actually more similar to an old 60s era studio pro, do a weird psychedelic band one day, record a pop song the next, set it up and go
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:44 (three years ago) link
that room matches the artist much better imo! xp to the gustaffson (sp?) youtube
― cosmic vision | bleak epiphany | erotic email (map), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:45 (three years ago) link
He did a record with Child Bite who are very metal-y (in this incarnation at least)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm3o0DnQ9Xk
― chr1sb3singer, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:46 (three years ago) link
xpost Yeah, that Thing jazz album shreds.
Albini is definitely a tradesman at heart, I just think he's so much more than a "my job is to place the right mics in the right place and capture the band's vision" sort of guy. But again, a lot of his projects could be pretty self-selecting, since it's not like some pop star is going to go with Albini. Was it Nine Inch Nails that went to him just to sample/capture a bunch of drum sounds or something? That seems like a great use of his approach.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:47 (three years ago) link
the room i long to have a glimpse of - the ultimate room - is the room they recorded exile on main st in. it sounds like the most amazing room you could possibly hang out in imo.
― cosmic vision | bleak epiphany | erotic email (map), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:47 (three years ago) link
the The Thing thing sounds great but cmon it's basically some noise-rock/doom Zu thing, not jazz haha
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:48 (three years ago) link
Another point of comparison, does anyone think his version of Cheap Trick's "In Color" sounds better than the original? I guess there are a lot of factors.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:48 (three years ago) link
gonna check out more child bite - good stuff and great name too
― cosmic vision | bleak epiphany | erotic email (map), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:49 (three years ago) link
I interviewed Albini in '09, and I'm pretty sure I've posted links or quotes upthread, but what he said then has a lot of relevance to this discussion:
I took a two-year engineering course, finishing in ’06, and it struck me that the guy I did my in-studio work with was an old-school guy who’d been around since the ’70s, and he still had the mindset of a time when producing and engineering was an aristocracy of sorts. As a freelance writer I've been hustling for work my entire career, gig by gig, but he had the attitude that bands coming to the studio were supplicants in a way. Do you feel that’s a mindset that’s dying out?Well, yeah, to be honest the sort of elite position of being a recording engineer, working in a studio, sort of evaporated a long time ago. The people that ran studios tried to persist with that mentality for a while, until they realized that it wasn’t in their business interests to alienate their clientele, and now they tend to be more cooperative. But I come from the opposite end of the spectrum. I started as a musician, a guy in a band, and whenever I or my friends would go into a studio to work with these professional engineers, we were always treated in a sort of a dismissive fashion, as though we didn’t really know what we were doing. And that inspired the idea in me that an engineer should be subservient to the bands that he’s recording. That is, he should be working to their agenda, rather than trying to fit them into his mental image of how a band should behave. The analogy that I can make is if you go to the barber to get your hair cut, you should be able to tell the barber how you want your hair cut. Of course, the barber is the professional and he’s doing the cutting, but he should be doing it to suit you. And when a band comes in the studio, I think of them in precisely the same light. They should tell me how they want their record to come out. I have to do the technical execution, of course, but it should be to serve their image of themselves and their perception of what their record should be.Do you ever have to talk bands out of making their record sound like your back catalog, or anything like that?The thing is, if you have an honest conversation with a band before you get too far into making a record, you can discern what it is about – if there are records that they’re emulating, and I’m using that in the Greek sense of being inspired by something but still trying to surpass it in some way – you can discern what aspects of those records they like, and which aspects they think are applicable to their music. So you can by doing a little forensic investigation on their music and an honest conversation, you can usually figure out what they’re actually asking for when they ask to sound like the Jesus Lizard or Nirvana or whatever. And it’s normally something quantifiable.Have you ever recorded anything that you wouldn’t describe as falling under the umbrella of rock music?Oh, sure, all the time.How does your approach translate to non-rock music, like a small jazz group?Basically the same. Essentially anyone, any band or any performance ensemble that has as the focus of its aesthetic the performance of the music rather than let’s say an intellectual construction of the music after the fact, I’m quite comfortable working with. And I don’t really care what the performance is, whether it’s improvisational music, electronic music, rock music, acoustic music, it doesn’t matter. As long as the heartbeat of the music is a live performance, I can do fine with it.
Do you ever have to talk bands out of making their record sound like your back catalog, or anything like that?The thing is, if you have an honest conversation with a band before you get too far into making a record, you can discern what it is about – if there are records that they’re emulating, and I’m using that in the Greek sense of being inspired by something but still trying to surpass it in some way – you can discern what aspects of those records they like, and which aspects they think are applicable to their music. So you can by doing a little forensic investigation on their music and an honest conversation, you can usually figure out what they’re actually asking for when they ask to sound like the Jesus Lizard or Nirvana or whatever. And it’s normally something quantifiable.
Have you ever recorded anything that you wouldn’t describe as falling under the umbrella of rock music?Oh, sure, all the time.
How does your approach translate to non-rock music, like a small jazz group?Basically the same. Essentially anyone, any band or any performance ensemble that has as the focus of its aesthetic the performance of the music rather than let’s say an intellectual construction of the music after the fact, I’m quite comfortable working with. And I don’t really care what the performance is, whether it’s improvisational music, electronic music, rock music, acoustic music, it doesn’t matter. As long as the heartbeat of the music is a live performance, I can do fine with it.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:53 (three years ago) link
yes, and i would trust he's entirely sincere there, but i do think bands come to him expecting a certain quality of sound
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:56 (three years ago) link
Except for maybe the swastikas that were allegedly carved/formed into the air vent registers, yeah.
― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, 30 November 2020 20:57 (three years ago) link
you'd choose a certain barber wouldn't you
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 20:57 (three years ago) link
my aesthetic complaints about albini are definitely in large part a post hoc rationalisation of a strong personal dislike
re: jazz and hip hop, idk who he’s worked with, but I’ve seen him in action on the electrical audio forums talking shit about ornette coleman, calling him a charlatan and his music bullshit, and dismissing jazz musicianship in general as hackwork in ways that made it clear he doesn’t have a clue what it is or how it works. I’ve seen him dismiss hip hop as beyond contempt. he is regularly gross about women and music made by or deemed to be for them. this alternative personality he cultivates in interviews as a thoughtful open minded lefty feminist dude, whose approach to music is purely technical, is transparent but it seems to work
you can say this is all irrelevant if the music is good. but I’m sick of him being held up as a hero by people who would cancel anyone else for a small amount of the shit he’s said and done over the years
― Left, Monday, 30 November 2020 21:04 (three years ago) link
― Left, Monday, November 30, 2020 3:04 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
we're not talking about his music though, or do people who record with him have to be cancelled too?
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 21:18 (three years ago) link
I always think about all the hundreds of bands he records who are coming to chicago and asking him to do stuff that 20 engineers in their own hometowns could do, but are coming to him bc they want to have a record recorded by the famous guy. Which is not his fault of course, but still idk, its hard for me to take his "i'm just a regular ol Workin Jumpsuit Guy" thing straight when he obviously knows that a huge percentage of his job is just to have the name Steve Albini.
― turn the jawhatthefuckever on (One Eye Open), Monday, 30 November 2020 21:20 (three years ago) link
asking him to do stuff that 20 engineers in their own hometowns could do
citation fucking required
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 21:21 (three years ago) link
ok how many dozens of clips would you like me to embed of random albini-produced flat-sounding punk bands over the last 20 years that sound like they could have been recorded anywhere by anyone
― turn the jawhatthefuckever on (One Eye Open), Monday, 30 November 2020 21:27 (three years ago) link
rather than that, post something produced by anyone else that sounds like albini
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 21:29 (three years ago) link
xxxp I like some artists and albums he’s been involved with. idk i’d just like to see him being called out more and praised less bc there’s a wealth of material for the former
― Left, Monday, 30 November 2020 21:29 (three years ago) link
I love the idea of Rid of Me opening with this Leno intro, from the performance that won over Costello:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBZoL8wpZzU
― ... (Eazy), Monday, 30 November 2020 21:53 (three years ago) link
― turn the jawhatthefuckever on (One Eye Open), Monday, November 30, 2020 3:20 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
this from the interview seems to acknowledge that imo:
"So you can by doing a little forensic investigation on their music and an honest conversation, you can usually figure out what they’re actually asking for when they ask to sound like the Jesus Lizard or Nirvana or whatever. And it’s normally something quantifiable."
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 21:54 (three years ago) link
the real takeaway here: pj harvey is the greatest.
― tylerw, Monday, 30 November 2020 22:00 (three years ago) link
otm
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 30 November 2020 22:01 (three years ago) link
This is a really good question! The first thing that pops to mind is, I dunno, Led Zeppelin or something, but those albums sound so much better than his, even 50 years later. Then again, those albums sound better than almost anyone's albums, too.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 November 2020 22:05 (three years ago) link
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, 30 November 2020 22:34 (three years ago) link
close but the guitars aren't quite there imo
― imago, Monday, 30 November 2020 22:41 (three years ago) link
I always thought Jawbreaker's Bivouac sounded more stereotypically "albini-sound" (big thundering drums, loud guitars, low vocals) than 24-hour (and also that 24-hour sounded awful),but the official engineer for that record is Albini's cat.
― Philip Nunez, Monday, 30 November 2020 23:04 (three years ago) link
post something produced by anyone else that sounds like albini
― assert (MatthewK), Monday, 30 November 2020 23:11 (three years ago) link