Best bands/Albums on SST

speed is a helluva drug

Listen to the first Man-Sized Action lp that Mould produced, people should be praising Spot for getting as much low-end on those records as he did

Funny to me that the default, esp with the Husker records is that the sound of them is a defect and not that it was done on purpose

Yeah, this has always been a mystery to me. Like, what do you want music like this to sound like? Do you want huge Phil Collins drums? Do you want dub bass? Do you want more isolation between instruments? That is not what this music is about. It's a wall of sound with Bob Mould roaring at you from the middle of it all. I don't even like Hüsker Dü, and I can accept that they had a sound in mind and they achieved it.

on the early stuff it sound tite af but I think it does obscure the songwriting a bit when things get “deeper” idk

I feel like Zen Arcade sounds right. Metal Circus works for the material. Earlier shit sounds like shit but doesn't matter. New Day Rising and onward it just gets worse and worse. Put on track one on Warehouse and it's like "okay these guitars sound awful but I can get into it, it works for Bob stuff", then the bass comes in and it's so dinky it's like "what's wrong with the bass?" and then the drums are like "holy shit how is it possible to sound this bad?" You could buy a radio shack mic and put in the hall outside the room the drums are in, with the door open, and press record on a cassette four track and it would sound better. I did that in high school and it sounds better.

It's like they eliminate every frequency below 500Hz and above 10kHz and did a 5db bump at 1kHz or 2k or whatever sounded the harshest ice pick to the brain.

Good grief those cymbals. I guess those are hi-hats? Hard to even tell. It sounds like white noise.

This was my favorite band in 9th grade. I'm probably going deaf now because of Bob's mixing preferences. Class action suit time.*

Copper Blue sounds like a "Bob Mould and his shit sounds" record but actually kinda good. Maybe the labels made him put the full frequency spectrum back in.

*Back sort of to the SST topic - how come when you go to a zip line park or whatever you have to sign an injury waiver but when you go to a Dinosaur Jr show you don't? I saw those freaks about a year ago and it was upsetting how many middle-aged adults were in the crowd without ear plugs. I mean that shit is one-show-and-it's-permanent damage territory. Feels really irresponsible by the venue and band. What's the point of that? I like loud shit but there's a point where you know scientifically it is causing permanent damage. I go to punk and rock shows all the time and often "forget" to bring my plugs even though Bob already permanently damaged me from those shit Husker Du records when I was a kid. I'm not some old dude complaining about loudness. I love loud. Dinosaur Jr is like four steps beyond loud.

That earplug rant is OTM.
We just had no idea as kids. We'd come out of shows and laugh about how we still couldn't hear anything for hours afterwards. And now i'm one of those middle aged dudes complaining about how loud the bar is because i can't hear the conversation happening at my table.

With a tuner app, I have verified that my tinnitus is consistently a high F# tone, generally ignorable but always there. I wonder what the dominant overtones of New Day Rising are?

remember reading how on tour bob mould would fall asleep to motel tv on static full blast to drown out his tinnitus. Not sure how he’s doing now.

He probably wears hearing aids. I saw an audiologist a few months ago and she made me try a hearing aid and just put in the exact frequency that the tinnitus is (4kHz) and it was completely gone. They are very expensive though and I don't need them to hear things - just to get rid of Grant's cymbals.

Cymbals are the frequency I have hearing loss at. And really it's from hundreds of shows in my own bands without protection. My bands were never super loud but a cymbal is a cymbal. And I don't have hearing aids but it seemed to help my tinnitus just knowing more about it (the specific frequencies and how it affects me in every day life) and that there's an option to get rid of it if/when the time comes.

Mould produced the metal band Impaler's "If We Had Brains..We'd Be Dangerous" in 86 and it's def trebly and thin, especially compared to how they sound live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApWk0iUTKns

In hindsight I’m glad Spot was there for the earlier years or else all those albums would sound like shit in exactly the same way

The Mould-produced Made To Be Broken by Soul Asylum sounds like Flip Your Wig or Candy Apple Grey with all the same issues. Insisting on producing themselves as part of the Warner deal seems like a practical joke somehow

maybe Mould's tinnitus fooled him into thinking it sounded great (shrug emoji)

plus, speed

I'm in the "Husker records sound as they should" camp but if you don't like it I think there's enough evidence that it's a Mould thing way more than a Spot thing.

In conclusion:
Metal Circus to New Day Rising sounds shit, but the right kind of shit
Flip Your Wig to Warehouse sounds shit, but the wrong kind of shit

sounds about right altho I'd argue Flip Your Wig is OK on vinyl

Ha otm.

FWIW, going by old newspaper reviews and articles, the grievance with Hüsker Dü albums is that they didn't capture the full-body roar of their live shows, which I'm sure was probably difficult to do regardless.

One of the greatest shows I've ever seen was Bob Mould at Brooklyn Steel in 2019. Lots of Hüsker Dü including an extra long encore that paid tribute to Grant with one of his songs. Also helped that most of the solo songs were from Sunshine Rock, easily my favorite of his solo albums. I was in the middle at the very front, inches from Bob, and the ear plugs were barely enough - that big enveloping sound was glorious, and it would be amazing to hear that faithfully captured on a Hüsker Dü album.

Sugar felt like Mould accomplishing a commercial rock Huskers that they tried with Warehouse

has everyone here seen this? I hope everyone has

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exf1SyjBlBg

I've been trying my hand at remastering a few more things from the SST back catalog using decent stem software and ProTools, not to try to throw shade at Spot or anything, just for fun and my own curiosity.

I recently made versions of The Punch Line and Nothing Left Inside.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/nv08coczju46ftz1qz20l/h?dl=0&rlkey=vil63tdnn47irfhbl3wy4syud

The Flag tune has mad crackling on the drum intro that I'd never noticed before, it seems to be on every version I can put my hand on, and I can't pull it out without damaging the drums.

do the 1982 demo version instead ;)

RIP SPOT

Husker Dü Announce New Live Album Tonite Longhorn
The set captures the trio across four performances in Minneapolis in 1979 and 1980

https://pitchfork.com/news/husker-du-announce-new-live-album-tonite-longhorn/

SST show on WFMU including an interview w/ Jim Ruland

I’m still disappointed the book wasn’t interested in diving into the non “punk” directions the label took from the late ’80s. Like, I don’t remember if it even mentions Ginn’s affinity for Tim Harding of the Richmond scene; I just got a mint copy of the Office Ladies LP on New Alliance from 1989, unopened until I sliced the shrink rap to put it on my turntable 20 minutes ago, and it’s great! But it’s like, Black Flag breaks up, the partners sell to Ginn, Ray Farrell and Mugger leave, and Ruland’s immediately uninterested in the story. Like, I dunno man, stuff like Issues Records and why it existed is interesting to me, but the book doesn’t even acknowledge it existed!

instead of like spending $44 billion dollars to ruin an app, i wish some billionaire with too much money would buy everything associated with SST and hand it over to the folks at Numero Group to give it the treatment it all deserves

agreed, altho Ginn has probably ruined the masters already through poor storage etc

i know i know, i just want someone to save what can be saved at this point

totally