Examples of flawed commercial releases

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Nightpolymath wrote:RHCP Californication.
Yep, sounded like Anthony Keidis voice was distorted and not in a good soft or saturated way . More like digitally clipping the converters . I couldn't listen to the album . I feel I wasted money on that one. Ironically that was the last RHCP album I purchased . I liked the By the Way song reminded me of Mothers Milk and prior . Shame really .

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fedexnman wrote:
Nightpolymath wrote:RHCP Californication.
Yep, sounded like Anthony Keidis voice was distorted and not in a good soft or saturated way . More like digitally clipping the converters . I couldn't listen to the album . I feel I wasted money on that one. Ironically that was the last RHCP album I purchased . I liked the By the Way song reminded me of Mothers Milk and prior . Shame really .
It was also the last RHCP album I purchased as well. Here are the gory details of the mix.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec99/articles/jim.htm

Interesting quote at the end:

"It wasn't like there was anything to fix in the mix. All I had to do was balance it right and make it really loud. So mixing was easy." They totally Californicated the mix.

:dog:

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Anything by Deadmau5 or Skrillex...

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I don't know if "flawed" is the correct word in this case but "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons is a powerful song which could be even better if the production wasn't that distorted and metalic.

It sometimes sounds like bad mp3 encoding.

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Nightpolymath wrote:RHCP Californication.
Damn you beat me to it! The songs are actually quite good but my god the album sounds so shrill it physically hurts to listen to it.

There's an album by Peach, "giving birth to a stone", where you can actually hear digital sync error noise in a couple of tracks. It's obviously unintentional and quite loud. Kind of funny.

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I don't see lo-fi production as being flawed. The Actress track posted earlier sounds great to me.

The real flaws come with mastering to my mind. The MBV Loveless reissue for instance has a digital glitch in one of the tracks. The CD soundtrack for Inception has some horrible clipping that the vinyl release does not.

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This commercially popular song by MGMT is considered by a lot of people to be tarnished because of the horribly distorted mixing, particularly with the bass.

And yet, a small part of me believes that it isn't a mistake at all - rather, a clever (and memorable) way to make that bass actually fit the ''messed up'' meaning of the song!
(Notably, none of the other songs on the album have anything like the same distorted tone).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9dSYgd5Elk

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Deep Purple wrote:It seems a weird concept to think of any production as 'flawed'. There are billions of recordings that when put up against a standard of perfection that could be considered 'flawed', but I don't know that perfection would improve them. If you tried that the piece of music would no longer be the same piece of music.

I like my music to be as intended, 'flaws' and all.
I think we need to define "flaw" maybe.
Not so perfect live sounding artist - you settle for less - that is what you expcect, kind of.

When getting a studio album on CD - if vocals sound harsch like live through a SM58, medioker PA and treble turned up to come through - well, not so nice.

I recently got Sia's album "1000 forms of fear" which is excellent.
But listening on Spotify free - vocals were not quite clear but harsch sounding.
So I bought the CD - but it still sound crappy and harsch. Especially parts where she doubles her own voice.

When production overall is terrific, everything from lows to highs - but vocals stand out as harsch - I consider it flawed. It sounds as when I tried to get Waves Aphex Aural Exciter to do something good on a femail voice on a track - never quite figured out how to get that working. Eventually put HLS EQ instead - and could go wild on mids and it just sounded better.

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Well there is Sturgeon's overly-optimistic dictum that 90 percent of everything is crap. So if seeking flaws one need not search for long.

Have wondered whether excessive absence of flaws, excessive "perfection", might be the most damning flaw of all?

Taking as example one of my all-time favorite bands, Procol Harum. IMO their first decade was truly inspired. They are top-notch players and I don't mean my comments to imply anything else. But their most-inspired stuff was full of "minor defects". On many of their best tunes, for instance maybe you couldn't say the grand piano was out of tune, but you couldn't exactly claim it was especially in-tune either. There are various rough edges where, most likely, they didn't re-take slightly flawed parts because they didn't feel competent to get it any better. BUT IT WAS GREAT STUFF! Hardly anything better.

The later decades, their style of music changed. I don't like the general style of the later music as good, but perhaps some other person would like it better than the early stuff. Some sounded a bit like pink Floyd, some a bit like Stevie Winwood. Lots of fairly standard pop brit R&B type stuff.

But the later stuff is much more technically perfect. No reverb oddities between different instruments. No detectable mistakes. Nothing even remotely out-of-tune. And to my ear, generally sterile lifeless and uninspired.

But there are live videos of the band up to the present, and the live renditions still have a great feel. Minor imperfections unavoidable in the live performances.

Pre-sequencer age, Procol Harum could bite off and chew very ambitious stuff, and pull it off great, even with the minor flaws. Hardly anybody could have done any better in the pre-sequencer era.

But the more modern, impecabbly perfect stuff, lots of people can pull that off nowadays with sequencers, so the perfection sounds very ordinary and commonplace, easily bested by the older "slightly rough" attempts.

For example, a fabulous 1969 tune. Rather loose. In my imagination it sounds like they were hanging on teeth and toenails to get thru the song, even with the rough edges. Fabulous nonetheless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VW6ycOfzxc

And then a 2003 studio cut in the same "old procol harum vein". Much more perfect, not a bad production, but maybe it is "too perfect". Maybe if they ever re-did "Wreck of the Hesperus" with modern gear, with all imperfections removed, then "Wreck of the Hesperus" would be a rather limp noodle as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTWTctsX-04

Note there are some live videos of Procol Harum performing that newer tune, "Weisselklenzenacht". The live renditions sound "better" than the perfect studio recording.

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