John Darko
Today, Warner/Rhino begin shipping a newly remastered version of New Order’s Substance 1987: as a black 2LP set or a limited edition red and blue version if purchased from a bricks n’ mortar record store. The new cassette edition adds the same period b-sides and remixes as the original double cassette whilst the 2023 CD edition goes the whole hog on expansion with four CDs that, among other things, accommodate all of the cassette-only b-sides and remixes that didn’t make it to the original 2CD set due to the format’s runtime limitations. We covered this back in September when the 2023 edition of Substance 1987 was first announced but still to be confirmed is if the new twin cassette edition retains the full-length versions of “The Perfect Kiss”, “Subculture”, “Shellshock”, and “Hurt”, which were all edited slightly to fit on the original CD release.
Why do I care so much about one album?
Substance 1987 wasn’t just my first exposure to New Order. It was my first exposure to indie music, period. I was so enthralled with the sound of “Blue Monday” that a school friend kindly lent me his 2LP set so that I could kill music by home-taping my own copy. I enjoyed Substance 1987 so much that as soon as I could afford to do so, I purchased the Factory Records-issued twin cassette edition with the cardboard slip. Subsequent digging at my local record store told me that, up until that point, each New Order 12″ had existed independently of the band’s album releases; and that each one featured sleeve artwork designed by Peter Saville with the band’s name heavily obscured, or not featured anywhere on the sleeve but the spine. That the double cassette would let me listen to anything from those first dozen 12″ singles for a fraction of the price of buying each one individually felt like the music bargain of the decade. I bought my first CD player in 1990 and the 2CD version of Substance 1987 came home shortly thereafter. It contained fewer b-sides than the double cassette edition but it sounded superb.
And now I know why: it has less to do with the CD format’s lower surface noise or hiss and everything to do with mastering quality.
Back in 1987, the majority of mastering engineers didn’t apply liberal amounts of dynamic range compression to make records sound louder and (hopefully) more exciting to the listener. If we run the original 2CD set through software that measures a recording’s dynamic range (MAAT’s DROffline MKII), we get an album average of DR13. This score sits at the upper end of the acceptability scale. Nice!
However, if we run CDs 1 and 2 of Substance 1987‘s 2023 remaster through that same software we get an album average of DR8. That sits in the middle of the acceptability scale with a lean towards too much compression. The 2023 edition bursts with detail and greater low-end punch but it’s also more tiring to listen to. It also sounds more urgent but not all tracks – especially the first three – benefit from that urgency. I don’t know yet how the 2LP set fares in all of this – I’ve yet to rip it. The vinyl might offer greater dynamic range than the CD but it doesn’t feature any of the b-sides and remixes, many of which are very hard to find outside of this new 4CD edition. “True Dub” anyone? And if we run all four of those CDs through the MAAT software, we get an album average of DR9 — a score bolstered by the slightly less compressed mastering used for CD4, which features a 1987 live recording of Substance 1987‘s primary twelve songs.
Warner/Rhino have produced a nicely expanded and long overdue reissue of Substance 1987 – especially on vinyl – and if you’re far more into the music than the sound of that music, you might just not care too much that the 2023 remaster can’t match the original’s dynamic range. My original double cassette is lost to the mists of time but I’ll be keeping a tight grasp of my original 2CD and 2LP copies for there is life in those old dogs yet. And point of order: back in 1987 and for many years after, no one called this album Substance 1987. It was just called Substance.
Further information: Rhino
