John Darko
“Reissue, repackage, repackage, re-evaluate the songs” — six words – penned by Morrissey for The Smiths’ “Paint a Vulgar Picture” – that have become the definitive cliché for online grumbles about a music release that seeks to regurgitate the past. And sometimes with good reason…
Warner/Reprise last week issued Neil Young’s Before and After in which Young, armed with an acoustic guitar, a harmonica and a pump organ, reworks 13 choice cuts from his extensive catalogue, including several from his golden run in the nineties. The result is a campfire-intimate set where songs run into one another with no pauses or breaks; a gapless playback device is essential.
And whilst late career reworkings of “My Heart”, “I’m The Ocean” and Buffalo Springfield’s “Burned” are interesting, they’re a long way from being essential Young, especially in the wake of so many great Official Bootleg Series releases. No version here is superior to the original. Different, yes. Better, no. And many of us sitting on the other side of forty will know how this story plays out: if we live with Before And After for a few months, we’ll eventually find ourselves eye-ing tens of other Neil Young albums that we’d rather listen to than this one.
And that’s a shame because anyone listening to Before And After via a nice set of loudspeakers or headphones will notice just how relaxed and expansive this album sounds. It’s so easy to listen to. And that’s not only because it’s an acoustic album without drums, bass or an abundance of electric guitar. Running the thirteen FLAC files through MAAT DR Offline MKII gives us (one reason) why: a dynamic range average of DR14 is as good as it gets. Back in the listening seat, the loud bits are loud and the quiet bits remain quiet (and haven’t been boosted to sound louder). Mastering engineer Chris Bellman should be applauded for keeping a cool head and letting a record that’s both subdued and startling breathe as it needs to.
The same cannot be said for Suede’s Autofiction, which this week gets the expanded reissue treatment via Sony/BMG. That the new 3CD set comes only a year after the original release will irritate fans who feel compelled to buy Autofiction a second time but please those looking to own the extra material on CD: the second disc collates four ‘digital only’ songs, a track tacked onto the Japanese CD and a previously unreleased song; and the third disc is effectively a live run through Autofiction compiled from a handful of shows recorded in early 2023.
‘Raw’, ‘angry’ and ‘nasty’ is how Brett Anderson described the sound of Autofiction before its release. And that creative intent is underscored by the mastering decisions made by John David at Metropolis. Note: the expanded set features the same master as the original.
Autofiction is a prime example of an indie-rock album that (despite some good songs) pounds the listener into submission. I like to think I have a high tolerance for loud recordings but after the album’s first three songs, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. It’s pure migraine fuel. Try it for yourself and see how long you last. The loud sounds are loud and the quiet sounds (that should be quieter) are also loud. If Autofiction were a photo, its blacks would be crushed and its highlights blown out; running its FLACs through MAAT Offline MKII returns an album average of DR5. That’s almost as bad as it gets.
Sound quality aside, if I felt Autofiction matched anything from the Suede’s early-mid-90s artistic peak, I’d persevere. But it doesn’t. I’d rather give Dog Man Star, Sci-Fi Lullabies, Suede, Coming Up or Head Music another run – and in that order of preference. And no amount of previously unreleased or live material will pull €25 from my pocket for an expanded edition where Disc 2 scores DR5 and Disc 3 DR6 to make it the most dynamically crushed Suede release to date.
For the best-sounding Suede CD or 12″, we return to 1994’s in-between single Stay Together. Its DR score stays in the green throughout and its b-sides, “My Dark Star” and “The Living Dead”, still rank as two of the finest songs ever committed to tape/DAT by the band.
I’m not arguing that we should embrace – or refuse – music based solely on its sound quality. The audiophile world already suffers enough from people who do. If you like an album, play it regardless of its dynamic range score or its production values.
Per this latest Suede release, dynamic range compression is as much of an artistic choice as the studio or the producer. But the hard truth is that for people who are sensitive to such things and who have the hi-fi or head-fi system to resolve it, dynamic range compression can impact what we hear far more than any move to hi-res audio or a new amplifier. Used in the extreme, as on Autofiction, it can give some of us a headache.
One final thought: whilst Dolby Atmos mixes are, all other things being equal, less likely to suffer the dynamic range compression of stereo mixes, Apple streams Dolby Atmos content at around 800kbps — one-tenth of the lossless version’s data rate. And to get our hands on that lossless version, we need a Blu-Ray disc…if it exists. How many Blu-Ray discs containing lossless Atmos mixes are being released each month? No more than a handful.
