John Darko
Chrysalis Records has this week announced the imminent release of a new 6CD box set from The Waterboys. It’s called 1985 and documents the band’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful period: 1985 was the year that The Waterboys released their third album This Is The Sea whose lead single “The Whole Of The Moon” would skim the UK charts on its first release before taking out the number 3 spot six years later when it was re-issued alongside the band’s first greatest hits compilation.
The new 6CD box – suitably subtitled “How The Waterboys made This Is The Sea and saw The Whole Of The Moon” – contains 5 CDs of 86 outtakes, live recordings, alternative versions and demos (64 of which are previously unreleased) with a remastered version of This Is The Sea occupying Disc 6.
Pre-orders on the new box are currently running at €80 – €100 in most territories: that’s almost twice as much as the 2013 6CD Fisherman’s Box and 2021’s The Magnificent Seven CD box set, which picked up where the Fisherman’s Box left off: midway through The Waterboys’s Irish period, which began in 1986 with the departure of band lynchpin Karl Wallinger. 1985 covers The Waterboys’ work immediately before Fisherman’s Blues (and Box).
Why so costly? The 220-page hardback book that houses the six discs will feature fresh liner notes from mainman Mike Scott, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Thistlethwaite and backing vocalist Max Edie.
What about vinyl? To press this much music onto wax would push the disc count well north of ten to send the resulting price into the stratosphere. Sensibly, Chrysalis has decided to re-release This Is The Sea separately as a limited 1LP clear vinyl edition, presumably with the same (or very similar) remastered audio found on Disc 6 of the CD box.
Price notwithstanding, 1985 is an easy purchase for die-hard fans looking to gorge on the final installment of Mike Scott’s pursuit of “The Big Music”. If all you’re looking for is a whole heap of previously unreleased This Is The Sea-era material in one place or a fresh vinyl copy of the album, you can stop reading here.
But if you also care about sound quality, read on…
Thirty years of The Loudness Wars have made many audiophile-minded music fans – yours truly included – apprehensive about any additional dynamic range compression applied by the mastering engineer. The past can tell us what might happen to the sound of This Is The Sea this year.
The 1985 original master remains a textbook example of how effortless a record can sound when it is left (more or less) dynamically unrestrained. We hear the quiet parts as quiet and the loud parts as loud. Listen to the opening few minutes of “Don’t Bang The Drum” to see what I mean.
We can also measure This Is The Sea‘s dynamic range with software to tell us why we hear it that way. Running a FLAC rip of the original UK CD through MAAT’s DROffline MKII app, we note a dynamic range average of DR11:
But hold ya horses. A 2CD deluxe edition of This Is The Sea emerged in 2004 with the second disc of b-sides and outtakes opening with the previously unreleased and utterly joyous “Beverly Penn” (worth the entry price alone) but also including the raucous “Medicine Jack” and full-length versions of “Medicine Bow” and “Spirit”. Mike Scott and Chris Blair’s remastering job wasn’t bad per se but neither was it superior to the original (as it should have been): the low-end gained some much-needed punch and some of the 1980s ‘vocal fog’ was removed but the pair also chose to add (in my view) too much dynamic range compression. Running a FLAC rip of the 2004 remaster through DROffline MKII we get a dynamic range average of DR9.
A similar fate befell the band’s 1982 eponymous debut album and 1983 follow-up A Pagan Place. The original UK CD of The Waterboys comes in at DR13 but 2002’s expanded remaster is DR9. The original UK CD of A Pagan Place is DR11 but 2002’s expanded remaster DR8. I still pull the latter up for the b-side that slays – “Some Of My Best Friends Are Trains” – but I flatly refuse the alternative vocal take used for the ‘unedited’ “The Thrill Is Gone”. A great song/album ruined by the artist’s desire to re-write the past.
Chrysalis hasn’t yet said if the 2023 remaster of This Is The Sea will be a fresh look or if they’ll go back to the mid-2000s remaster as they did with Room To Roam on The Magnificent Seven box. I’ve pre-ordered the 1985 CD box and, somewhat reluctantly, the clear vinyl LP so we will find out how they stack up sonically when shipping begins in February.
Anyone interested in yet more great-sounding releases from The Waterboys should aim his/her Discogs account at The Secret Life Of The Waterboys 81-85 (DR12) and the original Fisherman’s Blues (DR13).
