MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

 So CityBeat and the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards aren’t the only places to notice the Bears new album.  Blog Cosmic Debris reviews their Car Caught Fire release!

I mastered the record at QCA Mastering, with plenty of care and help from the band.  What a blast!  It went on to win the Cincinnati Entertainment Award for Album of the Year in 2001.  You never know what a record’s gonna do until you put it out.  This one worked out well!

City Beat‘s Mike Breen has tied up many loose ends in the History of The Bears in his Spill It piece, Bear Talk.  It not only highlights the band’s latest record, Eureka! (pictured above), it chronicles the band’s long history and features an interview with guitarist/singer Rob Fetters.

In the interview Rob discusses the current “Loudness Wars” and the band’s response to them.  As the mastering engineer on the project at Sound Images, I can back him up – we took great care to avoid smashing out the life and dynamics of the record, while still hitting commercially viable levels.  It’s a pure trade-off: Louder records are inherently less dynamic, making them sound worse at higher volumes, because there’s no variation.  When everything is loud, you can’t have soft parts.  And over time, music without soft parts is pretty boring!

Since their 2001 release Car Caught Fire (mastered by me as well, at QCA Mastering) average loudness on CDs has only climbed.  So Eureka! presented a real challenge, maintaining continuity with The Bear’s excellent-sounding catalog without sounding dated.  Based on the comments by fans in the CityBeat article, I think we nailed it.

Here’s a load off my mind: The Heartless Bastards – Limited Edition Vinyl reviewed by Each Note Secure indicates I’ve apparently done my job (mastering the limited edition).

Some background: the original CD version was kinda dark, and not at all like Brian Niesz’ pristine 88K(!!) original mixes.  This was the kind of thing that got me into mastering in the first place, so I was all over the assignment.  Like most mastering engineers, I’m pretty confident in what I submit to clients for approval, but a combination of deadlines, and a then-new workstation conspired to make the whole thing unusually stressful.  The first ref had drop outs due to bugs in the DAW! Gulp!

This was an important project, especially during my Sound Images years, when mastering was treated like a poor stepchild to TV commercials and on-hold messages.  Brian is one of my favorite engineers, and this record totally rocked.  Each Note Secure seemed to like my version better, as have some other reviewers, so I feel pretty good about the outcome.

Check it out… great record by a great band.

Our long-time friends and clients, Shake It Records have a critic’s mini-darling in Wussy’s Funeral Dress.  Color us impressed!  Check this out:

BlogCritics Magazine jumps in early, with their November 2006 review. In January, Harp Magazine picks up on the buzz.  Then Robert Christgau picks up where he left off in his love for all-things-Chuck, via Blender, in April 2006.

Nice work, Wussy & Shake It!

If I ever have a hard time remembering why I get up each morning, I hope I remember to check out this review of Ass Ponys The Okra Years in the  music blog PopMatters.com.

Okra Years was a special release by Shake It records compiling tracks from two older records from the band’s pre-A&M years, Mr. Superlove and Grim.  Consider this post a confession.  I consider the PopMatters review absolution.

A lot of records made locally in the late 80s and early 90s suffered in the mastering stage.  In fact, I was among a group of engineers insisting no mastering whatsoever was superior to the mastering available to us locally.  I’m not sure whether those 2 Ass Pony’s records were mastered by one of the local practicioners, but both testify to my position.  Like many records of the day, both sounded worse than the mixes actually were.  This problem is what led me into mastering in the first place.  The first decade of my career was spent lovingly revisiting many older records where the ball was dropped at the mastering stage.  Okra Years was one of the last significant records to get the full meggila.

I can only beam when I read this review.  It explains what we did, and why we did it better than anyone other than Chuck Cleaver could manage.  It’s always fun to make something great sound right, but much more fun when someone else notices.

Some other notices:

Harp Magazine noted that “the resequencing and omitted tracks do improve the flow, and only hard-core fans really will mourn the missing (no “Ford Maddox Ford,” guys?) and lament the changed—all while they exalt the extras. So the awful truth is that The Okra Years is a misleadingly billed but worthy do-over.”

BlogCritic Magazine says “The Okra Years is among the finest Alternative Rock releases of 2006. Not only is the music brilliant, but Cleaver’s assemblage of songs is tremendously satisfying, creating a roller-coaster ride of chilling, brooding pieces that allow the listener to tumble into the psychotic aspects of relationships, and then speed things up to ascend peaks of wry, eccentric humor.”

A couple good fan reviews in Amazon with a link to buy.

Thank God for CityBeat!  Without them, one of Cincy’s most unique and interesting bands would be criminally under-exposed.  Thanks to the alt-weekly’s coverage, natives were introduced to Culture Queer’s 2006 Super-Size It Under Pontius Pilate.  It only went on to win the annual Cincinnati Entertainment Award for Album of the Year!  Yeah, it’s that good.

But in the outside world, you’d never know the earth moved.  We were able to find this album review in Smother Magazine.  Indie music blog PopMatters managed to drop this dismissive short-take.  Not good enough.  This band deserves much more!

Mallory is a jones… you don’t realize the grungy, noise-soaked depth has so much melody until one gets stuck in your brain.  This is extra cool because all that noise stays there, forming a texture, like the rough weave of a canvas beneath an oil painting.  Over time it has a meaning: everything old is new to someone.  The evocative drones and riffs-that-won’t-die don’t get boring because there’s so much underneath.  But hey, don’t take my word for it: Indie music site Adequacy.net channels their debut, The First One Hundred Years in this piece.  It got some love at Aural Innovations as well, before going on to win the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards Album of the Year for 2003.

Spin Magazine reviews one of my favorite projects in my masterin discography, The Twilight Singers, ‘Blackberry Belle’ (Birdman).  I’ve mastered a lot of records.  This is not only one I’m proud of, but something a lot of fans have heard.

Click here to buy the record straight from The Twilight Singer’s website.

Way back in 1999 The Ass Ponys recorded Some Stupid With a Flare Gun.  

Great reviews followed starting with this one (originally in Spin) by the “Dean of Rock Critics”, Robert Christgau.

In Music We Trust covered them in Issue 31, back in 2000.

Like most things, it’s available on Amazon.com even though it’s out of press (the label, Checkered Past is long gone), where fan reviews average 5/5 stars last time I looked!