CB’s Breen Spills It in Bear Talk
Comments(0) 
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.