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Garbage Blood for Poppies
 
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Author
Posted on 2012-04-13 15:27:28
enrike
I love that garbage is back and I really love their new single Blood for Poppies, what u think of it ??
Author
Posted on 2012-04-27 02:58:53
Small-Talker
Yeah, I'm pretty psyched up for this record too. I really wasn't expecting much from these guys at this point, but Battle In Me is just bloody spectacular. It's like Vow mixed with Parade with a bit of Dumb thrown in. It's fantastic. Control is like Queer 5.0, and Sugar is the new You Look So Fine.

It's probably gonna be my record of 2012. Can't wait.
Author
Posted on 2012-05-07 02:02:30
Small-Talker
Awww... how I wish it was 7 days ago.

I've listened to their new record twice over the last number of days, and all I've been left with is a massive headache and ringing in my ears. It's the most unfortunately mastered album I've ever heard. Emily Lazar at The Lodge, NYC - probably the worst mastering engineer in existence - strikes again. This now makes it two Depeche Mode and two Garbage albums she's single-handedly destroyed.

The bitch.
Author
Posted on 2012-05-16 17:53:28
enrike
A Fantastic album TO ME!!!! I love it!!!! Thanks they´re back !!!! til the cardigans come back....

Loving garbage :) ... Control, Blood for poppies, Battle in Me, Man in a Wire... ;D
Author
Posted on 2012-05-24 02:12:25
Small-Talker
So it's official. NYKOP is an atrociously mastered album, with a rating of just 5 out of 20 at Dynamic Range Database. That's only 2 points higher than Death Magnetic - generally considered to be the worst mastered release of all time.

It's really hard not to let this effect your feelings towards the band. If they were on a major label, you could deflect this by blaming the label. But there is no record label to blame this time. It's all them. Garbage obviously don't give a shite.

I plan on videotaping myself burning my copy of Not Your Kind Of People and posting it onto Youtube. My little way of telling them to go do themselves.
Author
Posted on 2012-05-24 21:54:12
Kv2.0
Can you give us a little explanation of mastering
and what the DRD is and what to look for.
Thanks!
Author
Posted on 2012-05-26 02:45:29
Small-Talker
Audio mastering, in a nutshell, is basically taking everything the band/producer recorded in the studio and preparing it for CD release. They take all the individual tracks (vocals, guitars, keyboards, drums, etc.), clean them up by removing excessive background noise, perform equalisation correction... basically take all the individual things and put them together into one big master tape.

The only problem is, mastering engineers now feel it's their job to take all of these tracks and make them 5 times louder than they need to be. When a song goes past a certain point of loudness, the track becomes distorted. This distortion (or "clipping") isn't noticeable to most people. Most people instead feel it on a subconscious level. Have you ever listened to a song on headphones, and something about it doesn't feel right? It just doesn't feel good in your ears, for some strange reason, so you feel this urge to skip to the next track, even though you really like the song you're listening to? Chances are it's "clipped."

Look at this image here.

It's the same song twice. The 1992 version is the original. The 2004 version is "remastered." The remastered version is about 4 times louder than the original, and its peaks go beyond the limit of the waveform. This is actual sound information being lost, parts of the song that have been mastered so loudly that your ears can no longer hear them. If you listen to a lot of music like this, you can very easily damage your hearing.

It's such a needless practice. I've been a huge fan of Garbage since 1998, but I won't be buying their next album if I see Emily Lazar has mastered it. I probably won't bother even illegally downloading it. There's no point, when you can't even listen to the record without getting a headache.
Author
Posted on 2012-05-27 17:33:33
Kv2.0
Thanks again for clarifying that issue.
I've bought a few re-mastered cds but luckily no complaints so far.
Many cds from the 80s are weak, sterile-sounding discs.
There is a trend to maximizing the levels and volumes, I would have chalked it up to a competition level.
As over the years many bands got more extreme trying to outdo themselves in heaviness - also the importance of presence of bass.
I can see where it's getting out-of-hand now.
Author
Posted on 2012-07-24 01:41:40
Small-Talker
Alright. This has just gone from something that annoys me to something I hate. I was listening to Trespassers William's "I Don't Mind" the other night, and my headphones blew out around the 3:45 mark. I wasn't even listening to it on that high of a volume. Even with the rubbish audio quality on the Youtube video, you'd still be able to hear the "loudness" of that mastering. It gets all fuzzy towards the end.

They were the headphones I got with the MP3 player, and as far as I know the only ones that enable the built-in noise reduction feature. I don't even know if I'll be able to buy them separately.

So that's another day wandering around hopelessly in random electronic stores. :(
 
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