Audiophiles will put on Dark Side and listen for flaws. Not to belittle them, but to relish in them, to find what's hidden and
captured unexpectedly (like The Beatles' "Day Tripper" in "Eclipse" or the odd
warping sound in the very last seconds of "The Great Gig in the Sky"). That kind of
attention to detail is why most audiophiles (like me) find little to their
satisfaction with today's popular music. No doubt Radiohead and Muse, Fleet
Foxes and Lord Huron will satisfy the audiophile's desires, but most modern
music is mastered to sound loud even when played at low volumes – a compressed
dynamic range means that there's not much difference in decibels between the
quiet and loud parts of the music. Listening to these albums through high
quality audio gear can be a horrific assault on the senses, which is why
audiophiles seek out albums that have been mastered with a wider dynamic range
(forget that most rap is clichéd couplets set amidst a lack of instrumentation –
but I digress). The 90s are the era I enjoy the least, based on its mediocrity
and the sparsity of great music (Radiohead and a small handful of others noted as the
exception), but I'm good with the teens (is that what our era is called?),
loving the new focus on Americana (The Roosevelts, Sun Kil Moon, Midlake, even
Neil (forever) Young) and alt. bands like Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness or
Empire of the Sun. But the world of digital downloads and MP3s has done a
number across the board in terms of the audiophile – fear not, AM is here
to help. Got that new vacuum tube amp and a turntable from
Shinola? Better yet, a vintage Garrard with a Telefunken receiver, here's a handful of essentials.
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?
Marvin Gaye's brother's experiences in the Vietnam War
and the widespread social injustice in America in the early 70s led Gaye to
slough off his lover’s image and record a concept album, the first for a black
artist in pop music, about the shape of civilization. All of its songs flow
into one another, ending with a reprise of its opening theme, all the better to
tell the story of a Vietnam veteran who has come home from war to see his
country in a new and disappointing light. Gaye tackles poverty, drug addiction
and even environmental issues, not through angry political tirades, but as a man
who believes that love is the answer. As a
recording, the album exhibits a rare sonic spaciousness, with each layer,
counterbalancing its blues, jazz and soul underpinnings. Listen on remastered
vinyl if at all possible. This isn’t a sonic space-scape from which we expect
hi-fidelity (like Close to the Edge), but one of the best examples of how all
music should sound. This is the music, like Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, that
serves as the best aural example of living in the inner city.
Fleetwood Mac's Rumours
Rumours' meta-story
is set amongst two intra-band breakups and rampant cocaine consumption, a
veritable soap opera; so much so that at a concert I attended in Santa Barbara,
the band got through just three songs before Stevie stumbled off the stage in cocaine-induced stupor, the
concert postponed.
Rumours is essentially an unhappy love story with a happy ending. In the end, what you had was a masterpiece
of pop. To date, the LP has moved more than 50 million copies worldwide, making
it one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Aside from the pop-hit
formula prevalent with each track, the recording is a sonic triumph. Interestingly,
its popularity led to the production of Tusk, not as good an LP by half, but
one of the greatest produced and mastered LPs of all time. Listen to either and
find hi-fidelity in its purest form.
While the songwriting and performances were obviously
central to the album's success, the production and engineering cannot be
discounted. "We had a lot of time to dial everything in, and the band
members were incredibly tolerant," Engineer, Ken Caillat said. "But
then again, if you think about how we started, with them asking us to be their
ears, that was just a natural progression [At just 21, Caillat was a bit put
off at first to be working with a band of Fleetwood Mac’s stature]. When we
were recording Rumours, Christine would ask, 'How does everything sound, Ken?
Did you like this take better than that take?' and sometimes I'd say, 'Y'know,
Chris, I'm having trouble hearing the keyboard and the guitar.' The first time
I said that, I didn't really know what I meant, but she said, 'Oh... Yeah,
you're right, Ken. We're playing in the same register. Why don't I invert the
keyboard down a third and get out of Lindsey's way?' Which is what she did and
it worked brilliantly. After that I'd go, 'Hey, you know, you two guys are
playing in the same spot. One of you should go up or down, so let's figure out
who's going to take which frequency.'"
The prime example of Rumours ' excellence in terms of
composition, arrangement, performance and sonic clarity was 'Go Your Own Way',
whose complex drums originated in a discussion between Richard Dashut and
Lindsey Buckingham that Ken Caillat overheard while driving them to the
Sausalito studio one morning. "We knew we were going to record 'Go Your Own Way',
and so when we got to the studio Lindsey cut the track with an acoustic
guitar," Caillat recalls. "Then he asked Mick to play these drums
that had the big tom fills, and although Mick couldn't quite get it, he
'Fleetwoodized' it, doing the best that he could to duplicate the Stones' ["Street Fighting Man"]. It was that kind of studio
experimentation, and a bit of fortune that created this unexpected jewel. Possibly the finest "pop" LP ever made.
Steely Dan's Aja
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are nothing short of
slaves to perfection when it comes to recording and mastering; consequently, every
Dan LP is an audiophile's dream. Aja was the third Steely Dan album
since songwriters Becker and Fagen nixed the fixed band format in
1974, preferring the insular comfort of L.A. studios, recording their
compositions with a loose network of session musicians and jazz giants. As a
result, the framework of their music shifted to a clean and calculated
mutation of various rock, pop and jazz idioms. Aja is filled with
complex horn charts, synthesizers and lush background vocals that flirt with
schmaltzy L.A. jazz riffs or Ray Conniff LPs. When it comes to the title track, it's the
kind of production that Brian Wilson could only dream about when making "Good
Vibrations." It is the single most aurally perfect song in the rock canon.
I can go on and on about Blue, from my personal experiences in Jay and the Americans to the stripped down acoustic quality of the LP, it is another of my go-to LPs. But I don't have to. Here one will find a different kind of aural perfection. The LP is reasonably unadorned, with most of the LP filled with nothing more than Joni's piano and oddly tuned guitar, but Blue is raw in its approach and hi-fidelity will reveal every squeak of the guitar strings and even the pedals of the piano; the dynamic range is impeccable.
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