I had one of my strange awakenings today.
I woke up around 9.30 and, for a while, I somehow didn't feel the need to fall asleep again. Instinctively, I reached for my phone, just to see what the outside world had to offer.
After discovering that a Japanese S&M clothing store I followed on Twitter a couple of days ago (don't ask) had decided to follow me back for whatever reason (LOL), I went on to chek out my Instagram account. To my surprise, somebody had liked the picture I took of my then brand new copy of The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here - that's right: the one with the Baby Jesus I posted on this same blog about a million years ago.
Not a million years, actually, but 19 weeks: the exact amount of time that has passed since this CD first landed in my hands. Ironically and unknowingly, the stranger had chosen a very special day to perform his virtual interaction, and I'm glad he did, because if it wasn't for him, I would have definitely missed the occasion. It's been exactly five months since the day I first sat down and listened to this very album; five months since I realized I had become a fan of Alice, and my love for the band has only grown exponentially during this time.
It's hard to believe how long and how short these five months feel. In some ways, it still seems like it all happened just yesterday. But then, when I look back at all the things I've learnt and all the (countless) hours I've spent listening to their records and realize I've only been a fan of this band for five fucking months, all I can say is: 'Jesus Christ!' LOL
Alice is the first IMPORTANT band I've ever discovered through streaming, and I guess that explains some of it. Never before had I acquired such a deep knowledge of a band's body of work in so little time. With all the other bands, it took so much longer to complete the picture... You only got to see one piece of the puzzle, one record at a time, till you finally had all of them and could fill the gaps. There was fun in that, I won't deny it. But what happened with Alice (mostly thanks to the impossibility of playing un-shuffled albums on Spotify mobile LOL) was that I had a clear vision of the big picture almost since day one. I feel like I've known all these records for a lifetime now, which is still mindblowing; I can talk to people who have been fans of this band for years without feeling retarded, and they never even suspect how much of a newbie I am LOL
I guess this just proves what an awesome tool streaming can be. If only teenagers used it to expand their non-existent musical culture instead of just doing whatever the fuck they do with it... oh man.
But they don't even have a reason to do that, because music isn't worth shit today, thanks to twenty-five years of consolidation and 'container over content' politics.
In this apocalyptic context, I obviously had to find out who had unearthed my ancient picture, and why.
The like came from an account named metalvinyls. Unsurprisingly, it seemed to belong to a vinyl collector with a predilection for heavy metal records, whose avatar I happened to recognize as the cover of Daniel Buhszpan's The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal - a book I have proudly read from A to Z B)
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| Not his avatar, but actually my copy of the book ;) |
The reason he had stumbled across my picture became clear as soon as I saw his last two pictures, introduced by the following (and curious) caption:
"So this picture is part one of two awesome picture disks I got today at HMV. This is of course from Alice in Chains's album The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. Now I know they aren't exactly metal. But rock/hard rock non the less and I couldn't pass up showing off these records! #aliceinchains #thedevilputdinosaurshere #picturedisk #colouredvinyl #vinyl #vinyljunkie #part1 #nowspinning #rock #hardrock"
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| Photo: metalvinyls |
"I know they aren't exactly metal". This sentence sounded really funny to me, and it led me to ask my first trascendental question of the day: why is Alice In Chains generaly labeled as a 'hard rock' band while Black Sabbath is universally aknowledged as a 'heavy metal' band?
Don't get me wrong - I don't have much appretiation for the 'heavy metal' tag. In fact, I'm glad Alice don't have to deal with it because I know, from my long experience as a Metallica fan, how limitating it can be, but it just makes no sense to me that two bands as essentially similar as Alice and Sabbath happen to be separated by this Berlin Wall of genres.
I first noticed this when I came across LoudWire's '10 Best Rock Albums of 2013' list. I was very pleased to see Dinosaurs on the top spot (where it belongs), but I was equally surprised that they had apparently overlooked Black Sabbath's 13. Had they forgotten about its existence, or did they just consider it was so bad it didn't even deserve to make the top 10? LOL
But of course, they hadn't forgotten about Black Sabbath - how could they? It turned out 13 was on number 5, after all... of their '10 Best Metal Albums of 2013' list, squeezed between Dream Theater and Deafheaven (whothefuck???), just a few spots away from Motörhead (don't think Lemmy would approve being in the 'metal' list either *cough*).
I found that so mindblowingly absurd it hadn't even occurred to me that those two albums belonged in two different lists. Hollow and Phantom Limb are actually heavier than anything on 13; Alice's Dirt abum is more aggressive than any Sabbath record... But they're still not a metal band. And Sabbath are.
Because... yeah.
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| Photo: metalvinyls |
I didn't, however, let that question distract me from what I was seeing: Dinosaurs on picture disc... 'like what the fuck is that?' It took a few seconds for my drowsy brain to figure out it was (obviously) the limited edition picture disc vinyl release of the Dinosaurs album.
It comes in two parts because it's so fucking massive you can't just squeeze it into a single disc. The album is split in FOUR sides, with three tracks on each... which obviously doubles its price. If they had to do this with Dinosaurs, I wonder how they would have handled the vinyl release of Jerry Cantrell's 2 hour 20 minute-long (!) Degradation Trip Volumes 1&2. Would it come in some sort of weird vinyl box set or something? Unfortunately for vinyl die-hards (or fortunately for their pockets), it seems it never got a vinyl release, so I guess we'll never know LOL
But that's not the point.
As I kept looking at these pictures, it started to dawn on me just how solid vinyl records really look. It's not like I didn't know it; I just had forgotten the feeling. At those early hours of the morning, however, the idea suddenly seemed so tempting...
I browsed through his gallery for a while, looking at what else he had. There wasn't much I could relate to musically, but I couldn't keep myself from appreciating his love for collecting only the flashiest picture discs known to mankind... Tons of beautiful records from bands I couldn't care less about. I wasn't that impressed by the different albums' cover art as I was by the thousands of weird things you can do with the disc surface. And man, I have to admit the idea was making me drool.
And the more I thought about it, the more I started to enjoy the idea of holding a BIG vinyl record in your hands, looking at the BIG cover art, touching its surface and feeling the grooves...
I have been a notable vinyl skeptic for a while, especially since the format became trendy again in the last few years, mostly because I saw it as a hipster thing, and as an industy trap to sell us the same records AGAIN at a much more expensive price, after making sure we tossed our pre-CD vinyl collection into the trashbin, discarded as obsolete.I still believe that, because most of it is true, but I also know that, being the rock and roll dinosaur I am, it's just a question of time before I fall in the arms of the ancient format.
Being a kid raised in the age of CD and far away from the family vinyl collection I had to leave behind in Siberia, I never really got to have a first-hand vinyl experience, and, to a certain degree, that's something I miss.
The audio quality of LPs is universally aknowleged to be notably better than that of CDs. Like my friend Ducky (who is an avid vinyl collector herself) pointed out in a post she wrote regarding her vinyl collecting hobby, LPs have an incomparably wider frequency range, which makes the difference between the two formats something you experience with your body rather than something you can discern by hearing. I can't confirm it due to my aforementioned lack of first-hand experience, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
...Just like I'm pretty sure that all the glorious records from the 70s, like Queen II (especially Queen II) or the Ozzy era Black Sabbath albums, to name just very few, never really recovered from the conversion to CD, no matter how many remasters they've been through. Vinyl is probably the only legitimate way of listening to those records, and that's something I have to live with.
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| Queen II in beautiful vinyl |
And I'm gonna live with it for quite a while still, because there are way too many things pushing me away from vinyl collecting right now.
First of all, vinyl players are expensive as fuck.
Second: both the player and the records need space, and I mean they require TONS of space I totally don't have. I already have trouble organizing my CDs, so I can't even imagine what it would be like to deal with HUGE vinyl records.
Third: LPs cost three to six times as much as CDs (I'm not counting overpriced new CD releases), and that's when they're not diabolic double LPs like Dinosaurs LOL
Collecting vinyl is such a bottomless money pit I don't even want to think about it until I have my own stable (and abundant) source of income.
Everyone is entitled to a 'rich bastard' hobbie. I guess collcting vinyl is gonna be mine. But I still have to be a rich bastard first.Until then, the only vinyls in my collection will be my decorative exemplar of Hotel California and a tiny bunch of Queen singles I inherited.
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| Amazing Hotel California vinyl release. Not mine, but a similar one. |
Another thing that makes me cautious about vinyl collecting is that it really is a collector's affair. When you're a vinyl collector (and you only buy vinyl when you're a vinyl collector these days), you don't just walk in the store and buy whatever you find; you're supposed to know exactly what you want to buy, because there are so many different versions of everything, and limited editions and all sorts of weird shit to drive you crazy and suck the money out of your hands like a goddamn vacuum cleaner. I have to admit that perspective makes me pretty scared. But then again, I guess that when you're a rich bastard you have the time to dig deep into your rich bastard hobbie, and you're not afraid of how much it's gonna cost, so I guess I'll just worry about that later.
The worst thing about developing an interest in vinyl records, however, is having to deal the those bitchy little people known as 'audiophiles' a.k.a. the purists of sound mixing.
You know I'm a huge lover of great music, and I love writing and talking about it (as you can see LOL), but hearing audiophiles speak just makes me want to chew my own head off. Because being an audiophile is not about being a 'lover' of recorded sound; being an audiophile actually means you can NEVER enjoy ANYTHING that's recorded, because nothing is ever good enough for your exquisite hearing.
While looking for some extra information on the Dinosaurs picture disc, I accidentally came across this review, which suddenly reminded me why I should NEVER read reviews of things I like LOL
First of all, the guy says some things about Alice that are extremely inaccurate.
He says Black Gives Way To Blue was a poppier album than Dinosaurs, which just makes me wonder if he accidentally swapped the albums without knowing. He says Dinosaurs is 'a return to the bleak and the sorrowful' as opposed to the 'happy' tunes on Black Gives Way To Blue. REALLY, BRO? Dinosaurs features a record number of huge life-affirming anthems that don't have a single 'bleak' or 'sorrowful' thing about them; in fact, no other Alice album has SUCH an amount of happy tunes, and definitely NOT Black Gives Way To Blue.
He lists Stone, Choke and Scalpel as 'downer songs' along with Hollow, which also proves he has a rather curious perspective on life. Stone is a heavy tune, sure as Hell, but I wouldn't refer to it as 'downer', especially if Hollow is your most immediate reference of what a 'downer' song is. Choke is an epic mid-tempo Dire Straits-friendly ballad and Scalpel is a pretty happy country song that has nothing dark about it, aside from the title. Seriously: what the fuck was this guy listening to?
He also says that the band hasn't changed its sound since 1992, which would make me violently spit my drink out on his face... if only I had a drink.
But then my favourite part comes: loudness war and the never-ending audiophile rant.
Audio compression/loudness war is a subject that has fascinated me for years, because of how concerned all the purists of sound mixing seem to be about it. Obviously, the guy complains about Dinosaurs being as hyper-compressed as every other modern record, which is not entirely untrue. But the thing about audiophiles and loudness war is that, even if my brain knows they are surely right, my biker fist refuses to let them win.
I might start buying into their anti-loudness war campaing the day I finally hear a coherent explanation of why all the producers and sound engineers in the world seem to be conspiring to systematically over-compress every record that hits the shelves, but they all keep failing to provide me with one. The author of this review (ironically?) puts it down to the fact that mixers and producers are 'stupid, bad people', but that's not a big deal of a convincing argument (even if it's true that most producers are, indeed, BAD people).
But really: what's the point of 'loudness war'?
Highly compressed records are supposed to be notably louder than not-so-compressed records... and yet I need to kick the volume of my players really high when I'm listening to Dinosaurs or Black Gives Way To Blue, because they don't really sound that loud.
Loudness war is also supposed to give songs some sort of 'advantage' on radio stations, but I haven't noticed that either. In fact, the mix of Hollow that reached the waves on local music TV over here was so quiet it was barely inaudible, so I can't really see it. Plus, when you pick Hollow as the first single from your new album, I don't think radio airplay is a priority. It's not like somebody was hoping it would land a spot between Avicii and Calvin Harris on top 40 radio, right? LOL
Making hyper-comopressed records is not cheaper and I don't think it's easier either. I don't see how it can boost record sales, but it can obviously push audiophiles away from buying them, so I really don't see what kind of secret benefit lies in there for the music industry.
The only (über-twisted) theory that kind of makes sense is that Ted Jensen (the guy who single-handedly masters every record in the planet) is deliberately fucking up the audio quality of CDs in order to force the audiophiles to buy vinyl, since they seem to be the only ones who care. And then, he fucks up vinyl records too, in order to make them buy better vinyl. Because that's another thing I've learnt from this review:
When you're used to listening to CDs, you assume that anything that comes on a vinyl has to sound good. Turns out you're wrong, because, apparently, even in the world of LPs there are ways mean sound engineers can fuck things up. Judging from what this guy says, picture discs sound awful too, so you can't even have beautifully-looking vinyls if you want to enjoy the REAL sound. Jesus Christ.
The only thing I don't understand is why he decided to buy the picture disc in the first place, if he already knew it would sound like shit.
He also complains about the quality of the red plastic sleeve and pretty much everything else he could possible complain about.
For a few seconds, he even made me feel guilty for feeling attracted to the picture discs in the first place, but then I just looked at myself and said: 'Fuck you!'
I think the problem about audiophiles is that they listen to the sound so much they forget to listen to the music. And, even if I can partly understand their concern for how records sound, their obsession of 'GOOD SOUND' borderlines on OCD.
Would I like to have a clearer mix of Dinosaurs? Sure.
Does that prevent me from enjoying the record? Nope.
But, given how inaccurate our critic is in all the musical aspects, I guess it does stop him from hearing what's really there. And that's a real problem.
So, kids, if you start becoming too obsessed with sound, just kick the volume up till you're too fucking deaf to care about your audio-shit.
You'll live happier.
And now, if you excuse me, I'm off to bed, to dream of evil dinosaurs and shitty-sounding picture discs.
Guess I'll never be one of them audiophiles ;)
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