With the release of 65daysofstatic’s new album We Were Exploding Anyway looming, I thought it would be a good time to take a retrospective look at their last album The Destruction of Small Ideas. Personally I’ve always really rated it as an album. Not only does it contain some stunning songs, but it’s one of the best produced albums of the past few years. Interestingly the critical reception at the time in some quarters criticised that very aspect. The album was produced in a different way to the band’s previous efforts and most modern albums. The production of most modern albums focuses on having pretty much everything really loud. This album was recorded bearing this in mind and as such has a much larger dynamic range of volumes. An interview with the band covers the issue really quite well.
The Loudness War is a result of artists wanting to make their music stand out by artificially increasing the volume of their recordings. This makes the music stand out on the radio and sound better on the more standard – rubbish quality – laptop speakers most people will listen to music on these days. It’s achieved by increasing the average volume of the recording, which itself is often achieved by compressing the dynamic range. The image below shows the effect of successive increases in the volume on the waveform of Something by The Beatles. You’ll note that by 2000 the waveform has been pushed to the point where it is nearly hitting the limits of what is possible in the recording format. Probably the most famous example of where this has been pushed too far is the Metallica album Death Magnetic. This image shows two versions of the song My Apocalypse. The top is that from the CD release, the lower is from the Guitar Hero version. Note that the CD waveform has actually been pushed to the point where it is clipping on the edges of what can be stored in the digital format. This kind of waveform results in audible artifacts, or distortion. Laughably the version from Guitar Hero (which was mastered separately) has been shown much more care and as such is actually the superior recording. It brings me much joy to imagine Lars Ulrich in a recording studio repeatedly saying “No, we need more volume. Louder…louder!”.
Back on point, the beautiful thing about the production of The Destruction of Small Ideas is that they took all of this into account. This means that the album has a fantastic sound. The quiet moments are really delicate and the difference between these moments and the loud moments is astounding. It offered what should have been the perfect rebuttal to the continual pushing of the Loudness War. Instead people were left disoriented by something which was produced in a slightly different way. If we take a quick look at the waveform for one of the songs from the album we can clearly see that a greater range of volume levels are being utilised.
Yes it still has loud sections, but these are contrasted with just about everything in between. This is in sharp contrast to the Metallica track in which the dynamic range of had been throttled out of existence, similarly the multiple increases in volume of releases of Something by The Beatles would have a similar effect. It’s something which I would really like to see less of, but I’m not entirely sure the music industry is willing to go that way. Hopefully artists will continually make a deliberate retreat from the front lines of the Loudness War. It’s a battle that has already resulted in at least one major casualty, the production quality of which was criticised far beyond the realms of the hardcore music fan.
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