The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Christ, what a mess.
(This review is specifically covering the remix job. For my feelings on the music itself, see my review of the original Comfort.)
The career-spanning boxset 1992-1996 found Failure in the perfect spot to...George Lucas their back catalog, with the notoriously sonically odd Comfort and Magnified newly remixed for the set. Listen, you might not make music, so let me put this as simply as I can. You cannot fix it in the mix. What you record is what you have. You cannot EQ, reverb, and compress your way into any other record, and Comfort's remix is Exhibit A for this. The original record was boomy, ostentatious, airy, vocally low, certainly not for everyone--the remix tries to solve this by flattening and muddying the entire mix, going from "the Albini special" to "the Albini special through a damp towel". Oh, it's hideous.
Comfort's focal point, Robert Gauss' crisp, pounding drums, are melted down into a gross, undefined soup on "Screen Man", now left to fight Greg Edwards' dissonantly melodic bass playing for space in the mix. Songs like "Submission", "Something", "Muffled Snaps" rumble like they're being played on the world's most aggressively compressed radio station, overly bassy, quite literally muffled, still indebted to Albini's extreme recording methods but without why those methods sounded any good in the first place. Look, it's cool to hear Ken's vocals so forwards, but that's about all good I have to say here. If the goal was to make Comfort something it wasn't, they should've just re-recorded the fucking thing. Bad.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| The songs are still good, I guess? It's just this hatchet job mix job is all | "Macaque" | "Screen Man" |  |
| Download from Failure's Bandcamp | |||
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