Didn't someone already post DR measurements of the different releases? Not sure where that leaves an opening for a debate on whether or not varying levels of compression were applied...
Didn't someone already post DR measurements of the different releases? Not sure where that leaves an opening for a debate on whether or not varying levels of compression were applied...
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"The First Rebreather" is a much better opening track (as it was on EE1) than"Make Some Noise" (as it is on EEFP). "Noise" is both musically and thematically inconsistent with the rest of the project, IMO. I left it off of my personal playlist version.
I actually like it a lot as an opener to EEFP, it is a sort of rallying cry and about the only spot where it would actually fit on EEFP is at the beginning. Anywhere else and it would have stood out negatively thematically among the rest of the songs. It also worked superbly as a concert opener in 2015.
Me too. I actually think it's better that way - "The First Rebreather" coming in mysteriously after the relatively no-nonsense rock'n'roll "Make some noise".
Also, I don't really understand why some people dislike "Make some noise". It's deceptively intricate and clever musically, and the lyrics beautifully capture that teenage idyll of spending the summer holidays off school with some mates in the garage trying to be a rock band - making a bloody awful racket whilst trying to emulate their rock star heroes. It's a song of rare genius, as far as I'm concerned - and the live at King's Place version accurately represents what a fun way it was to open those gigs.
It's not a bad song on its own. But it's the only song on the album that's about the singers themselves rather than about historical or fictional characters.
Also, First Rebreather states several of the musical themes that then recur throughout the rest of the work. That's one of the jobs of a first song in a collection of connected pieces. Grafting a musically unconnected song in front of it ruins that flow, for me.
And "musically unconnected" understates things. It doesn't just lack any of the recurring themes or motifs, it lacks any of the genre cues that make English Electric English. It's a rock'n'roll anthem on an album full of pastoral folk, symphonic, chamber, brass-band, and parlour-ballad touches.
It's a single. It sounds like a single. EE is not a collection of singles. It's about as far from that as an album can get, and to me it's jarring placed where it is. Especially since it's a retrofit, displacing the original opening song which, at the time, I characterized as "the best first song I've ever heard on an album."
ETA - As an opener for the shows it fulfills a different function, and of course a rallying song is perfect for that. Also, the shows are not a performance of EE, complete and in order, as such. (I'd actually been hoping they would be.)
While I generally do prefer "The First Rebreather" as an opener to "Make Some Noise", I actually find the recontextualization of different songs on the different versions of the album fascinating. I think "Summoned by Bells", for instance, really benefits by the ordering on Full Power. And "East Coast Racer" works much differently as the opening track to EE, Pt. 2 than it does as the penultimate track on FP. So I still regularly listen to both versions of the album, depending on mood.
While I love The First Rebreather, I think that the song that gives me the most spine-tingling moments is The Permanent Way. What a sublimely beautiful, haunting track that is.
Got the remaster from lasercd today. The difference was very obvious on Make Some Noise. The extremely low freqs were cleaner and everything was clearer when it was loud. On the rest of the disc I need to do some more listening, but loud vocals sound cleaner to me where they seemed harsh on recent listening.
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