Thea Cochrane
Group: Musicians
Posts: 445
Joined: Nov. 1999 |
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Posted: July 15 2018, 12:19 |
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Quote (larstangmark @ June 24 2018, 19:34) | As much as I love Incantations, I can see that some bits went on for like seven minutes so that it would fill out the LP side. As much as I love Platinum, I can see that Mike didn't have a f-ing clue what to put on the b-side of that record. As much as I love QE2, I recognize filler material when I hear it. As much as I love Five Miles Out, Crises and Discovery, I understand that it took considerable input from very talented studio musicians to flesh out the plinkilty-plonk song sketches made on the fly with cheesy Fairlight Presets (which sounded cool cause only Mike could afford them). |
There's another side to that, Incantations came after Mike had vanished for a couple of years (doing Exegesis, amongst other things) and maybe he felt that he owed the label a double album to make up for it? To help justify the cost of getting an orchestra involved and so on.
By the time of Platinum, QE2, FMO, etc., there was a definite "album/tour" cycle with no breaks in between to let creative sparks happen - those albums were coming out because there needed to be an album so there was something to tour next year. If it's a double album they can charge more for it and it recoups faster (in theory - and after the first three albums had done well there was no reason to think Incantations wouldn't chart).
Even listening to that run of albums from Platinum through to Discovery - maybe even up to Earth Moving - however you feel about the composition and so on, the pieces are very well put together. Everything is very well mixed and the production is excellent, and lots of stuff in the same time period wasn't as well done even though they had separate specialist songwriters, recording engineers, mix engineers and so on.
Here's the remixes from Discovery/ Crises particularly, really shows how well that stuff was mixed in the first place.
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