Thanks for this

It's not bad. Kind of reminds me of the sound of Thank you my Twilight era works.

However, for some reason, I feel like Trial seemed more cohesive as an album although more varied sounding.

This has far too many songs that sound the same. However, the more I listen, the better it gets.

Clean Slate Revolution and Anemone are my favs besides the title and single tracks.

Still loving it, really confused about sl4's comments on tedium and sound production. Horn Again sounds like what was being described. I felt it avoided mixing errors pretty well, and Sawao sung this one very well. The only thing I find peculiar is Message, it is kinda all over the place musically. Sometimes i like it, sometimes i skip. I'll listen again tonight to see if anything sounds out of place.

[quote="gekigangar3"]

Kind of reminds me of the sound of Thank you my Twilight era works.[/quote]

Yeah i got a bit of that too. Crunchy.

[quote="Cloudy_One"]Still loving it, really confused about sl4's comments on tedium and sound production. Horn Again sounds like what was being described. I felt it avoided mixing errors pretty well, and Sawao sung this one very well. The only thing I find peculiar is Message, it is kinda all over the place musically. Sometimes i like it, sometimes i skip. I'll listen again tonight to see if anything sounds out of place.

[quote="gekigangar3"]

Kind of reminds me of the sound of Thank you my Twilight era works.[/quote]

Yeah i got a bit of that too. Crunchy.[/quote]
I didn't say anything felt out of place -- it's almost the opposite of that, actually, in that the production decisions homogenize the sound and sap a lot of the energy out of the music. I listened to Pied Piper last night, and Tokyo Bambi is a great example of what I'm talking about: it's an upbeat, energetic song, but the drums are so buried and lacking in presence that Sato may as well be slapping noodles on cardboard boxes. This works directly against the song's strengths. In general, the Avex pillows releases seem to want to bury the rhythm section under the guitars, which takes a lot of the punch and energy away.

In addition to this, on Moondust and Wake Up! (I haven't heard Pied Piper enough times to judge it overall yet), the individual segments of each song often don't sonically contrast with each other as distinctly as they should. Yes, the song itself can have changeups and variations in it, but the production flattens out the dynamics of the song rather than emphasizing them.

It can be easy to miss this sort of thing if you're not looking for it: until I realized what it was, I found the songs to be competent but mysteriously lacking in some undefinable element.

I can't really judge the quality of Sawao's vocal performance on this because it's been so heavily pitch-corrected.

I feel similar to sl4 and myfoot. Meh.

I know exactly what you're talking about. The production has been noticably terrible since avex.

[quote="Tidusauron12"]I feel similar to sl4 and myfoot. Meh.

I know exactly what you're talking about. The production has been noticably terrible since avex.[/quote]
I thought for sure that they had been working with a different producer or something since they left King Records, but at least according to Discogs.com they're still working with Zin Yoshida, who worked on all their King Records albums. I guess Avex is more particular about how they want the songs to be mixed and mastered.

A somewhat similar thing happened with the Guided By Voices album Do The Collapse when they moved to TVT records for a couple years: guitars way up front, drums in the back, bass guitar is almost completely absent, songs stretched out needlessly past their optimal length. I'd still consider it a good album, but the songs are objectively worse off due to some of the production decisions.

Label pressures suck.

Liking the first half of the album more than the second half, every time I've listened through I start to zone out by the end. We'll see, it's still kind of settling for me.

Definitely not a fan of the mastering, dat brickwall

[img]http://i.imgur.com/RuZaSFU.jpg[/img]

[quote="sl4"]Okay, so this is the first new pillows album I've heard since Wake Up!

Listened a few nights ago with my girlfriend and nothing made much of an impression on either of us -- a few decent songs, but a lot of interchangeable mush. A lot of the songs felt like they went on for twice as long as they needed to, often going on for two or more minutes past the point where they had run out of musical content. I know the pillows have generally aimed for song lengths close to 4 minutes, but brevity can make the difference between a great song you want to repeat, and a snoozefest that you can't wait to end.

It's holding up better on repeat listens today, in spite of the production homogenizing it pretty badly and making the songs (and the individual parts of them) sound less distinct from each other than they ought to. This definitely contributed to our listener-fatigue and generally negative first impressions, but even after getting to know the songs better, the production is still a noticeable issue that's actively detracting from the music. Wake Up! had similar production problems as I'm hearing here, with bad compression use and other poor mixing decisions keeping the songs from putting forth as much energy as they ought to have, generally flattening things out into mush. I'm feeling the same thing here -- the drums sitting way in the back of the mix in Tokai No Alice, etc.

Is Zin Yoshida still producing the pillows' albums, or did they part ways after the move from King Records to Avex? Someone is really dropping the ball in the mixing department, regardless. Not to say that the songs are otherwise perfect, but my ears really miss the varied and dynamic production of the pillows' mid-90s/early-2000s work.

I came to rather enjoy Wake Up! and have recently even come around to My Foot, so I'm looking forward to delving into the four recent albums I've missed.[/quote]

No, Yoshida isn't, and that's arguably the problem. I'm not sure why they switched to Avex (and frankly, I'm afraid to ask), but King Records was a much better label. Better direction, better album art, better everything.

Captain Records (their first company, who put out Pantomime) scammed them out of royalty money and so they never actually got any $$$ for the sales of those CDs.
Pony Canyon...they left this one because the producers kept trying to get Sawao to change little things like lyrics and such. They also rejected Another Morning...hence why it wasn't released until later. He said they were trying to exert too much control over the creative process.
King Records...well they almost pulled the plug around the Tiny Boat period...but Sawao convinced them to release Strange Chameleon and things got better for them after that. Other than that, I can't really see why they left.

Fun fact regarding this album, though. Anemone is a reference to a character in the novel Coin Locker Babies, which Sawao's first band was named after. After Sawao left, the remaining members went on to form The Chewinggum Weekend with bassist Jun Suzuki. Jun later left to become the bassist for the pillows.

In any case, I think pretty much everything after their move to Avex has been sub-par.

Ok then, loudness war aside, I enjoy the content. I was wondering, does anyone else feel like when they play songs in their head their brain makes up for percieved errors, or punches up the sound to an optimum? To me, while i understand where you're coming from, i generally feel like my "head theater system" lol makes it plenty rocking anyways.

Fingers very cold! Ahhhhhh i need internet back

[quote="Cloudy_One"]Ok then, loudness war aside, I enjoy the content. I was wondering, does anyone else feel like when they play songs in their head their brain makes up for percieved errors, or punches up the sound to an optimum? To me, while i understand where you're coming from, i generally feel like my "head theater system" lol makes it plenty rocking anyways.

Fingers very cold! Ahhhhhh i need internet back [/quote]
I can look past poor production quality, sure. Amateur recording and even performance can even add to a song's charm (see: Secret Slogan), but this is just taking a perfectly fine studio recording and needlessly sucking the life out of it because someone behind a desk wanted to see higher output levels on the readout.

And thanks for the insights, zorahk! I didn't know most of those details

[quote="sl4"][quote="Cloudy_One"]Ok then, loudness war aside, I enjoy the content. I was wondering, does anyone else feel like when they play songs in their head their brain makes up for percieved errors, or punches up the sound to an optimum? To me, while i understand where you're coming from, i generally feel like my "head theater system" lol makes it plenty rocking anyways.

Fingers very cold! Ahhhhhh i need internet back [/quote]
I can look past poor production quality, sure. Amateur recording and even performance can even add to a song's charm (see: Secret Slogan), but this is just taking a perfectly fine studio recording and needlessly sucking the life out of it because someone behind a desk wanted to see higher output levels on the readout.

And thanks for the insights, zorahk! I didn't know most of those details [/quote]

Seconded on all counts.

[quote="Cloudy_One"]Ok then, loudness war aside, I enjoy the content. I was wondering, does anyone else feel like when they play songs in their head their brain makes up for percieved errors, or punches up the sound to an optimum?[/quote]
This applies to The Holy Trinity as well. Nobody here hasn't pedestalized those albums. I think that's a huge part of what makes a great work of art: how deeply can it convince the audience to suspend judgement. Imperfection becomes perfection. Psychological auto tune.

Generally speaking the consensus on the Japanese internet is that they went to Avex for the money/advertising.
Avex isn't a music label, they're an advertising powerhouse. They don't give a shit about the music as long as it sells.


Now, as for Zin (or Jin):

He was their producer since the second movement. He produced ameagari, but not anything else on OOPARTS, which is arguably their worst album.
He also did not participate in Horn Again or Moondust.

This has me wondering how much of the sound we liked was actually influenced by him, and how much by Yamanaka.
Because now that Zin is gone, I think we can all agree that their sound is, um, not as good as it was.

That being said, Pied Piper was also pretty bad, and that one Zin *did* produce.

Looking back on it though, Good Dreams was actually a great album, even though at the time I wasn't a huge fan of it. I wish they could make stuff like that again.

I gotta say it's a real crapshoot in my opinion. I mean, we all know everything in the last 8 years hasn't been as good as past that. But IMO the last great classic pillows album is My Foot (others would disagree, naturally). After that, WU!x3 was a let down, to me, and the first CD that I chose not to physically purchase. After that, I actually really liked Pied Piper (for the most part). But then, obviously Ooparts wasn't great. Horn Again as well, still doesn't really jive with me. But then Trial was amazing, for me. And now...this....

I mean, I really can see no rhyme or reason to it, as far as my tastes go. It was WU!x3 that they moved to Avex right? I remember Scarecrow being one of the first Avex singles. But it is 2:09 (really 3:09 bc of DST). So my mind is fuzzy...

[quote="zorahk"]Generally speaking the consensus on the Japanese internet is that they went to Avex for the money/advertising.
Avex isn't a music label, they're an advertising powerhouse. They don't give a shit about the music as long as it sells.


Now, as for Zin (or Jin):

He was their producer since the second movement. He produced ameagari, but not anything else on OOPARTS, which is arguably their worst album.
He also did not participate in Horn Again or Moondust.

This has me wondering how much of the sound we liked was actually influenced by him, and how much by Yamanaka.
Because now that Zin is gone, I think we can all agree that their sound is, um, not as good as it was.

That being said, Pied Piper was also pretty bad, and that one Zin *did* produce.

Looking back on it though, Good Dreams was actually a great album, even though at the time I wasn't a huge fan of it. I wish they could make stuff like that again.[/quote]
Heh, maybe he left because they didn't like the direction they were going in

Good Dreams is totally awesome. I've always liked it more than My Foot or Penalty Life, and of the mid-2000s pillows stuff it's probably the one that I appreciate most as an overall album. Its brevity works well for it, and it's stacked with great songs. And contrasts, even though they all fit together nicely.

But back on topic, Moondust is pretty cool, in spite of the shite production. The songs that have interested me the most so far are Break a time machine!, Prairie Rider, Anemone, Moon Dust, and Ideal Affection. I think it kind of falls flat as an actual album (as opposed to just a collection of songs), though: part of me wants to say that the first four tracks feel out of place entirely, but I think the album may have held up better for me if the sequencing wasn't "put all the goofy poprock songs at the very beginning and then put all of the slow ballady tracks in a row after that". Sequencing it to focus more on contrasts between songs rather than on the similarities between them could've been an improvement. Though maybe that still wouldn't have helped due to the production: relistening now, I keep forgetting that Message even [i]is[/i] an upbeat track because the production blandifies and homogenizes it so much with the surrounding slower tracks. Fffff.

Beyond that, I keep wishing Sawao would try to get back to the sonic/stylistic experimentation they used to do so well in the first half of their career, rather than just tossing in a token "look, it's 1992 again!" throwback song like Ideal Affection on every new album that's otherwise pretty much just retreading old ground. I like the old pillows stuff and I don't mind getting some nice new songs along similar lines, but one of the defining traits of the pillows was that pretty much every album was a surprise. Runners High, Happy Bivouac, and Smile came out sequentially and each had distinct goals, each pushing the band's sound in different directions that hadn't been heard from them before. For the past decade, the biggest surprises that the pillows have given us have been "oh, this album [i]isn't[/i] completely terrible". (And no, having their producer halfassedly add a bunch of out-of-key instruments from a prefab sample library to Nobody Knows What Blooms doesn't count for much. FFS, some of them are just stock samples that come with Reason, which makes it hard for me to believe that much thought or care was put into selecting and implementing any of the others.)

Ok but seriously! Is no one else getting a Scarecrow vibe from the Moon Moondust chorus. Not only the chords, the melody in a way too. I can't get over it. I want to like it, but it's one of those "can't unhear" things.