Rant In D Minor: Rage Against The Machines

The other night my housemate Fiachra played me a drum track he’d recorded by placing a microphone on the hard tiles of the kitchen and capturing the ambient sound of the kit being played two rooms away.

The results can only be described as Spector-esque. He did this on a shoestring budget, by process of trial and error, armed with a bit of curiosity and patience. It blew any drum sound I’ve heard on the radio lately out of the water.
Why do modern rock recordings sound so over-produced? So neutered? So lame? Linkin Park. Fall Out Boy. My Chemical Romance. Madina Lake. Panic At The Disco. Good Charlotte. Even homeboys Snow Patrol. The sound is interchangeable with the Backstreet Boys: glossy guitars, drum tracks plotted to a computer graph, vocals pitch-shifted to perfection. Everything polished in post production with the bland alchemy of digital editing, all dressed up in a vintage Ramones t-shirt, skinny jeans and Converse.
“I got a two-word term for you,” producer Michael Beinhorn (Marilyn Manson, Hole, The Blizzards) told Hot Press 18 months ago. “Pro Tools. The degree to which people use the technology, and the fact that they’ve lost their essential understanding of how musicians are meant to play together music now is a cyborg, a fusion of man and machine, with the emphasis on machine, because it’s made not by musicians but technicians. Technical people make the records, not recordists. And there’s a big difference.”
So who are these masked men, these architects of a sound so smoothly planed that the listener’s ears can find no purchase? Conspiracy theorists might speak in fevered mutters of an Illuminati-like collusion between record labels, big studio owners and radio programmers, all justifying inflated budgets and maintaining the FM-friendly hegemony. Either way, in modern mainstream rock, there’s no room for beautiful mistakes. Producers distracted by inflated budgetary concerns would rather fix it in the mix than play band practice drill sergeant a la David Briggs.
This suggests a worrying prospect: the art of recording a live performance becoming viewed as quaint – or worse, unworkably inefficient – in commercial rock ‘n’ roll. A generation of engineers who know little about mic placement, producers who never learn the psychology of performance, mastering technicians instructed to make everything louder than everything else, and musicians who can’t play a song all the way through.
There are always exceptions, acts who’ve defined themselves in opposition to rock radio and modern recording mores, from Neil Young and Tom Waits up to the White Stripes and Arcade Fire. Here at home, the Choice list and Irish indie release schedules periodically yield idiosyncratic albums like David Geraghty’s Kill Your Darlings, Cathy Davey’s Tales Of Silversleeve and Maria Doyle Kennedy’s Mütter, hand-made records teeming with ideas and character. Songs you won’t hear on the radio. Songs you’ll never see on MTV.
Our emo-friendly friends in the US and UK would do well to learn from this invention-out-of-necessity ethic. Time for the proles to down Pro Tools. Long may we rage against the machines.