The world is full of "cool" rock albums, and no one would argue that this one is definitely one of those five, right?
This is "Younger, Louder, & Snottier", a rough mix version of the first album "Young Loud And Snotty"...by the well-known New York punk band DEAD BOYS.
Here's the cover for the original version.
The rough-mix version is rougher and cooler! I've often been told that, and I've always thought so too, but now that I've listened to it, I've come to realize that the original version is better, or maybe I just like the original version better, because it has a better balance. But if you're listening to it on a boombox without the bass, the rough mix version is definitely better. The sound quality of the rough mix version is rough at best, and it's a little hollow at worst.
The reason why I've brought up the topic of the DEAD BOYS' first album being so cool is because I've been into changing the pitch of the recorded sound.
Today's technology is amazing (well, it's been around for a long time now), and it's possible to change the pitch of a recorded sound without changing the speed of the sound. Of course the sound quality is degraded, but sometimes it's nice to be able to include that in the mix. I tried turning down the toms on the drums, or the tuning of the strings (I always turn them down).
Then I remembered that in the 70s, when I tried to copy them on the guitar, they didn't seem to be in tune. In those days, it was quite common to speed up the speed of the songs to create a bouncy, tense sound, and as a result the pitch was a little higher.
And I thought that's what happened with this album, and I listened to it again...wasn't that the case...or was it? For example, Sonic Reducer, the first track on the album, is in the key of exactly D. There's nothing weird about it. However, if you watch the video of their live show, this song is in D flat. It's not a problem if you think of it as a "lowered" tuning only for live performances, but I doubt a band like this would do that. I think they took what was recorded in a lowered semitone and turned it up a semitone to give it a sense of speed and tension.
By the way, I went to Amazon to get the image of the album cover, and I was shocked to find that the first album of DEAD BOYS was classified as "Heavy Metal". It's almost as shocking as the fact that "Sonic Youth" was classified as "Heavy Metal", and Amazon likes to classify Western music as "Heavy Metal" anyway, don't they?
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