Bought the new boxed set of his first seven albums up to Born in the USA, I'm no Boss nerd,
was disappointed from a recent (plain awful) stadium gig, but the price seemed right. Let's not get into the music, I never thought he was Landau's "future of rock'n'roll", but I think he has his place as a musical storyteller.
There is a lot of bogus around remasters and one man's "too loud and overcompressed" is another man's "sounds great", but what Bob Ludwig (producer) and Toby Scott (engineer) have done here has to be heard to be believed. If you thought Greetings from Ashbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle sounded flat, dull and opaque (like I did) and Born to Run less than full for all its mock-Spectorish grandeur (ditto), then you won't believe your eardrums.
Most radically improving remasters I have ever heard (and I'm somewhat a nerd with these things). Not only is Tallent's quirky bass playing (before he honed it down to stadium acoustics, somewhere around Born to Run) now a dominating force (where before you had to concentrate on him), but you hear everything well and clear now (for instance Sancious' tasty neo-jazz ivories as well as The Boss' inability to bend notes in tune on those early albums!
). Listening to Ashbury Park I had the feeling I was standing in a rehearsal room with the E-Street Band. Finally, those busy (some would say cluttered) arrangements make sense. And for all the new clarity and "thereness", there is nothing clinical or grating about these new remasters, it just sounds phat, warm and organic, like a good Blood, Sweat & Tears recording where there is a lot going on, but it is still overall tidy (ok, Springsteen's guitar playing isn't always!).
But why listen to my ramblings, this guy says it all:
http://www.greasylake.org/news_blog_comments.php?id=1614&headline=Bruce's+masterful+remastersAnd here is Herr Ludwig on the subject and he is not overstating things:
http://www.backstreets.com/remasters.htmlI'm only at Darkness on the Edge of Town now, haven't heard The River, Nebraska and Born in the USA yet, but I've never experienced Springsteen in the studio like that before. I used to be underwhelmed by his studio output (fair share of good songs, nice, if underdeveloped melodies, lyrics that wrote stories, but instrumentally pedestrian/dull, it must be the live experience with him, I thought), but those remasters make me change my mind.
