Warpaint - The Fool

Soft-limiting perhaps–but without any notion as to whether the peaks are actually clipped, who knows?

On the whole, that's not the worst I've seen by a country mile–and I used to sell ProTools plug-ins in a previous life!

No not the worst. But not good. Still, I suppose it will sound OK in the car. 

Having had a couple of Audio Fidelity gold disks land on the mat this week, this was back to earth with a very loud bump. OK, the price difference is significant. But there is a difference between cost and value. And even a new release cost pennies, it's still money down the toilet.

Harry, I saw your thread a couple of weeks back, and was just wondering if you (or anyone else) still felt the same way?

I think The Fool is a brilliant album, and hadn't once thought it sounded bad until I read your post. Playing it again for the first time in a while after reading your posts, yes, it's obvioulsy a fairly lo-fi recording, but it doesn't ever sound bad to me.

I've seen similar graphs to yours for a couple of big albums I have that are often considered to be good recordings - a few tracks on Radiohead's In Rainbows, for instance, measure pretty badly. As with the Warpaint, I haven't once found them unlistenable, though I can think of a couple of lo-fi recordings I have that would probably be torture for your ears - lots of tape bleed, heavily filtered vocals, and obviously distorted noise.

Anyways, I hope you like the album a little more now. Their earlier ep, Exquisite Corpse, is well worth tracking down if you can find a copy. From the above, here's 'Beetles':

Too good.

It's a good album and it's fine in the car or on the PC. Like you and many, I can appreciate a tune on any old tinny device but the posh system really shows up poor recordings and in my case I lose patience quickly, flipping over to something which sounds better recorded. 

It's interesting how the paradigm has shifted over the years. We now talk about soft overload and which albums have been clipped but still come over OK all things considered. As opposed to universally rejecting such low grade rubbish. But then again, how can we? In the old days it was "I hope the shop has a good batch without clicks, pops and too much transient distortion". Now it's "I hope it hasn't been maxed to hell".

But somehow I find the will to go on