Door To The River/ Solidarity the 'new' bits
 

Hi thought it would be good to start a new thread to identify the 'extra' bits that are in the KYE remixes. I haven't got the best ear (or memory to be honest) but the ones that jump out to me are :

Let Robeson Sing : Extra Nicky vocal at 0.56 "The Price of Leaving"

My Guernica: "Alfred J Prufrock" corrected to "J Alfred Prufrock" at 0.40. Can't work out if this is a different vocal take or has been cut up (sounds more like it to me). Extra guitar lick after the phonecall at 3.57

Intravenous Agnostic: extra 'breathing' (?) and possibly guitar in the breakdown section 2.37 onwards ?

Baby Elian : different vocal take for the choruses (or massively double tracked?)

Dead Martyrs : New outro (instrumental chorus and extra guitar, assume this is Kevin Shields) from 2.43

I'm not 100% sure on those and am sure there are loads I have missed. The new mixes of My Guernica and Freedom of Speech feel significantly different but is there anything truly 'new' in the mixes or just things being turned up/down ?

What has everyone else spotted ?

Excellent idea for a thread


I wouldn't be surprised if every note of Masses Against the Classes 2022 is new. It sounds too informed by the way it's played now.

My Guernica Rehearsal has the little wobbly sound at the start that went into the final version - what is that, anyway? Sounds like the start of a studio tape being played back (EMG era rehearsal tracks have something similar on them)

Miss Europa has an additional funk guitar break at the end (I think) with a wah solo instead of the similar notes played on synth (that part is definitely new)

I was thinking of starting this the other day too! Think you've covered most of it.

Pretty sure there is an alternative vocal line on Groundhog Days - the bit about the sunset (almost sounds Welsh what he sings now).

A lot of the demos have stuff that sounds very much like the finished product such as the end of Ocean Spray and SWSS demos.

Yes - sounds like an anglicised pronunciation of 'Llŷn' in the original and a more 2022 Manics Welshy one now. Cofiwch and all that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llŷn_Peninsula

Good spot! Yes as UEF says that does sound like Llyn and that's one of the places where R.S Thomas lived so that ties back to the This is My Truth era.

Am going off topic in my own thread already but I found the Freedom of Speech demo really useful as it answers the question "what is Kevin Shields playing ?". No wonder it originally sounded so rough on KYE. Reminds me of how they similarly used the demo of No Surface All Feeling.

I didn't spot much in Masses to be honest ,although the loss of the Camus quote has probably distracted me. More echo ,(as per almost every other song) and I thought it was now easier to hear the extended parts of guitar solo which carry on under the last chorus but that was about it. Will have to go back and investigate.

Good point about Miss Europa, feels like they have tried to make it feel more Nile Rodgers in this mix.

I know it's not new, but I love the way the more abrasive, acerbic mastering of 'Intravenous Agnostic' accents Nick's drawled "what a mess!", referencing Dinosaur Junior in a similar guitar mess during 'Freak Scene', I'd like to think?

Someone let me know I'm crazy. At the beginning of the bridge for Intravenous Agnostic, it sounds like there is now a vocal track where someone is going "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch..." to rhythm of the drums. Anyone else hear this?

Definitely! I had put it in as 'breathing' above but yes it does sound more like Nicky mimicking the drum beat .
Going back to the original mix I don't think now that there is extra guitar in that bridge but the 'lead' line has been turned down so that the other guitar lines are most noticeable.

The gorgeous Ocean Spray mix omits the delay of Sean's trumpets. That was the best thing about the old mix. The way the delay worked was -- there was two of them. One echo in the far-left and the other in the far-right channel. The delay bounced between them, first right then left, beautifully widescreen. I can understand why the effect has been taken off the new version, though. The new version has different architecture -- the screen widens in the chorus, with the beautiful guitar line that's now much further left and clearer than before. So, the verses and trumpet solo are narrower for that to have full effect. Trumpet has a bit more compression now plus a shorter less flashy delay. Still very, very good. Sean's played it with great emotion.

All and all the new Ocean Spray mix with the gorgeous stereo effects in the chorus and post chorus elevates the song into top 6 for me and the loss of the delay is understandable.

I have also noticed the mouth-drums in Intravenous Agnostic's breakdown. Radiohead's All I Need has a similar sound doubling the drums. In IA's case I think it's Sean's digital percussion, the kind of little detail he likes to add to mixes, for example on Rewind the Film.

Not a new detail, but have you noticed the bouncy bass that joins SWSS at ca 4.00. Soooo nice.

Yeah, on My Guernica, I was confused when singing along to Alfred J Prufrock and it was the other way around haha, glad I wasn't imagining it.

My guess it's Sean hyping himself into the drum rolls into oblivion!

Didn't Shields play on Freedom of Speech? Unless he also appears on Dead Martyrs as well...

Groundhog Days has always been a decent song to listen to but this new version is a different beast.

Baby Elian’s chorus is also a massive massive highlight

to me it sounds like a mixing mistake - there is a 1/8 or so missing!

That's obviously a completely newly recorded vocal. The voice sounds 20 years older. No matter it is now "correct", it sounds pretty awful to me because of the tonal change on James voice. What's wrong this year? Bernard Butler released new vocals for his first solo albums too :-D oh my

The change was confirmed by eringa to be a cut edit job. To my ears it doesn't sound the best but time will tell if it feels right

J. Alfred ? Or which change?

What is meant by cut-edit? Only modifying the old track? I seriously doubt it in case of J. Alfred, it really sounds
1. like JDB 2022
2. smooth (no strange cutting)

Definitely a cut/shift job on the vocal. It's very jarring and just sounds shit. The more I listen to the remix of My Guernica, the more I dislike it.

Apologies I should have been clearer, they moved the j to the front on the original vocal track. Dave Eringa confirmed it on the what is music kye podcast episode.

Thanks for that. I've just listened to it: Dave Eringa insist there is nothing new there indeed. First I thought he was lying, but I listened intensively to the orginal and new version and he is probably true. Probably there is a bit of time warping which change the tone a bit. But to be completel clear: I believe my feeling was simply wrong.

Impossible! ;) :D

Hahaha! Pedestal now has an unnecessary "WOWNK" guitar noise at the end instead a fade on Sean's symbol! Knew I should have bought the 3CD thing.

I must say that Dave Eringa interview on that podcast was FANTASTIC.

Liking the mix. The alternative title of this is "Found That Reverb." :D

It's not a new bit by any stretch of the imagination, but I like the fact that they put a swell in Intravenous Agnostic (3:19.) Glorious.

The other veeeeery noticable thing is how the bass drum shifts from the centre to the side of the mix in the Ocean Spray heavy guitar part. This opens up the space so you can hear Mitch Ikeda's spoken word bit (at the end) much more easily.

The thing with the KYE mix originally is it's all so rough and unfinished that it's no surprise that a bit of polish and space is brining elements to the fore that were there but just inaudiable before.

I'll have a listen to some of these other suggestions and thoughts on the mix itself and see if I can spot the difference.

Good spot. Where James sings "kidnapped" he holds (mainly) one note in the remix, where he glides down from "kid" to "napped" in the original.

This sounds like there's general foley/ambience in the background turned up high so you hear it. You have the ch-ch-ch sounds, but also what sounds like a book turning pages or something in there?

I notice that the high pitched guitar in the first part of this is *much* lower in the mix (from 2:44 onwards) than the original. I think a lot of what is going on here is just playing with levels rather than anything new, plus the swell mentioned in my last post.

New outro sounds a lot like guitar tracks with feedback. In all likelihood if they chose a mix with an extra chorus, these would have just been muted and so they might have been part of the song originally, but we never got to hear it. And yeah, Kevin Shields is a decent shout as at 2:57 there is a tone very similar to the intro of Freedom of Speech at that point.

I'll have to listen to these in more detail, but focussing on the mixes mainly:

The original Guernica has some very odd placements and deliberate crappiness (edit: this crappiness is something I wondered about, but I'm glad to hear it very much confirmed by Dave Eringa in the recent podcast episode), which is mostly removed. Typically, drums and bass are central in a vanilla song mix. KYE isn't traditional so on Guernica, you have the bass on one side of your ears and the drums on the other with a random tambo in the middle. The new mix is more traditional which makes way more space especially for James voice, and the guitars are significantly turned down.

Freedom of Speech; again, there's just a lot more space in the mix, and it sounds like there's some gentle movement of the placement of instruments in your ears as the song builds up. And it's drenched in reverb where the original isn't. The original is also quite a muddy mix, which again really highlights those jagged guitars and hides other aspects of the song.

Errrr what else?... The Convalescent now has a tambourine & cowbell. The end of Wattsville Blues is gone.

As a final note; what I'd say with remixes is that you'd be amazed how far you can turn a horrible buzz-saw guitar into something quite pretty with a low pass filter and a few other little tricks. The same is true the other way. If one can add reverb and delay to an instrument, then additional effects (see: Miss Europa guitars etc) can be added to tweak how a specific instrument sounds.

In a nutshell we've gone from a narrow, muddy and buzzy mix with buried vocals, to something more "classic Manics" if you will. The new one has a wide mix including mostly traditional placement of the instruments, more vocals, less guitars and a bunch of reverb.

According the the liner notes:

A link to that? Would love to hear him talk about this album.

It's all in here - https://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/fo...ad.php?t=63123

I've got about half way through this, but again Dave reveals some great insights here. Pretty much the key takeout from what he's saying is that they made 2 albums in the vision the band had. And then right at the end they lost their heads, put it all on one record and then either deliberatley (or slightly thoughtlessley) buried the songwriting under some questionable mixes. And also chucked away songs like Rosebud that didn't even make the B-Sides.

I'll make a longer comment elsewhere so as not to derail this thread too much but I guess the story is that this is a revisit that is strangely compelling given how unpopular it was with the mainstream and how disliked it is by the band. Lifeblood next then!

I'll try and do a proper trainspotters list of all the musical changes that came out in the wash once this one has had more time to sink in.

Which podcast is this again?

Thanks!