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swan-archive · 7 years

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Okay so I said I wasn’t gonna do this but I have been REINVORGATED and REJUCINATED by the Oak boot of “Dust and Ashes” so here you go, more rambling than you require about the cast recordings of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Sorry, y’all.

Blease to keep in mind that these are all just, like, my opinions, man.

First off: not to be all I AM UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN WE ARE NOT ABOUT HAMILTON? but I really do wonder how many of my issues with Comet’s obcr can be traced back to Hamilton’s cast recording...

So, as we all know, Lin took pains to make Hamilton’s cast album sound as much like a hip-hop record as he could. This is there in the way the songs are composed and performed, and it’s very much there in the production—Questlove and Black Thought were co-producers on the album, along with Lin, Lac, and Bill Sherman.

Now, when I think of big-name modern rap and hip-hop records, I think high production value. At their best, you should be getting an incredibly well-crafted, slick, cohesive sound, vocals married to instrumentation and beats in a way that just works whether you’re listening track-by-track or to the whole album start to finish. And, most importantly, the work that goes into achieving that sound shouldn’t be audible. You should be able to listen to something like Lemonade or Coloring Book or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy without getting tangled up in “oh, interesting eq going on there” or “what’s going on with that delay?” at first pass. Just let it be about the music.

This worked for Hamilton. It doesn’t work so well for Comet.

And, I mean, they tried. They worked very hard to polish things up, to make a Studio Album that stands by itself, bless ‘em, but honestly, I just wish they’d let the music speak for itself a bit more, just let it be a recording of a very good Broadway show. Because on Comet, that sort of tight-ship production value just reads as...overproduced. And it makes it a less enjoyable listening experience.

Now, music producers wear a hell of a lot of hats, so “overproduced” can mean a lot of different things. With this album, it takes the form of stuff sounding TOO clean, overpolished to the point of sounding artificial, and artificial is not a thing you want in a vocal sound in a genre based around showcasing, well, vocals. It’s mostly little things that I noticed, not anything that would ruin an album, but just things that might turn your head and make you go, “huh, that didn’t sound quite right.”

For example, I noticed a different treatment on certain phrase deliveries, exemplified by Grace McLean’s bit from “In My House” where she sings “Why didn’t he come to the house? / Why didn’t he openly ask for your hand?” as well as Amber Gray’s “Charmante, charmante” from (obviously) “Charming.” Both of these phrases end with a little descent that, on the ocr, sounds more like an interpretive/ornamental bit than anything; a sort of natural falling-off of the line that comes from an emotional rather than a technical place. On the obcr, both of these ornaments persist, but are “tidied up” for lack of a better phrase—both actors deliver them with significantly more weight, taking care to strike specific pitches. And it...well, in my opinion, it doesn’t work as well. It sounds like someone circled the bit in the music and went, “okay, let’s make those ornaments INTENTIONAL,” which removes the the charm of the unstudied voice and makes the part sound rehearsed.

At other times, they go too far in the opposite direction, pushing on the bounds of the written music in a way that simply doesn’t read on a recording like this one. I’m thinking in particular of Lucas Steele’s long notes at the beginning of “The Abduction” and at the end of “Pierre and Anatole.” Now, I’m not saying the album shouldn’t show off Steele’s vocal prowess; he’s an unbelievably talented singer, and he can do some Real Shit with his voice that is frankly terrifying and everyone should fear and respect him. What I AM saying is that a recording is a different format in which to hear those notes, as opposed to a live performance. When you’re there in the Imperial Theater, watching Steele sit on a C#5 for 45 consecutive seconds like it’s his fucking job (which...I guess it is), you can tell by dint of BEING THERE that there’s no artifice, just a skilled singer and his throat and his voice. And that’s part of the beauty of it, that you can watch it happen in real time and marvel at it. When you’re listening to a neat studio recording, on the other hand, there’s that level of abstraction, of knowing that between the note coming out and hitting your ears there’s been work done on it. And maybe Steele did actually hold it out that long in-studio (he probably did. The man isn’t human, I fucking swear), but you can’t know that. Cross-fades are a thing, and it is a fairly trivial task to knit together two long notes to make one biiiiiiiig long note, especially with a clear pure tone like Steele’s voice has. So it ends up sounding self-indulgent and gimmicky. Look how long we made this note. Such high. Very edits. Wow. Please clap. Lin got it when he said there’s some stuff that should stay unique and exclusive to the live performances, and these virtuoso showings definitely fall under that heading. Hint at ‘em on the recording, but their proper home is on the stage, in the theater.

(I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I AM UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN WE ARE NOT ABOUT HAMILTON!)

All that said: Comet has a very complex, group-oriented score, and everything I’ve been pointing out so far is fairly nitpicky. It’s subtle artistry stuff that will, by its nature, get lost when there is a lot going on, which there frequently is. Not to mention the score features long recitative-style sections, where the actors will deliberately use a more speech-like singing style to deliver exchanges between characters, quick exposition, etc. which does a lot to counter the “getting too technical and shoegazey” thing. People know what speech is meant to sound like! If you stray too far from that, you’ll undermine your listeners’ comprehension, as well as the whole uh...ACTING part of the PLAY. Which is important.

However, the whole play isn’t like this. You do have solo arias—broadly, major pauses in the action to expound on a single character’s emotional state. I’m thinking of three songs from Comet in particular: “Dust and Ashes,” “Sonya Alone,” and “No One Else,” standout showstopper numbers that are meant to drag the tears out of everyone in the audience. (Don’t worry, I love crying. It’s my favorite thing, next to dying and being dead.) Overall, these three songs are more delicately orchestrated, in order to showcase the unique voices of the soloists. Which would be great, if, you know, they’d managed to consistently mix the songs in a way that showcased the unique voices of the soloists! Fuck!

(“Charming” technically fits this mold as well. However, I would argue that it has more of a narrative action, i.e. showing Hélène’s beguilement of Natasha, not to mention that it is musically a very different song from any of the other ones I’ve listed above, faster-paced and with a more active accompaniment, which covers things that might otherwise give pause. Even so you can hear a few off-kilter things in it, as outlined above.)

“Dust and Ashes” (and to a lesser extent, “Pierre”) are difficult to compare between albums—obviously, because there’s no studio recording of the former (@DAVE! PLEASE SAVE MY LIFE), and because Dave Malloy and Josh Groban have such radically different voices. Let’s be very clear, I am not dunking on Groban’s prowess as a vocalist; there’s no question in my mind (and shouldn’t be any in yours) that, in terms of technical skill, he has a better voice than Dave in every way. To my ear, though, Groban’s recordings of Pierre’s songs sound almost unpleasantly slick, which I would guess is what you get when overproduced hypercleanliness meets vocal control that could knock an apple off someone’s head at forty paces without batting an eyelid. Especially next to the raw, almost painfully sincere delivery of Malloy’s versions, Groban’s sound sanitized, lacking in sincere emotion, just a string of notes with a vibrato as wide as a barn. It’s very disappointing, and makes me regret not watching the Groban boot all the way through for a better idea of how his Pierre comes across onstage.

“Sonya Alone,” luckily, manages to escape overproduction for several reasons. First off, it’s performed by Brittain Ashford on both albums, which presumably gave the production team a model for how to showcase her voice on the obcr. Secondly, the way the song was written and performed naturally resists this sort of treatment. It doesn’t have a virtuosic range—nearly the whole thing sits within less than an octave, and the one high belt note just kind of gets tapped briefly before settling back down. Hence, the emotional beats in it are a matter of performance, rather than technical prowess, and cleaning up too much of the natural wobble and waver of the voice in that range would make it sound absolutely lifeless and boring. Ashford also has that unusual, striking dark tone to her voice, which can already sound like an affectation to the first-time listener; placing too many effects on it would only exacerbate that. Hence, a reprieve. We get to enjoy Brittain Ashford’s voice showcased as it is. Nice.

Which leaves us with “No One Else.”

Oh, you guys.

You guys, I love “No One Else.” I think it is the second most perfect song Dave Malloy has ever written, only missing out on the top spot because he also wrote the ear worm from hell. It is PEAK F major aesthetic in every way. It is such a gorgeous, wistful, romantic piece, and couldn’t have hit more of my buttons even if Dave Malloy had literally come into my home and said, “hey, Swan, I’m trying to write a song that will knock you, specifically, on your ass, wanna give me some pointers so that I can more efficiently Kill you?” It is so good.

And this recording of it did Denée Benton SO. DIRTY.

Benton’s Natasha is necessarily a bit different than Phillipa Soo’s Natasha. Soo has a somewhat weightier voice than Benton, so her interpretation of the character seems to lean more on her vitality and spirit, whereas Benton reads as a very young Natasha, naïve but deeply good. (Margaux @likeniobe, I’m pretty sure it was you who pointed this out to me, thanks, you’re the real mvp.) I think both of these are perfectly valid character interpretations of Natasha as she appears in this adaptation, and based on what I’ve seen of the bootleg, Benton’s Natasha is lovely to watch onstage.

...However. The thing about that interpretation is that it requires a good bit of subtlety in order to come across as compelling and not saccharine. This reads onstage, but on this recording, very sadly, it kind of flops. Again, this strikes me as the fault of hewing too close to the written music, and ironing out too many of the natural kinks in a voice. Benton performs this song very delicately, with a light touch regarding theatricality; when overworked, this gives it an almost Disney princess-y feel, all fluff, no substance. It’s not as moving, it simply doesn’t do justice to Benton’s interpretation, and I’m mad about it.

There are also some technical...I wouldn’t call them errors, I guess, but interpretive things in this recording that just seem like sloppy mixing. The first one comes right on Benton’s first line, that beautiful fifth leap that sets up the airy space of the song as a whole. There’s reverb on her voice to mimic the atmosphere of hearing the song in a theater, but for some reason they don’t even give it time to fully die away before launching her into the first verse, and as a result she sounds rushed. This could work with a different vocal interpretation, but Benton performs the opening of this song with a very dreamy, mysterious approach (contrast Soo, who takes it more stridently), so it just comes off as sloppy and badly-paced.

Then, at the end of the song (and bear with me, folks, I’m about to get VERY nitpicky), Benton sings that wonderful ascending “you and I / you and I / you and I,” showing off her higher range and building suspense before the surprisingly tender and introspective ending of the song. Since she is singing high notes, an engineer mixing the song would most likely apply some compression to her voice to keep it sitting in the appropriate place in the mix, and to prevent the signal from clipping. I’m not gonna get into a super in-depth discussion of compression here, but in short it’s an effect that reduces the dynamic range (“loudness”) of a signal when it passes a designated threshold frequency, thus allowing you to get a more consistent dynamic range throughout, so your pianos aren’t inaudible and your fortes aren’t blowing out your speakers.

...It’s more complicated than that. Whatever. Don’t @ me.

Anyway, the way what I assume is compression has been applied to Benton’s vocal here sounds VERY sloppy in comparison to how Soo’s was treated on the ocr. A cool thing about many types of compressors is that you can control exactly how fast the compression kicks in, smoothing out the level changes so that you don’t have a track that’s pulsating wildly in dynamic range. Here, as Benton reaches each held note, her vocal ducks audibly before coming back up. This effect is audible in Soo’s recording of the song, but it’s MUCH more subtle and naturalistic, serving a technical purpose without distracting from the artistry of the song. So...either this was some very spotty compression work, or like, the engineer just went into the volume for her track and manually ducked it and brought it back up? I don’t know, but whatever it was, I don’t like it.

Now, in the end, Dave Malloy signed off on this album, and as long as he’s happy with it, that’s all that really matters. As an engineer, you’re (for the most part) there to bring your client’s vision to life, and if they like the product you put in front of them at the end of the day, then you’ve done your job. And there’s a huge chance that I’m just being all IT’S DIFFERENT SO IT SUCKS, given that I’m very sensitive to small differences in versions of a song.

But still. Still.

Denée, sweetie, you deserved better than this.

#swan talks #............at great length #more appropriately: swan is a nitpicky bitch about stuff probably no one notices anyway! fuck!#the great comet of 1812 for ts

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