Niki N. Phaser

Grunge survivors Pearl Jam have offered a gift to fans through their MySpace page. The song is called The Fixer and it’s the first single from their upcoming album, Backspacer, which is due for release this September. It will be a breath of fresh material amongst the string of reissues they are planning. Even before the premiere, it was known that The Fixer is going to be used for a Target commercial, directed by Cameron Crowe. He’s a good friend of the band and has worked with them before, on his 1992 grunge-era comedy Singles. He is also at the helm of some sort of documentary on the band, a 20 year anniversary retrospective. This new single might baffle some of Pearl Jam’s fans, as it has very little guitar heaviness on it or, in fact, none at all. It was the band’s intention to get more poppy on this one, but the results sound a bit like Counting Crows back in the 90′s. However, after their previous album, Pearl Jam, being so punchy, a change was rather expected.

This isn’t really something against The Dandy Warhols, it’s just that they have recently joined yet another new trend in the process of releasing records. We no longer get just remastered re-releases, but also remixed ones, and by that I don’t mean the seven-minutes-intro club mix of a three-minutes song. It’s about the mix of the whole album. The Dandy Warhols released Welcome to the Monkey House in 2003, the version mixed by Jeremy Weathley, apparently preferred by the band’s label at the time, Capitol. Still, the original mix was done by Russell Elavedo and this was apparently preferred by the band. Now, six years later, they are releasing this version with the title The Dandy Warhols Are Sound.

Truth be told there are plenty of differences between the two records, it’s not just that one is louder, like with remastered material. First of all, some of the songs are longer, for example The Last High or We Used To Be Friends. The track order is different, the album covers (as you can see in the images) and then, of course, there is the mixing. The songs have a new sound, but if you have listened to Welcome to the Monkey House for all these years and got acquainted with that music in that form, its 2009 “doppelgänger” seems like a collection of rough demos, missing some crucial production. Still, The Dandy Warhols have a strong enough indie following for this release to not have been in vain and they have plenty of irony to not pretend that pecuniary thoughts haven’t crossed their mind. Their official website’s greeting at the moment is: “Remember when we released The Dandy Warhols Are Sound today? And then you bought it? Good times.”

You can compare samples from the two versions here:

Welcome to the Monkey House and The Dandy Warhols Are Sound

Pearl Jam did the same with their first album, Ten, which was rereleased in 2009, both remastered and in a new mix by Brendan O’Brien, as the band thought the original mix by Tim Palmer had too much reverb on it, something that many rock bands seem to complain about when it comes to mixing. But the truth remains that it simply sucks when your favourite band says about your favourite album that is not quite what they were striving for, but, oh, the new mix, which comes in Limited edition, Deluxe edition, SuperDeluxe edition, Vinyl, iTunes edition, Wal-Mart/K-Mart edition, the gas station around the corner edition, oh, yes, that’s the real deal. And, yeah, I know no one is forcing you to buy it, but it has those two damn bonus tracks…