Spirit - Clear (Revisited)

It's been a couple years, maybe i can learn to like Clear. I love 1, 2, & 4, it seems such a shame to hate it. Spoiler alert, no, i can't. 

It's not the band or the songs, though. It's the engineering and mixing. The first time around i said it sounds muddy, and it does, but that's not really all that's bugging me. Randy's vocals are fine, and most of the lead guitar parts are ok if really really dark, it's everything else that sounds like oatmeal. You can totally disagree, but i hate drums panned left, bass panned right. Next, things like background vocals, horn, strings, all that kind of sonic middle-ground sounds 30+ feet away from the mics. There're basically no high frequencies, so it only sort of sounds like someone might be playing a piano in a different room and you can't hear any attack on the synthy sounding guitar parts, but the hard left hi hats are so distracting it's hard to actually concentrate on anything else. The reverb isn't helping either. Half the time it sounds like they are literally around the next corner and you're hearing it bounce off a brick wall.

On top of that, the quiet sounds are almost always louder than the loud sounds, and a harp being louder than a tube saturated guitar lead sounds totally wrong. The EQ is so totally whack, i had to run it through an analyzer. So, the first photo is a snapshot of the title track, Clear. The second photo is a snapshot of Fat Old Sun from Atom Heart Mother. I know you're gonna be like "Bottle, those look basically the same," but in real life that difference around 1k is like night and day. Clear sounds anything but. 

Like i said, the songs are great, the slightly sloppy playing is gorgeous, the compositions are fantastic, the album sounds like i'm wearing ear muffs with walkmans glued to each side. Spirit doesn't sound like this, The Band that Plays Together doesn't sound like this, Dr. Sardonicus doesn't sound like this, no wonder they told Lou Adler "smell you later." I said Seventh Sojourn deserved a time-travel type re-recording, but so does Spirit's 3rd album. It's certainly not as painful to listen to as any Rolling Stones album, but it's not particularly enjoyable. 

So, there you have it. I wish i liked listening to it, but i probably never will. Clear could have been a great album, but it sounds too much like crap for me to ignore even when i'm trying. Sad, but true.

Edit: i was bummed after writing this, so i gave it yet another shot. This album actually sounds good played out loud through the speaker of your cell phone. That's not a win in my book, but there you go.