I consider the sound of Time Out of Mind to be the best part of the album.
Amazing depth, ambiance, sense of airiness/distance/physical space (the instruments/voices themselves, and the physical space they occupy together, whether in their room or in the ‘soundstage’ of my speakers), while still retaining clarity where there needs to be clarity.
Not easy, and an impressive achievement I still find sonically remarkable.
Dylan's Time Out of Mind remix is Stunning
"Time Out of Mind" was always a powerful record, despite the murky original mix.
Now, with most of the sonic muck that producer Daniel Lanois smeared onto the music scraped off and rinsed away, it's full glory is revealed. Abetted by terrific SQ, its impact is stunning.
The old mantra "original mixes are always better" is blown out of the water by this.
For my tastes, this is one of the best releases in the Bootleg Series-- a dream come true for Dylan lovers-- and one of the best Dylan releases since "Blood on the the Tracks".
Lyric fragments keep cycling in my head. . .
"People on the platforms
waiting for trains
I can hear their hearts a beatin'
like pendulums swingin' on chains"
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@stuartk No, not at all. I like this album’s sound. I listen to all manner of music. Music audiophiles would turn away like a rotten fish because it doesn’t sound like Diana Krall, Brothers in Arms, Aja, or Dark Side of the Moon. |
To my mind it’s all about the murk. I think Lanois did a great job on the original Time Out of Mind. The dark sound was a huge part of its allure. It’s a work of art (no?) about aging and losing touch. About existential darkness creeping in as you get closer to some reckoning. Things are getting more obscure, not brighter as the singer might have expected. So he’s constantly looking backward in regret or forwards in resignation.
Lanois caught that feeling in the production values. Not an easy thing to do. Did he go overboard? Perhaps. But this was in the nineties and it was a contemporary sound. And let’s not forget that Dylan has a long history of gainsaying his own work. I’m sure he was very much in the driver’s seat, though maybe not perfectly pleased with the result. To my mind, the anti-audiophile values of the production (and really, they’re not THAT bad) are gorgeous and had everything to do with making it one of the more moving albums I can remember hearing. Critics are always gonna huff and puff about Bob Dylan - isn’t that, like, one of the great lessons of cultural criticism since the 60’s? (lol). That just means (to me) that he’s doing his job.
As an aside, I saw Dylan perform this material in 1998 in a small club in Chicago. One of the better concerts I’ve seen, definitely the best iteration of Dylan live. It’s a quarter of a century ago now, so my memory may be off. But I remember Dylan using two vocal mics, I guess to mimic the sound of the album. Ditto the band - lots of reverb. So the ‘actual sound’ of the live band wasn’t exactly like the CD but neither was it as clean and up-front as it is on the new ‘bootleg’ version. |
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