Escapade 1 examined

How could a terrible album be this good? How could a good album be this terrible? - razumov22 on RateYourMusic.com, 27 May 2011

 Escapade (2009) track listing:

1. March for the Age / My Next Escape (8:21)
2. Days to Midnight (4:00)
3. Modern Art (3:45)
4. What Is Mine (3:27)
5. Them (6:04)
6. Faraway Island (9:48)
7. My Last Escape (3:42)

This is going to be longer than I anticipated, so I'm actually bothering with headings.

Sound I: instruments

I think the best place to start this examination is with the general sound of the album.  The first thing one notices is, of course, the somewhat primitive MIDI instruments used almost exclusively throughout.  (There's at least one exception besides the vocals, but it's not captured well.)  Many have derisively commented that they sound like they're from a 1980s Casio or a cheap sampler program.  In reality, they are from the General MIDI mode of a Yamaha PSR-5700 - actually quite a sophisticated piece of kit, but probably not being put to its intended use!

As for why I thought this was a good idea, the easy route would be just to say I was naïve and leave it at that, but I'm not sure that was the case.  Some months before making Escapade, I remember seeing this scathing review of Eric Clapton's Pilgrim (1998) and thinking to myself "oh, recording my own music this way might NOT be a good idea".  I must have suppressed that thought at the time.  I wish I hadn't.

I'm not familiar with Pilgrim, by the way.  I have little interest.

I think there were, broadly speaking, two factors behind my production choice.  The first was that I didn't really hear the tones of the PSR-5700 in an objective way, because I'd basically grown up with the thing.  My late father (also a musician) had bought it when I was about 4 or 5, probably for the purpose of playing back scores from the original Acorn version of Sibelius.  (This was before such software packages came with instrument samples built in.)  On top of this, I used to love to use the instrument to put on little "concerts" at home, just for myself: I'd be endlessly fascinated by the ability to, say, hear what "Michelle" sounds like with the solo on acoustic guitar or harpsichord or whatever.  So, not only did the PSR-5700 MIDI tones sound normal to me, I actually associated them with feelings of comforting conviviality.

The second factor was that, while aware of MIDI's poor reputation, I regarded it as the lesser of two evils.  I didn't want anything to do with a sloppy, amateurish, lo-fi garage band sound, and was trying to get as far away from that as I could.  It's also worth noting that in the neighbourhood where I grew up, rock was a niche interest at best, so I didn't have a lot of opportunities to work with other like-minded musicians.

It's not all bad news on the production front, though.  One thing I've learned in the intervening years is that hi-fi audio equipment tends to make a good mix sound better, but that it also makes a bad mix sound worse.  With this in mind, it's more than a little shocking that Escapade, of all albums, is one that actually benefits from being played on good gear.  (I currently use a powerful Marantz amplifier for home listening.)  There's a nice, strong but slightly mysterious low end to the sound, mostly due to the PSR-5700's Acoustic Bass tone - there's a reason that was my go-to!  (Only "Modern Art" uses Fretless Bass instead, and suffers accordingly.)  I also remember taking great care to ensure decent, but not overdone, stereo separation throughout.

Sound II: vocals

The vocals, on the other hand, are an unmitigated disaster on every level.  I can sing, but you wouldn't guess so based on this evidence!  It mostly had to do with a crippling, and inexplicably intense, lack of confidence on my part.  That's why I chose to sing "Modern Art" in falsetto (except where the melody goes below A#3 or so); I found it comforting to hide behind a different voice.  (Just as I was hiding behind someone else's lyrics and a towering wall of dissonant synthesizers, really.)

Anyway, once "Modern Art" was ridiculed to the point of becoming a sort of independent Rick Roll (albeit, thankfully, on a much smaller scale than that meme) my confidence in my singing ability suffered further.  The result is that on the other 6 tracks, I was basically just going through the motions of singing, resulting in deliveries that were listless at best.  Perhaps this lyric from the track "My Next Escape" best sums up the vocal situation:

"There's no use trying anyhow."

There are a few moments where I break out the falsetto in fits of a "this is how I do things" sort of defiance.  At a climactic moment in "Them" it even comes close to working.  The rest of the time, it doesn't.

Unlike the instruments, the vocals are also captured extremely badly on a technical level.  If memory serves, there were difficulties getting my microphone to work with my sound card.  It was a stereo microphone, so the issue probably had to do with that.  Whatever the reason, I remember having no choice but to sing very quietly right up close to the mic, with the result that my voice sounds simultaneously muffled AND overpoweringly loud.  (Again "Modern Art" is a slight exception, but it's not necessarily an improvement.)

If there's anything good to be said, it's that I at least did a decent job of synchronizing the stems in the few places where I harmonize with myself, notably on "What Is Mine".

The microphone issue is also felt in the above-mentioned rare use of an instrument that isn't the PSR-5700.  That would be a brief passage for flute in "March for the Age", which I played on a real flute, albeit using varispeed because C-sharp minor (that's 4 sharps) is an awkward key for woodwinds.

Songs

That about covers the shortcomings (and few strengths) in the production, but if that were the full story I wouldn't be doing this remake now.  Admittedly the opening "March for the Age" makes a poor first impression in the composition department.  Its pretentious title frames it as a sort of funeral march in memory of some vague cultural golden age, and also makes me look and sound like a self-important idiot.  It's really a good example of how, whenever I sit down to write music just for the sake of writing something, the results are usually rote substanceless mush.  I do like the strings/flute middle section, but that's because its melody and chords are adapted from something else.

That something else was the sketch that also evolved into "My Next Escape", into which the march eventually segues.  This is a brooding, slightly funk-tinged (filtered through Pink Floyd) pop song about, as far as I can tell, feeling conflicted about moving on from a bad breakup.  The lyrics, as is standard for this album, are gibberish with the occasional inspired nugget, but I mostly like the actual music.  The main riff, the descending bass underneath it, the anthemic chorus and the call-back to (the one good part of) the march are all suitably moody without being too bogged-down.

Up next is "Days to Midnight", the fastest song on the album.  The uncanny production particularly hurts this one, I think, but the call-and-response refrain is quite catchy and I really like the decision to use its chords for the "guitar solo" that immediately follows the second refrain.  This song might actually be more impactful at a slightly slower tempo; as it stands it's taken at exactly 180 BPM to make its 180 bars last exactly 4 minutes.  (Yes, this song is about the end of the world.)

I'll bashfully admit that, listening to this version of "Modern Art" for the first time in years, I laughed a lot.  I think it's best simply to list, in order of appearance, the elements in this song that are so preposterous that they turn this attempted put-down of, well, modern art into a huge quasi-unintentional joke...

1. The intro is just a bunch of ear-piercing upwards chromatic scales before the bass and drums come in.
2. The occasionally out-of-tune falsetto vocal.  Enough said.
3. The drums, which first appear halfway through the first verse and resemble a loud, programmed version of the "A Day in the Life" fills.
4. After the second verse, the intro is played again, but with the scales this time using a synth-sparkle-like patch.  At least this use of the sound can't possibly be accused of being overly commercial!
5. Near the end of the third verse, a random applause sound effect plays in the right channel.
6. Shortly after this, we get a long passage consisting of no fewer than FIVE sawtooth synthesizers all climbing up a chromatic scale, starting from a low-pitched chord of B major and converging to a unison F-sharp, with a pulsating repeated F-sharp in the bass underneath.  Sound familiar?
7. After the fourth verse, the music briefly pauses altogether and a strange drum effect plays for five beats, bouncing its way across the stereo field.  Then the fifth verse begins right away.
8. Finally, just when it seems I've run out of ideas for random silliness, the song ends with a loud, dissonant chord played on tubular bells.  Admittedly the harmonics of metallophones in general make almost anything sound dissonant on those.

The actual "song" part (consisting of five verses, with the last two in a higher key) is quite a nice tune.  It should be noted that, while I didn't necessarily mean the track to be funny, the normal and experimental elements clashing was absolutely what I was going for.

"What Is Mine" is a theatrical piano ballad.  I actually used to hate this song, largely for some lyrics that evoke a creepy possessiveness, but revisiting it now I've come to realize there's more to it than that.  In particular, the line "Even if you say I'll lose my mind" is possibly my favourite lyrical turn of phrase on all of Escapade, just about summing up where I was in real life at the time.  In any case, there's something very satisfying to me about the sturdy, forthright piano styling here.  The track has gone from being my least favourite in the set, to a highlight for me.

My favourite has always been the following "Them", though.  This is in large part because it's the closest the album gets to making a feature of its ice-cold sound, as the song's mood is one of despondent alienation.  The few lyrics are about romantic jealousy, but they're not the main focus.  This is a complex, classically-influenced piece and its middle section is even organized as a full-fledged development, as you'd typically get in the first movement of a symphony.  I think my favourite detail is the way that the organ theme in the exposition gets subtly varied to become lead guitar in the recapitulation, but really this is a composition where things just come together in a way that works.  Even my singing bothers me less here than on the other songs.

The following "Faraway Island" is the album's big epic and a far less successful attempt at fusing rock elements with a bulky classical form.  It certainly has tremendous potential, as all three of its main musical ideas are among the loveliest to find their way onto Escapade, but it loses my attention around the 6-minute mark.  Unfortunately, the song is 10 minutes long.  I think the problem is that it follows its classical template too slavishly.  The form (excluding the intro and coda) is essentially A-B-a-C-B-A (the lowercase "a" stands for a very truncated reprise), but the second B section feels like it's there because the textbook says so, and makes for a wholly inadequate pay-off after the tense C section.  It doesn't help that section C itself is too repetitive (in this recording, anyway) to quite pull off the mood it's going for.  If "Faraway Island", as a composition, came close to living up to the potential of its themes, it would be hands-down my favourite track on the album.  As it is, it's in the running for my least favourite.

Finally, "My Last Escape" is a reprise of "My Next Escape".  There's not much else to say except that I sort of like the way it ends with a long C-sharp major chord with some instrumental noodling as it fades... but doesn't that sound familiar?  That brings us to one last major weakness in the album: I so badly wanted to be Pink Floyd!  The album's structure is basically just Wish You Were Here with more songs - it even shows in my heavy use of synth string patches that wanted to be Richard Wright!  It is fortunate that the musical personality in the actual songs, underneath all the simultaneous overproduction and underproduction, is my own.  Again, if that weren't the case, I wouldn't consider the album worth remaking.

Conclusion

I'll echo what others have said: Escapade has a good, or at least respectable, album buried therein, but as it stands it's not it.  What fascinates me the most is the way that its overinflated ambition lets it down in ways that are as damning as they are subtle.  This, plus the above-mentioned bad production (actually downright hard on the ears in places), adds up to something that I still feel justified in being embarrassed about, 14 years after the fact.  Yet I am confident that it can be made right.

In the next post, I shall be taking a (probably shorter) look at Escapade 2, my first attempt at doing exactly that.