Escapade 2 examined

I remember it just being boring, less "outsider art" for want of a better term. - I remember someone saying this of Escapade 2 but I'm not sure who, or when.

Escapade 2 (2012) track listing:

1. March for the Age / My Next Escape (7:21)
2. Days to Midnight (4:00)
3. Modern Art (3:00)
4. One of My Goof Attacks (3:35)
5. Look and See (2:57)
6. Them (6:04)
7. After the Party (4:50)
8. Faraway Island (9:21)
9. My Last Escape (3:44)

As far as I can tell, Escapade 2 divided listeners into two camps.  The first were those who had an instinctive reaction along the lines of "it's still MIDI, therefore it still sounds horrible".  The second camp, on the other hand, appreciated the improved sound but felt that it exposed other weaknesses in the album.  In hindsight, I think both had a point.

I shall be doing this review backwards from the way I did that of Escapade: first I'll look at the actual songs, then turn my attention outwards to the production and the overall effect.

Songs

Five of the tracks are only cosmetically altered from their Escapade counterparts, so I shall be focusing solely on the other four.  These comprise two that are drastically re-worked, and two that were previously unreleased.

This version of "Modern Art" mostly took inspiration from the informal, piano-only rendition I'd done the previous year.  It's no longer a massive quasi-unintentional musical joke, but I'm not sure that the serious tone of this version fits the poem too well.

The other drastically re-worked song is "Look and See", which pairs the melody (and some aspects of the arrangement) of "What Is Mine" with completely new lyrics.  It's also much more stripped-down in its approach, lending a particular vulnerability to one of the more confessional songs in the set.

I LOVE "One of My Goof Attacks".  It strength, I think, lies in my awareness that my singing voice isn't ideally suited to rock, and particularly not to hard rock.  Thus, much like "Them", the short sung verses are merely a springboard for some fun organ and guitar solos.  I particularly like how the two big solo sections use chord sequences different not only from the verses but also from each other, while still having a logic to them.  And I really like the coda, in which an organ/bass breakdown seems to be reaching tranqility but then the riff suddenly bursts in again to close things out.  Plus, on a meta level, Escapade itself definitely counts as me having a goof attack.

"After the Party", on the other hand, is the only song on either of the Escapades that I outright dislike.  For starters, the piano styling is a shameless knock-off of "The Great Gig in the Sky".  I might once have justified it as a sort of harmonic what-if scenario: what if that Pink Floyd classic stayed in the key it seemed to start in, instead of quickly modulating away as it actually does?  Noble intention is all very well, but the reality is that if the result sounds like a knock-off within 2 notes, it effectively IS a knock-off.

On top of this, the pompous arrangement "After the Party" quickly builds into is completely inappropriate.  It turns the track into a bombastically depressing disaster on par with something like "Without You" by Asia!  Note that that song, too, is track 7 on a 9-track album... I don't want to think about the implications for where my inspiration was subconsciously coming from.  I do like the flute solos (played by me, no less!) but they're wasted here.

Sound

This time the keyboard used for the vast majority of the instrumental sounds is a Roland Jupiter-80.  I still have it.  Compared to the PSR-5700 it has many more different tones available, and some of the "acoustic" patches come close to sounding like their real counterparts.  I'm not sure that last point is necessarily a plus, though.  If someone were to say that this sends the sound even further into the uncanny valley, I'd at least understand where they were coming from.

To me, however, the instruments seem okay at first but become tough to take over the course of the whole album.  It doesn't help that, in contrast to the meticulous (if wasted) mixing work throughout Escapade, the mixing on Escapade 2 is haphazard at best.  I think I got complacent: with access to more sophisticated software than before, it was super easy to make the mix functional and I'd say "meh, that'll do" rather than refining it further.  Relatedly, while Escapade sounds notably better played on good hi-fi equipment, Escapade 2 sounds worse on the same setup.  The loud drums in particular quickly become annoying, and there's little bass presence to speak of.

The vocals are a mixed bag.  There are places where I sound genuinely good, but others where I sound horrible.  In general, it's easy to guess what order I recorded the tracks in based on how well I sing on them: "Modern Art" and "Days to Midnight" were the first I recorded, mimicking the order of the Escapade sessions, and accordingly suffer from moments of unbearable hoarseness on par with Gordon Haskell on Lizard.  Again, one could be forgiven for thinking I'm a terrible singer, based on that evidence.

On the other hand, I handled "Look and See" and "Them" quite well!  The former is especially impressive considering that I only did one take, eager to be done with what was then my least favourite song in the set.  There are a few sour notes, but they're not as bothersome as they would be if I didn't sound so surprisingly self-assured.  As for "Them", I specifically remember saving it for last because it's my favourite, so that's just a case of me having figured out by then how best to use the voice I've got.

The rest of the time, I sound very ordinary.  And while my performance on "Look and See" is strong, it also exposes another huge technical issue: the microphone I used (the only hardware retained from the Escapade sessions) wasn't very good.  I was able, this time, to sing at a reasonable distance from it, but this made for a poor signal-to-noise ratio and I had to use aggressive noise reduction so as not to have everything covered in hiss.  And because it was a stereo microphone, the resulting artifacts are all the more noticeable as they slither randomly between channels.  On much of the album, I consequently mixed the vocals very quietly, but on the more stripped-down material that wasn't an option.  The results are hideous.

Other weaknesses exposed

Stripping away Escapade's most glaring faults also had unintended consequences.  Most obviously, the lyrics come through much more clearly on Escapade 2, as I indeed knew they would, and while I re-wrote a few lines to be less glaringly embarrassing, I don't think that was enough.  There's a strong emotional thread of hopeless futility throughout, and the high quotient of non-sequiturs actually reinforces this instead of obscuring it.  It's not a pleasant effect.

Relatedly, the sequencing of tracks doesn't help matters.  Having two bleak scene-setters to start the proceedings is just excessive, and the oppressive atmosphere they create is never really dispelled.  The more stripped-down approach taken on "Modern Art" and "Look and See" (f.k.a. "What Is Mine") serves those songs well in isolation, but also undercuts the emotional relief that their Escapade counterparts did bring in that context.  "One of My Goof Attacks" helps a bit, but not a lot, as its humour is of the self-deprecating variety.  And "After the Party" speaks for itself.  All this leads to a startling conclusion:

It didn't need to be a concept album.

For the longest time, my reaction to this would have been along the lines of "But the concept is the POINT!"  No.  It isn't.  Even in something like the Who's Quadrophenia (1973) the heart of the proceedings lies in the music itself: it's not hard to imagine someone who doesn't know a phoneme of English enjoying that album greatly.  Or to use an example from further into the past, do we need deep knowledge of mediaeval Latin, and/or Catholic liturgy, to appreciate a requiem mass?  I don't think so.

The bottom line is that the overblown conceptuality on Escapade and especially Escapade 2, far from improving things, has the unfortunate effect of making the music seem much more mopey than it really is.

Conclusion

Escapade 2 is a failure, at least if we take its aim to be turning Escapade into a genuinely good album.  The one consolation, really, is that I think this failure had to happen.  If the original Escapade were the only one extant, I'd probably still be under the impression that a slavish, cosmetic remake along 2's lines would suffice.  Even though 2's production leaves a lot to be desired, it's still enough to make it abundantly clear that even a superbly produced version of this would still fail to do the material justice.

In the next post, I shall be setting out my plan for the third version of this set of songs.