A Year of Music

I should be in bed for real, but after my last posting about Torche, I can’t let go of something that’s been nagging at me for a couple months now: wot up with re-recording your first album, dudes?

The original version of Torche’s self-titled first album was released by Robotic Empire back in 2004, and it’s a monster of heavy music carved into catchy bite-sized pop song chunks. I have already attested elsewhere to its greatness.

The band are perfectionists (something that comes through effortlessly in their immaculate craftsmanship, barring their sometimes off-tune singing), and for reasons I don’t completely understand, they decided to partially re-record and completely remix the album and rerelease it in 2007. The only immediately obvious changes are that “Sex Addict” has become an instrumental (losing its charmingly direct chorus of “AND I’D LIKE TO TURN YOU ON” in the process) and a bonus track’s been tacked onto the end.

I think re-recording it was a mistake. It bespeaks a lack of confidence in the material that’s unfounded. The new version has heavier low end and sounds more like a conventional metal album, circa 2007. But I think I get what whomever engineered the original was trying to do: there’s a buzzy lightness to the original mix that reminds me of the hard rock I heard on the radio when I was a kid. Stuff like Boston or Aldo Nova (or The Cars!), where the compressed, midrange-heavy mix would sound good on cheap car stereos, and the absence of bass gave an airy feeling that really accentuated the pop hooks that give Torche’s music so much of its appeal. There are a million heavy bands out there cranking out tectonically heavy sludge, but very few of them have the skill to put together a set of songs like Torche. The band should have stood by their original work, because it was worth standing by.