What an album! Ahhh! Tom Cruise jumping on the couch!
It’s so bizarre that people fall back on Zen Arcade as the standby “best album ever and stuff” when talking about Husker Du. Zen and Warehouse aren’t a TENTH of the album that New Day Rising is.
But here’s what drives me nuts - New Day Rising is a hell of a pop record, to the point where I’m shocked that it didn’t catch on and make the band a household name when it came out ('85). “Celebrated Summer,” “Books about UFO’s,” “I Apologize,” “The Girl who lives on heaven hill” - ENORMOUS pop songs that easily trump anything that R.E.M. (because I’m blanking out on any other bands that ascended from the indie ghetto to mainstream superstar status during that era) was doing at the time. What happened? Was it the SST thing? The gay thing? The fact that the records are so noisy (even though “celebrated summer” has that perfect acoustic breakdown toward the end)?
Although neither Mould nor Hart really made an effort to conceal their sexual preference – they both took lovers with them on tour – it wasn’t really widely known.
SST, on the other hand, hindered the band a great deal. Its shabby distribution efforts are well-documented. Fans who saw the band tour behind Zen Arcade, for instance, generally found themselves out of luck when they headed into the record store to buy the album thanks to the label’s overly cautious estimate of how many copies to press.
This is actually pretty interesting, because I just responded to your Pet Sounds thread. I’ve never been able to understand Husker Du. Everything about my musical tastes would indicate that I’d like Husker Du. I like Bob Mould’s work. I like Sugar. I like noise. I like Sonic Youth. I like Big Black. But I can’t stand Husker Du. I think a lot of it is the production. It’s so piss-poor and so screamingly lo-fi that it just sounds like a wall of noise to me. Not like a good wall of noise–as Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine–but as shrill, incoherent white noise.
Now, maybe years from now I’ll have my Pet Sounds experience again and suddenly understand the genius of Husker Du. I mean, so many people like it and praise it, so there must be something going on that I’m missing. But, as of yet, I can’t find it.
At any rate, allmusic.com agrees with you that New Day Rising is better than Zen Arcade.
I would hate to think how Nirvana’s Nevermind would have turned out if Mould, who I’ve read was in the running to produce it, had actually gotten the nod.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that Mould would have done a poor job producing that record. The reason that some of the Husker’s material from their SST days (particulary Zen Arcade) suffered from poor production was SST’s producer (Spot) and the fact that it was intentionally recorded in a haphazard fashion.
Maybe Mould is not Butch Vig. Nevermind may not have even become a big hit if Mould would have produced it. But then again, maybe Kurt Cobain would have been happier with that record if he had.
On the subject of New Day Rising, it’s hard to argue it’s not a fantastic record. I’d disagree with the OP’s contention that it’s 10 times better than Zen Arcade though. New Day Rising may have more of the band’s noteworth songs, but as a record, and as a document of a band raging at the top of their game, Zen Arcade is fabulous…shitty production and all.
You’re probably right. I have no complaints about the job he did on Copper Blue. I guess I was thinking about the thin sound of Warehouse. I know that Mould and Hart were co-producers on that album, but I just can’t imagine that Mould would have done much better by himself.
While I agree that the engineering on those albums is (often intentionally) “bad,” how many of you guys have listened to them on vinyl, on system designed for decent reproduction? I’m the last guy to invoke the “vinyl soundz bettar!!!1” argument, but in the case of the Husker Du catalogue (really, the majority of the SST catalogue, esp. the Minutemen records), they were so poorly mastered for CD that the CD copies sound astoundingly bad. Warehouse is probably the worst of the bunch - it just sounds awful, really unlistenable. It sounds like most of those were just dumped straight from vinyl to CD with no mastering involved, and the Warehouse CD sounds like it was sourced from a cassette tape found in the backseat of somebody’s car.
I was a big fan of Husker Du back in the day, and at the time I wasn’t at all shocked that they weren’t popular. Things were very different back then, musically. In 1985 Ronald Reagan had just been elected to a second term and if you were listening to any other band besides Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon or Boston then you were a punk rocker and all of the jocks at your high school would beat you up.
There were plenty of us that liked Husker Du and the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets and all that, but there just wasn’t a mass market for music like that yet. When Nirvana and bands like that hit it big, I felt like Husker Du would have been huge if they had come out with stuff like “Zen Arcade” just a few years later, when people were ready for it. But in 1985 there was still a serious stigma against any rock music that wasn’t corporate-approved monster arena rock, and kids just weren’t looking for new music the way they’ve been for the past few years.
So, basically, any band whose members weren’t sucking enough record executives’ cocks didn’t stand much of a chance in those days. It wasn’t long before that changed, but Husker Du had broken up by then.
In Spot’s defense, I’d like to say that I saw Husker Du and the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets many times back in the 80’s and I think he did a great job of capturing the spirit of their music in studio recordings. Although no one, including him, ever quite did the Minutemen justice, some of his Minutemen records are the greatest records ever made. Years later, Spot was actually embarrassed about all the production work he did for SST, but at the time it seemed like most of the “non-sloppy” music that was being produced sounded like Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon or Boston and completely missed the point of punk rock. I think complaining about Spot’s production on “Zen Arcade” is like buying the White Album and complaining because there’s not enough yodeling and steel guitar.
I don’t know. While I don’t like the glossy sheen of pop production, and certainly buy into the lo-fi aesthetic for many kinds of music, the production–for me–is so distracting on that record. It’s the only record I could think of at the moment, that I cannot listen to because of its production. And it makes me wonder whether I would actually like Husker Du and their music if I saw them in concert or if I could actually hear their songs. Some of their albums have all the sound fidelity of an audience recording of a live gig (another class of music I cannot listen to). If that’s part of the aesthetic, and the recordings are intentionally that muddy and incoherent, then I guess I just don’t connect with it, or am not ready for it yet.
I’m with puly here - the sound of the album is distracting to the point of not being able to hear the songs, which is what VC03 is holding up as great. When I listen to Husker Du, all I can hear is bad, solid-state amps that kill the musicality of songs. There are other bands that suffer from this, too, but that album really stands out.
True, Nevermind got over-pop-ified, but if you listing to the white-noise feedback at the beginning of Territorial Pissings, there is a cool distortion sound to it…
New Day Rising is a great record; my second favorite Husker Du, if for no other reason than the title track. But Zen Arcade is better: “Something I Learned Today”, “Indecision Time”, “What’s Going On” (“I was talking / When I should have been listening”) “I willl…Neverr…Forget…Yooooou!” and the “Pink Turns to Blue / Newest Industry / Monday Turns to Blue” trifecta. That’s a New Day Rising’s worth of great songs, plus it’s still got “Turn on the News” and “Recurring Dreams”!
It’s a fair point, but when listen to Zen Arcade, I still wish that they could have at least captured some of the sound of it’s predecessor, Metal Circus. I absolutely love the sound of Mould’s guitar on that one.
Yeah, but it’s also got “Hare Krsna”, “Dreams Reoccurring” ("Reoccurring Dreams played backwards for a minute-and-a-half), “The Tooth Fairy and the Princess”, piano noodling, the still-too-tuneless hardcore of side 2, and worse production than NDR. There’s nothing really great on New Day Rising after “Books About UFOs”, but the filler is a higher caliber than on Zen Arcade, IMO (and there’s less of it).
I never really noticed the bad production at the time (well, maybe a bit on Zen Arcade); I just thought the sound was huge, even if it wasn’t polished. I agree that Warehouse sounds shitty on CD, and it doesn’t have standout songs like most of their other albums (also, it’s more toned down), but it’s (to use the phrase critic Robert Christgau used when reviewing the album) overwhelmingly consistent, which is one reason I think people have a problem with it - it’s easier to judge greatness when it’s contrasted with obvious filler. Lyrically and musically, though, it’s quite strong. Still, I agree with NDR as the top pick for Husker.
I agree. That bassline is great, as is the guitar solo. When it came out, that song reminded me of Big Country, for some reason.