[…continued from last post]

CONCLUSION

Fans of “Rage In Eden” have been waiting a while for this box and it’s proved to be quite interesting. I can remember in 2008 when the 2xCD edition came out, following a few years of fan inquiries about a “big deluxe box,” the band were quoted as saying “there’s nothing left to use,” but that was 2008, when Steven Wilson 5.1/2.0 remixes were a glint in a marketing major’s eye. Ultravox themselves may have had quaint ideas about what was “boxed set ready” material as the subsequent rehearsal cassette material was surely on the low[est] rung of fidelity, yet now we have it on the silver disc! Of course, the pandemic played havoc with the neat and tidy 40th anniversary release of the set in 2021, but a year late [and two masters short] it did finally arrive. Better late, than never. So let’s review the contents.

• Original 1981 album – No home should be without one.
• Steven Wilson 2.0 album/B-sides/work-in-progress mixes – A more than valid revision of the classic album campaign and then some with fresh new ears.
• Single tracks/rehearsal jams/early mixes – The rest of the original album campaign plus peeks under the hood at the developmental aspects of the recording.
• Vintage live concert – Probably the biggest draw for my ears.
• 5.1 remix/high-resolution masters of 1981/2022 campaigns – It astonishes me to have this music in such quality but DVD listening is not really my thing.
• Bonus paper goods: 1981 Tour Book replica.

It’s funny, but there seems to be a significant chunk of people who really enjoy the new mixes. The scuttlebutt on Steve Hoffman Forum was that the comments had a surprising number punters on record as preferring the Wilson mix. Going into this Wilson remix phase of their two best Ure era albums, I thought that I was of the “Conny Said It. I Believe it. That Settles It” ilk.

Hearing about these remixes for “Vienna” and RIE, I was of the initial impression that how could anything Conny Plank did be bettered? His was a singular [and brilliant] vision for music, right? And the dramatic shift from Plank, who used light and shadow like an artist in sculpting sound to George Martin, who removed all of the ambiguity from Ultravox to a debilitating degree on “Quartet” seemed to be on far opposite ends of the production spectrum. George Martin overlit the music and removed the mystery that Ultravox had relied upon. How could Steven Wilson move in the opposite direction from Plank and do anything but diminish the music? 

Apparently, I underestimated Wilson. Because he’s increased the detail and clarity without flattening the music into banality. His process I would liken to expert painting restoration where buildup of dirt and age was carefully removed to reveal more detail. Maybe Plank used dominant midrange frequencies to smooth over bleeding edge production gambits using tech not designed to work together. That’s why we loved his work! He was using novel approaches to sound processing that might have had a footprint of sound artifacts which he EQ’d out of the picture. Even so, Conny used an automated board back in his day. One of the earliest examples. But automated boards were a kludgy intermediate step until the Digital Audio Workstation became the thing.

With Wilson operating in a DAW, he has much more flexibility and control in the remix. I think his goal is to replicate the mix as closely as he can. And the slight differences and different judgements he brought to the work gave it a patina of novelty without being too jarring. And he managed bring his editorial thinking to bear on what I thought was the weak track on the album. In that respect, he has crucially transformed “Stranger Within” from the nadir of “Rage In Eden;” placed in what I’d deemed to be an almost flawless album, to one of its zeniths. It takes an alchemist of sound to add two and a half minutes back into a seven and a half minute track that seemed too long initially, and make the ten minute version fly by.

As soon as Wilson was mooted for remix duties on the Ultravox canon, the hot-button issue amongst fans was what he’d eventually make from the thin, anemic production of the next album in this series. “Quartet” suffered from a shift to first generation digital gear as well as George Martin and Geoff Emerick’s penchant for polite, immaculately recorded music. The net effect was to render the 1982 Ultravox album bloodless and sterile in comparison to what had come earlier.

In comparison, Conny Plank had the much better reputation for his trailblazing recording conceits and a production style that allowed Ultravox to reap the full benefit from his coloring outside of the production outlines. But until I heard Steven Wilson mix this material, I never would have found fault with any of Plank’s production and engineering gambits. He delivered a rich, baroque sound where the next album in the series was emaciated in comparison. It never would have occurred to me that much of the detail of the music had been flattened down to the midrange bands in doing that. But now it does.

So the big question I have now is this: what will Steve Wilson bring to the table when he’s remixing the most problematic imperial period Ultravox album for my ears? I don’t think that I need greater clarity applied to music that already sounds thin and clinical. None of the Wilson remixes of Post-Punk canon I have sound blurrier than the original mixes, but I suppose there could always be a first time. Join us in a year or two when the ultrabox of “Quartet” is in our hands.

In the meantime, this deluxe box has been an appropriately in-depth explosion of what is many fans’ favorite Ultravox album. It certainly did represent a heady broth of highly melodramatic sturm und drang; legitimately written and recorded on German soil over an intense three month period. It represented a go-for-broke gamble that paid off well for the band, in spite of its psychic costs. There were only two singles; neither of which were top 5 but the album seemed to cap off the year that the New Romantic movement peaked and began its ebb. Making of it and its imminent sister album, Visage’s “The Anvil,” the headstones to the club movement. They both represented a place where high musicianship met high anxiety and tortured angst, ironically, on the dance floor.

It’s official: With ten copies, this is the album I have the most copies of in my Record Cell. One caveat: I own two identical Spanish 1981 LP pressings + poster since if you see another one, you buy it, right? As you can see, there’s no Japanese copy with obi so never say never…

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