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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

He was a legend as musician, and as producer, despite destroying PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. What a major fuckup!

Anyway, the way he talked and explained the music business was always legendary.

I didn’t start listening to PJ Harvey until later in her career, but Rid of Me is one of my favorite albums. It had a sort of harshness that put me off at first, but once I got past that it really grew on me, and now that perceived harshness is an inseparable part of the final product for me. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to Albini or what the album might have been with a different producer, but what it did become still stands out strongly in my musical experience.

I love the sound of Rid of Me, with one major exception: the radical volume changes on the title track and Highway 61. I 100% don’t understand what was going on there; it makes it impossible to listen to without riding the volume control and it bears no resemblance to how it was performed live.

A Mogwai album did this to me once, while I was wearing headphones. I’ve never bothered to work through the process where I’d know when and where this would happen so I can listen to them again. I just dropped them.

Despite my phenomenal experience hearing them live in Cambridge MA in the 90s. Loudest band I’ve ever suffered through. But that was live.

I don't think there's a single track on the 4-Track Demos that outdoes its sibling on Rid of Me, which is Harvey's best album.

Search 6+ comments up for somebody with exactly the opposite view of what he did to that track: de gustibus and all that.

Search music producer forums and you will the see the same totally opposing viewpoints as for Napoleon Dynamite. They love it or hate it.

Rid of Me is extremely devisive. Excellent record, and extremely influential. Just think of Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days take on it. But Albini's laissez-faire (non-)production??

>But Albini's laissez-faire (non-)production??

I'd take even more exteme versions of Albini's "non-production" that the overpolished turds served by 99% of bands like RHCP and the like...

Of course indie production isn't for everybody, but there's always The Eagles for the rest... or Coldplay or something

Destroyed it? Major fuckup? In what parallel universe?

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