Fleet Foxes surprise release, Shore, contains neither surprise nor disappointment. It is a Fleet Foxes record, naturally extending the vast, reverbed expanses that’s defined their sound and continuing the subtle experiments of their last two records. Continuing in a strict sense of the word, mind you — they feel like repeated experiments.
But most notably is the record’s flatness. The album’s cohesion from start to finish is actually a detractor. One breezes through the album hardly aware of the time passing or the music floating by.
Many critics of the band might say that about many of their albums, but I find it most pronounced here, as well as most indicative of the multi-medium cultural trend of compression.
Music is the easiest illustration of compression because that’s literally the term for what’s happening. The “loudness wars”, as they’re called, are a race to the bottom of dynamic range. Since (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, producers have mastered their tracks with a bitch’s brew of master bus compressors and brick wall limiters. Here’s a pretty inc
What this does is make music an entirely inoffensive listen, contrary to what ‘loudness’ might imply. People who are mixing records (the step before final mastering, where loudness happens) are told to mix quietly, because louder is always perceived as better, up to a very high threshold. So everything is loud; everything sounds nice.
This is very deceptive, because a well-mixed record increases the resolution at which the artist distills their vision, highlighting the arrangements and details of a record. These things can’t be picked up on airpods at the gym or in a car, though, which is why this loudness trend has really taken off.
Compression finds its way to all mediums though. I’ve been playing Breath of the Wild, Nintendo’s open-world “masterpiece”, as it’s been hailed. Like Shore, Breath of the Wild plays flat, at a constant intensity that reduces the dynamic range. The battle with the flying divine beast, which had teased its potential the entire game by its ubiquitous presence in the vista, turned out to be a quaint dungeon with an intensity only slightly higher than ravaging one of countless Moblin camps or sneaking past Guardians — constant enemies that never changed.
Just for the sake of comparison, I’ll turn to the boomer classic Chrono Trigger. The loudness wars had not touched this game, which deftly swings between heart-pounding battles of epic scales, apocalyptic-junkyard motorcycle races, and quiet campfire respites.
Of course, the Marvel movies long to be included as a consequence of the loudness wars. Everything about them is compressed, although in a less intuitive way. They’re almost limited in their anti-compression: character dynamics arise from witty banter or melodramatic, high-stakes tension — no alternative. Scene compositions are constructed from opposite ends of the color wheel, and are garish combinations of brilliant white light and dark, mount doom reds.
Movies like John Wick lean into the war, making compression the point. My love of Wick comes from the same place as my love of Morning Glory, the infernal source, the big bang: They both embrace loudness in style and explore its possibilities. I love convincing friends to watch by telling them it’s meticulously choreographed fight scenes for 2 hours, with some enigmatic lore thrown in if you’d like.
Games have done the same thing, most memorably with the Doom remake in 2016. Plenty of praise-pieces were written that discuss its self-aware decadence.
Loudness, as a trend, means all mass-audience cultural exports are further decaying into pure escapism. Life has a vast dynamic range. It’s mostly boring and pickled with pockets of immense intensity, highs that make it all worth it, so to speak. Highs that make living a net positive. Art, at its best, is an attempt to reflect these realities. Art that transcends loudness and uses it as focal point is useful as an exit from the loud monotony, but runs the risk of failing and becoming further prey to insidious compression. The dopamine hits of Wick and Doom may be no different than those of Avengers, regardless of our intellectualizing.
As a postscript, loudness could likely be a cause of societies massive emigration out of reading. Books have a slowness and un-immediacy that necessitate dynamic range. Attempts at compressing novels, I think, are too easily spotted as artificial. Instead of passively receiving the compressed engineering of a film, the necessarily active reader will simply stop reading when they realize reading requires more effort than was expended in the writing.