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Phil Spector records have this heavy, dreamy sound that is, oddly, _exhausting_. Your brain can't pick out the instruments being played (beyond the vocals and
by bingohbangoh 5y ago
Phil Spector records have this heavy, dreamy sound that is, oddly, _exhausting_.
Your brain can't pick out the instruments being played (beyond the vocals and some of the lead instruments) so it all folds into each other. You stand there, awash in sound.
A key aspect of this sound was the monaural setup: everything was forced through one speaker and there was no stereo separation to separate the incoming instruments. Mono doesn't work very well on headphones though imo.
- nend 5y agoFor this reason I feel like Phil Spector's early-mid 60's Wall of Sound production holds up a lot better than the late 60's/70's. By the time you get to George Harrisons All Things Must Pass there's just way too much going on so that you can't listen to all the different pieces of the song at once. Like literally there's too much sound trying to grab your attention in the song that you can't listen to everything that's happening, and like you said it's just exhausting trying to. It just devolved in to compressing sounds toward the loud side of the spectrum, and we lost all this nuance that pop music used to have.