RIP Lou Reed

LOU REED : MAGIC AND LOSS
The Wire, February 1992

by Simon Reynolds

"Maybe to relate to this album you need to have been whacked around by life a bit," says Lou Reed. "This record won't mean that much to an eight-year-old, except you can just luxuriate in the sound, it's so thick and defined and dimensional. But an eight-year-old won't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about. And I'm not trying to offend eight-year-olds," he adds, the faintest of smiles flickering across his impassive features. "Maybe there's a very sophisticated one out there somewhere."

Where New York railed against the here-and-now specifics of Manhattan's disintegrating social fabric, Magic And Loss is Lou Reed raging against the limits of existence, the absolutes of life and death; it's also a glowing tribute (literally glowing, since the playing is luminous) to two friends who died recently. One was Doc Pomus, a songwriter friend from Reed's pre-Velvet Underground days as a salaried songsmith. The other, "Rita", was "just a friend. Not a celebrity, put it that way."

New York was socially engaged and street-real: Magic And Loss is a spiritual document. ‘Power And Glory’, for instance, trembles with a palpable feeling of revelation: "I was captured by a larger moment/I was seized by divinity's heart breath — gorged like a lion of experience... I wanted all of it, not some of it". The song teems with mystical imagery of metamorphosis, rooted in the paradoxes of terminal illness ("I saw a great man turn into a little child") and of radiation therapy ("The same power that burned Hiroshima/Causing three legged babies and death /Shrunk to the size of a nickel/To help him regain his breath").

"I came to understand that the album was about transformation," explains Reed. "Alchemy. The purpose of alchemy wasn't to transform lead into gold, that was just one example of the process, to be used later to transform yourself. I call the album Magic And Loss because that experience can be taken two ways. That's why the song ‘Power And Glory’ occurs twice, in different forms. A whole different tempo, a whole different way of looking at the exact same thing. The way they faced illness and death was very inspirational. In the end, it was a magical experience. A positive experience. Positive to have known them, positive to have watched them go through this. When, to quote myself, 'you loved the life others throw away nightly'. I thought they were giants."

Magic And Loss says Reed, is "an extension of the Songs For Drella album which was an extension of New York —.the idea of a thematically whole album. Right now, I'm not interested in the idea of twelve or so disparate songs." Each song has a subtitle, "like a novel, at the head of each chapter, a little phrase explaining what it is".

The album conducts you methodically through each stage of terminal illness and bereavement. There's the morbid, unbidden reveries of ‘Dreamin’ ’, perhaps the most lovely song on the record, with its braid of wavering guitar-synth and tremulous, plangent, pure Velvets guitar. ‘Goodbye Mass’ vividly evokes the awkward discomfort of the funeral service, Reed bemoaning the disparity between its dour gravity and the feisty, irrepressible good humour of the dearly departed. "You, you would have made a joke/ Isn't this something you'd say/ Tommorrow I'm smoke".

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"Both of them made jokes straight the way through," recollects Reed. "It's unbelievable. I had said there's this great widescreen colour TV I could get for you, and I'll hook up all the wiring for you. And they said, Lou, this is not the time for long-term investments. Joking. I think that's magnificent. I just think some people are giants. You may never hear of them, but they just have this thing. They're like the sun, they're just glowing all the time. They stay that way. When they get hurt, they don't suddenly turn into this other thing. It would be totally understandable. If I get a flu, I start whining!"

Then there's ‘Warrior King’, which documents the most confusing and ostensibly illogical symptom of mourning, a desire for bloody revenge that can't be slaked because it's intransitive.

"The character singing is very mad at the elements that have attacked and killed his friends. But there's no person to aim it at, with terminal illness. It's like, if you could take a physical, malleable form, I'd take you in an alley and do this, and this, and this. It's if I could, if I could... but with death, you can't. So it's that anger that causes the song afterwards, ‘Harry's Circumcision’, because you can't walk around with that anger in your heart. It causes these very negative thoughts, which is what ‘Harry's Circumcision’ is all about, taken to its natural conclusion (attempted suicide)." According to Lou's theory, you can't just stay in that mental state, you've got to go beyond that. Which is what happens on the album.

"The songs are in a particular order for a purpose, it's supposed to take you to a certain place. And that's a really positive state. This is not a negative, down album. I'm not the only person in the world who's experienced loss. Everybody has a brother or sister or father or friend somewhere that died and that means they can understand. You just have to have been alive for a little while to experience it. It's not a mystery. It's real life giving you a real hello, welcome to the club."

That "certain place" is reached on the final track, ‘Magic And Loss’, a spectral sleepwalk of mystic jazz-metal whose lyrics suggest reconciliation. It hints that Reed's even come to believe in some kind of afterlife: there's a door up ahead, not a wall.

"You can call it a spiritual awakening, or whatever you like. Things look a certain way, like you're driving directly into a wall. There's nothing you can do about it. But no, it's a door. You just didn't see it. And a door, obviously, can be opened. It depends how you look at things. The song ‘Magic And Loss’ I find very uplifting It's resolving the whole album. You don't wanna come to the end of that experience still feeling splintered. You have to reconcile yourself to it. But hopefully, it's a reconciliation with a lot of positive aspects to it. It's an inspiring thing, what I witnessed. I want to be as good as them. These were the people who were inspiring to me right the way through the last minute. It's really sad not being able to call Doc Pomus up right to this day, because he was like the sun. He was just one of those people that you feel good when you're around them. You could be feeling bad, and you visit them and they say two words and you feel good. But then, it would have been even worse not to have known him at all. That's part of the whole magic and loss deal."

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Lofty speculations and spiritual quandaries withal, Lou Reed spends the bulk of his time grappling with the nitty-gritty technicalities of making records. It the truth be known, he's a bit of a muso. Way back in his decadent days, Reed could drive Lester Bangs up the wall by discoursing interminably about how George Benson invented a totally clean, totally pure amplifier. Even the unendurable din of Metal Machine Music was informed by audiophile obsessions. The interview has hardly begun before Reed launches into a diatribe about rock critics' cloth-eared ignorance about sound.

"It always amazes me — and this not meant to be offensive — how little you people hear, on a tonal level. I find the sound on the new album awe-inspiring. There is a radiance to it, an enormous tonal range. It's like a stereo image. It's very 3D-ish. You can actually walk around it. It has the sonic depth to match its subject matter. This time, I've got the tones I haven't quite been able to before. On the sleeve of New York I wrote about the equipment we used, and I was trying to let the people know there's a lot going into the choices that are there. It's not as spontaneous as it seems."

Reed explains, at considerable length, about the "incalculable hours" he and co-producer, second guitarist Mike Rathke, spent on research, refinement, and modification of equipment. He describes how the kind of tape you use, the pick-ups, even the wood in the guitar can all make a difference.* It's all very incongruous.

The reality of Lou Reed-as-technical-boffin jars discordantly with the image of Lou-Reed-as-icon-of-street- romanticism. In the post-punk scheme, technique and technology are generally deemed to be enemies of the gritty authenticity that's allegedly the heart of rock 'n' roll: Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, for all the arty input, are generally taken to represent the epitome of this raw expression. Because they tend to come from a Litcrit or humanities background, rock critics find the nuts-and-bolts side of music-making demystifying. But for Lou Reed, it's where the mystery is painstakingly constructed. It's a sort of science of magic.

"No one knows that better than me because I know how much magic disappears when the technical stuff is wrong. At the end of the whole process, when you listen to your finished CD, you realise that you've got a cassette from the very beginning that sounds 100 times better. So what happened? Why is it so cold sounding? There's no dimension. That guitar hurts my ears. Where's the bass? Why is it muddy? If you get into the why of it, it's fascinating. And it's a real thrill if you finally get it to sound right. The only way to learn is to make records. But most people aren't really interested, they think the magic is all over there, and the technical stuff is another matter, and if you have a good producer that's all taken care of. The writing and performance are one thing, but if the production and technical side aren't there... and I've got the records to prove it. A lot of my records, 'till I could get a handle on it, aren't even produced, except in the sense that I wouldn't let the producers do anything, rather than let them do it wrong. And the records are completely dry, 'cos I didn't know how it worked, but I knew they'd fuck it up so I wouldn't let 'em do anything. It takes a long time to learn, when you're making a record every couple of years. It's fascinating, but it's like this onion with all these skins, endless."

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Far more congruent with Lou Reed's received image is the fact that Penguin are soon to publish Between Thought And Expression, a selection of lyrics that he felt could stand up on their own without music. It's strange that it took him so long to get between book covers, considering that back in 1979 he declared "my expectations are very high... to be the greatest writer that ever lived on God's earth. In other words I'm talking about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky..."

"That was just me shooting my mouth off, but it is a real dream. To do something that's not disposable, that could really hold its own for ever. It sounds kind of glib and pretentious, to say you want to be up there with Dostoievsky, but I would. I wanna create art that will live forever, whether it's on record or on the printed page. That's why I avoid slang, any expression that will date, like 'dig it' or 'freaked out'."

Despite his aversion to transient argot, Reed's lyrics exude a great sense of demotic, everyday speech, rather than the ornately poeticised. The same love of ‘conversational tone’, the faltering rhythm of thoughts taking shape as they're spoken, informed his interviews with novelist Hubert Selby (Last Exit To Brooklyn ), and Czechoslovakian playwright turned President, Vaclav Havel, both of which are included in Between Thought And Expression.

"I don't like it when the interview's so cleaned up that both interviewer and subject sound like the same person. I like to keep the real rhythm of the way the person talks. With Selby, hopefully from the interview I did with him, you can hear him think. The way he puts things together I found really fascinating. Hearing a writer think like that, you can see why he's a great writer."

The most interesting thing to emerge in the Havel encounter was the Velvet Underground's indirect effect on history. First there was a Czech avant-rock band called Plastic People Of The Universe who covered Velvet Underground songs, and then they got sent to prison, and then the campaign to get them released evolved into Charter 77, which in turn led to Czechoslovakia's ‘Velvet Revolution’. That's a coincidence (the "Velvet" means soft, bloodless) but a beautiful one, and it highlights the way a band like the Velvet Underground, by symbolising absolute possibility, can be ‘political’ without being politicised, can change things without being explicitly consciousness-raising. Most touching of all for Reed is the fact that the Charter 77 activists recited his lyrics to themselves as a source of spiritual fortitude.

"I have the handprinted book of my lyrics, in Czechoslovakian, that Havel gave me, and it's an astonishing thing. It meant so much to them. Music was a real expression to them of social change. We walked over this beautiful bridge in Prague and they told me that a few years ago you wouldn't have seen a guitarist on that bridge with kids singing. It was considered dangerous. Where people get together is where ideas are generated, and that's a problem for totalitarian governments. It's hard for us to even conceive of living under such constraints."

When he goes about his daily life, or looks in the mirror, does he feel mythic, an icon?

"I don't even relate to that. It doesn't even cross my mind. What I'm really interested in is stuff like analogue to digital converter shoot-outs. I don't even conceive of that other stuff at all. It's like, they must mean someone else. It doesn't compute with me, simply because I know how hard I have to work with the limitations that I have, just to get to where I am."

Nonetheless, Lou Reed is one of those artists that people of a certain generation tell the time by. Like Neil Young, Reed is one of the few figures from his era to survive with credibility intact and muse in working order. But Reed denies feeling any responsibility to the people who look to him for the next big statement. "It wouldn't even dawn on me," he shrugs. He also claims to be oblivious to the legions of copyist who have turned ‘Lou Reed’ into a genre.

"I always thought of it as a situation where some really obvious ideas were sitting there, and I happened to be one of the guys who happened to hit the dirt first. It's like, hey, look at that, there's a whole continent over there. It seemed really obvious. Then you start listening to Brecht or Weill, and you realise quite a few people have been running around there."

BONUS QUOTES FROM THE PULSE MAGAZINE PROTO-VERSION
OF THIS PIECE

"I spend a lot of time researching. You could call it studying. I ask, Why does digital do that? What's the analog-to-digital conversion process? Are the filters better now? It goes back to the wood in the guitar, which pickups to use. Everything I have has been modified, tinkered with, to make it work for me." Reed and his co-producer, second guitarist Mike Rathke, spend "incalculable hours" in research and refinement. "I practically studied with some technical people who really helped me out. Because there's millions of choices out there and even if you had a zillion dollars and bought all these to try them, it’d take forever. So you really need someone knowledgeable and talented to guide you. Even down to the kind of tape you record on."

Reed takes similar pains when it comes to selecting compatible musicians, preferring to work with people he knows personally. He's quick to demolish the idea that tension heightens creativity, and is particularly scathing about what he calls "the Lou Reed/John Cale myth" (that the duo's prickly relationship is the font of their collective genius). "Things would be 1,000 times better without that tension." When you recall that he and Cale disagreed about such minutiae as the amount of time between tracks on Drella, it's easy to believe.

Reed's team on Magic and Loss is almost the same as for New York: Mike Rathke as second guitarist, Rob Wasserman on bass, with frequent Tom Waits and Elvis Costello accomplice Michael Blair replacing Fred Maher on drums. "We have the interaction of a real band. The music's based on ebb and flow. A song should give the impression of being a living thing. It's always going to be assembled; that's how recording works. But our stuff is about as live as we could get it and still satisfy my requirements for sound."

According to Rathke, the approach to Magic and Loss was, with New York, a fusion of vintage and state-of-the-art. "We try to blend the old with the new. Lou and I spend a lot of time on pre-production. It goes down to the kind of wood, strings, pick-ups, wirings, speaker cabinets you use. Neither vintage nor state-of-the-art does it all. If I was a painter, I'd want the colors to harmonize. And sounds are like colors in a way; they have to match."

With his perfectionism ("compromise makes me ill"), it's not surprising that Reed has only ever produced one other artist, Reuben Blades. "It's too much work. You'd have to love what they did, to spend that much time with their material. Plus I want things my way. I could imagine producing one song, maybe, and only if I got alone with the person. But I couldn't be brought along to produce a group – that's too many factors I couldn't control. I want as much control as possible."

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Lou Reed is legendary for his antipathy to being interviewed. During our encounter, he had to cadge a couple of soothing cigarettes, even though he's quit smoking, because, he says, "I get nervous about interviews." He was even more uptight about being on the other side of the tape recorder.

"With Hubert Selby, I came in with typed questions, because I was sure I’d be nervewracked and I didn't want to forget anything. Same with Havel. The only reason I did it was that these were people I really wanted to meet, that I really admired, and here was a chance to meet them and ask them things that I was really interested in. I'm sure there are a few others I could think of, but it's just really hard work. I'd much rather go out for a drink with them. I found with someone like me it was really good to have notes, in order of asking, so that I didn't glaze out. And later kick myself 'cause I forgot to ask them the most important question. I had loads of spare batteries, and a microphone that I knew worked."

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Brian Eno-David Byrne
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Virgin/EMI
Uncut, 2006

by Simon Reynolds
 
On its original 1981 release, this album was widely dissed for being “cold-blooded,” “detached”, an eggheads-in-the-soundlab experimental exercise. Yet Bush of Ghosts drips with emotional intensity, it’s just that the feelings don't come directly from the record's makers but from the found voices--Pentecostal preachers, Algerian Muslims--harvested by the duo from American radio and ethnic field recordings. In another sense, the whole project is framed by the conflicted emotions--uneasy fascination, admiring envy--that this material stirred in Byrne & Eno, at once attracted by the fervour of these true believers yet incapable (as progressive sorts trapped within modernity’s rationality and temperance) of accessing that kind of passion themselves.

Chances are, you’ll feel the same cold rush as Byrne & Eno the first time they heard the preacher who “stars” on “The Jezebel Spirit. ” The electrifying conviction of his cadences as he exorcises the slutty she-devil that’s possessed an unfaithful wife will make your hair stand on end, even as your liberalism recoils from the patriarchy he’s restoring (“Jezebel, you have no rights to her, her husband is the head of the house”). Elsewhere, it’s the mystical rather than moralising aspect of religion that enthralls Byrne & Eno: “Regiment,” for instance, entwines the ecstastic ululations of a Lebanese mountain singer with sinuous bass and arabesques of synth. Throughout Ghosts, the duo lovingly recontextualise their sources, embedding the voices in a sticky web of psychedelic rhythm, funky ambience, and some of the most counter-intuitive and contortionist basslines you’ll ever hear.

Tracks 1 to 5 (the original first side) are great, but 6 to 11 (side two) is a whole other plane, gliding you through a phantasmagoric sequence of steadily more untaggable and precedent-less groovescapes. Following “Moonlight in Glory”-- falter-funk laced with the halting cadences of Scriptural chants and astral gospel plaints, as incanted by a literally isolated African-American sect from the Sea Islands off Georgia’s coast--“The Carrier” shimmers like a portent or future-ghost of The Unforgettable Fire. But instead of Bono, thankfully that Lebanese dude[tte?] reappears to kiss the heavens. “A Secret Life” is an itchy microcosm as gorgeously infolded as Can’s “Quantum Physics,” while “Come With Us” pretzels bass-gloop and stereo-flickering sorcery into a disorientating audio-maze. Heading out into a non-specifically Oriental hinterland of gaseous gong sounds, “Mountain of Needles” sounds like God sighing with satisfaction at the end of the sixth day. Byrne & Eno, the Creators of an equally marvelous if somewhat more compact universe of sound, ought to have felt pretty pleased with themselves too.

 It’s a pity that the immaculate construction that is Ghosts now has an extension tacked onto it: the inevitable slew of out-takes, most of them sketchy and substandard, diminishes the sense of conclusion achieved by “Mountain”. A couple of the bonus tracks work as intriguing footnotes ( the ungodly exhalations of “Vocal Outtakes”, the needling stellar twinkle of “Solo Guitar with Tin Foil”) but overall, the effect is a bit like the Almighty following up the Cosmos with an encore of… Croydon.

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the excised cut

Imitation Invisible Jukebox with Simon Reynolds 

(postpunk records chosen and presented by Wilson Neate)

Pop Culture Press magazine, 2006

During an interview with Simon Reynolds about Rip It Up and Start Again in 2006, I played him five songs (without telling him what they were beforehand) and asked him to talk about each one in turn – along the same lines as The Wire’s Invisible Jukebox. 

"Careering" - PiL (Metal Box, 1979)

This is one of two songs on what’s perhaps the best side of post-punk ever, although this is lost today because it’s on CD and not in its original format of three 45 rpm 12-inch records...  “Careering” is the second of two songs on the third side — side one of the second record. The first track is “Poptones,” an amazing trance-like, almost psychedelic song, with a looping, gyrating guitar riff and this incredible Jah Wobble bassline. Rotten is singing from the point of view of being abducted and you can’t work out if he’s been murdered or not, or if he’s just lying in the woods, cowering in the foliage, with all his body heat going. And the next track is “Careering,” which has no guitar in it; instead, Keith Levene uses a synthesizer in a really abstract way and the sounds swoop over your head. The song is obliquely about Northern Ireland, at a time when the conflict must have been at its worst and there were people on hunger strike. Lydon talks about people going over the border, bringing weapons and bombs. It’s very oblique but it’s definitely about civil strife in Northern Ireland. It’s Public Image at the peak of their inventiveness. Metal Box is PiL’s masterpiece and this is their best side; this two-song sequence is a real killer.

"Lions After Slumber" - Scritti Politti (Songs to Remember, 1982)

This was originally the B-side of “The 'Sweetest Girl',” which is when Scritti Politti reinvented themselves as a pop band. “The 'Sweetest Girl'” is — as its title suggests — a very “sweet,” almost cloying pop-reggae song. It’s a beautiful love song, but the sort of love song that actually questions the idea of love songs and problematizes notions of love and possession. And then, on the other side, “Lions After Slumber” is a very strange track. It’s a list song — a list song through the lens of Green’s narcissism. It’s a list of things to do with him: “my languor,” “my greed,” “my elbow,” “my indecision,” “my sex,” “my white chocolate” and so on, all these states of mind, bodily dispositions, little moments, fragments of time, things he owns, his stance. It’s obviously very influenced by post-structuralism and the idea of the self not as a unitary entity, but as a plurality or as a multiplicity, and the idea of there being no essence to someone — just these moments and interactions with things or with people. Despite the fact that it’s about the fragmented self, coming through it all is this very strong, almost feline narcissism. The way Green sings it, you feel he’s like a cat basking in himself, arching his back, really in love with himself. It comes through in this sort of falsetto he sings in. So there’s an interesting tension there between the fragmented self and this absolute self-love conveyed by the vocals. It ties in with the band’s failing really: Scritti Politti ultimately wanted to be a pop group but none of their songs ever really got beyond Green’s psyche. I imagine people bought Scritti’s records and found meanings in them for themselves but it’s all so tied up with Green and his particular anguishes and doubts.

"Houses in Motion" - Talking Heads (Remain in Light, 1980)

This is an interesting song. It was a single in England but it wasn’t a hit. It followed “Once in a Lifetime,” which was a big hit in the UK but not in America. “Houses in Motion” was sequenced on Remain in Light to follow “Once in a Lifetime,” which is about someone who’s suddenly estranged from his routine, his life, his possessions, his family, his wife. He’s estranged from it and it all seems absurd, yet that realization hits him with this sort of a cosmic force. It’s almost like a blinding, mystical epiphany: the idea that you cruise through everything without connecting with reality. And then, immediately, it goes into “Houses in Motion,” which is back inside alienation. It’s based in the same musical ideas as “Once in a Lifetime” but whereas “Once in a Lifetime” is a kind of mystical, oceanic funk, “House in Motion” is a sort of eerie, neurotic funk. The protagonist in the song is back inside neurosis. The key line is: “He’s digging his own grave.” He’s trapped in routine, going round and round, just working for these goals and missing life. So it’s almost as if the two songs are sister songs. In the first one, the guy sees through everything and grasps the oneness of existence, in an almost mystical way. In the second song he’s like a prisoner. He’s blinkered. He’s working for ambition and goals, digging his own grave, going nowhere.

"Sketch for Summer" - The Durutti Column (The Return of the Durutti Column, 1980)

Durutti Column are interesting because, a lot of the time, people think of post-punk as this sort of angular, abrasive music but a lot of lovely, ethereal music was made during that period. I would think of Cocteau Twins as a post-punk group in some ways and Young Marble Giants, for instance, made very pretty, intricate, atmospheric, low-key music.And Durutti Column are a case in point. There’s this intricate, spider web filigree of guitar-playing that’s almost too exquisite at times. I almost feel it’s vulgar how exquisite it is — all these arpeggios. It’s very delicate. There’s nothing abrasive about it. It’s a dream music, a music of reverie, of drift, of fleeting prismatic perceptions. Vini Reilly was a very delicate figure. He was anorexic. He was almost wasting away and so there’s a sense in which you almost feel that the music is an expression of his body, of his fleeting, weak grip on the world. It’s almost as if he’s going to drift away, like his music.

"We Are All Prostitutes" - The Pop Group (Single, 1979)

 The Pop Group started out as quite Romantic. They were into the Beat poets and their lyrics were very abstract and imagistic. They were political but in the sense of “impossible politics”: they were into the Situationists, whose famous slogan was “Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible.” It was that very Romantic idea of politics. Everything was politics, mysticism, poetry; it was all indivisible. Somewhere along the line, though, they got more didactic, a lot more like protest singers, and “We Are All Prostitutes” is the turning point. It’s still a very exciting song today. The music is a burning punk-funk sound. The lyrics are guilt-wracked. It captures a certain aspect of post-punk: the idea that everything’s corrupt and we’re part of a system where everything we do is connected to something evil. The Pop Group agonized over the fact that they were signed to Radar, which was part of a bigger label owned by a conglomerate involved in arms-dealing. That tortured them and they left and formed their own indie label. So that was all part of it — the feeling of being unclean and wanting to be pure. “We Are All Prostitutes” was an almost hysterical rant about consumerism and capitalism as a barbaric religion. It imagines the future when our children will be ashamed of us, stone us, disown us and feel that we’re totally corrupt. It turned a lot of people off, fans who liked the early Romantic, Byronic stuff. The Pop Group were a bit like the Romantic poets, like Blake, Shelley and Byron who were also political. Shelley and Byron were involved in liberation struggles. Byron was involved in the attempt to free Greece from Turkish rule. The Pop Group were into all those guys. But they lost a bit of their Romanticism and became very guilt-haunted. They were flagellating themselves, so guilty and tortured by living in this corrupt Western society. People found that a very black-and-white view of the world, very blinkered and a big turn off. The album For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? was very lecturing. The lyrics were almost like pamphlets given out by some left-winger outside the Tube station. It was very guilt-tripping and they lost a lot of their support but “We Are All Prostitutes” is still a powerful piece of music. In some ways, it’s more focused than their early stuff because their early Romantic phase is quite chaotic musically. But as they got more militant, they actually got more focused and hard-hitting sonically.