City Of Blinding Lights Review

[MacPhistoPT]

I love COBL and fuck the rest

 

[U2DMfan]

Nellee Hooper shouldn't get all the bashing. The problem here is production which IMV is terrible. I just couldn´t believe my eyes when I read Flood's name on the main production credit for this track.

I always beleived that production credit is from the original part of the song left over from the POP sessions, but this is my own speculation.

The actual song was recorded by Carl Glanville, mixed by Hooper and additional production by Chris Thomas and Jacknife lee.

I'm not sure I would credit Flood with the messy sound, he didn't produce anything else on the album, all he did was mix. Production credits can get precarious, depending on how you look at it. This leads me to believe all Flood did was come in at the very end for 'fresh ears' to do the mixes, because he didn't produce anything else, and he didn't even mix his own production like Lillywhite tends to do.

Flood mixed OOTS, arguably the best mix on the album.

Anyhow my problem is with the drums way back, the guitar too low, the melody piano line WAY too high, the bass way too high. This is all mixing. The production (actual recording) could be just fine we wouldnt know because of the terrible mix.

The song seems to be about 1,000 times better live. It could very well be Flood's fault but his track record seems to say different.

That or I am just apogizing for Flood in my own way.

 

[Earnie Shavers]

The problem with the production/mixing on this song to me is that it sounds like the song can't decide what it is. No one part in the song puts its hand up and says "Ok, I'm going to define this". And if that's what they were going for, a kind of smooth, soaring 'even' song ala Coldplay, it somehow fails in that way as well - a little too much going on. Listening to it, you can easily hear a way it could have been 'built' differently, beginning with the Edge's guitar part brought into the front and centre and everything else swirling around that. The song itself isn't bad, it has a really nice run and feel to it and it's probably my second most listened to song on the album, it just does actually sound like there were too many cooks in the kitchen who had different ideas for what it should be, and in the end it's trying to be it all.

 

[ultraviolet7]

I always beleived that production credit is from the original part of the song left over from the POP sessions, but this is my own speculation.

The actual song was recorded by Carl Glanville, mixed by Hooper and additional production by Chris Thomas and Jacknife lee.

I'm not sure I would credit Flood with the messy sound, he didn't produce anything else on the album, all he did was mix. Production credits can get precarious, depending on how you look at it. This leads me to believe all Flood did was come in at the very end for 'fresh ears' to do the mixes, because he didn't produce anything else, and he didn't even mix his own production like Lillywhite tends to do.

Flood mixed OOTS, arguably the best mix on the album.

Anyhow my problem is with the drums way back, the guitar too low, the melody piano line WAY too high, the bass way too high. This is all mixing. The production (actual recording) could be just fine we wouldnt know because of the terrible mix.

The song seems to be about 1,000 times better live. It could very well be Flood's fault but his track record seems to say different.

That or I am just apogizing for Flood in my own way.

Yeah I would like to believe Flood had nothing to do with the actual COBL since I'm a great fan of his past work with U2. However if his contribution had just been the Pop era work for the song, he would have been credited for "original production" just like Eno & Lanois are for LPOE.

Anyway whilst production has got lots to do with the construction of the song: arrangements, structure, sounds, type of performance required, general idea for the song, etc which belong to the pre-recording and recording stages, mixing is not independent from production at all. In fact the mixing stage is as important to production as the previous ones are since it is when the final product is rounded off. While a producer may not actually engineer a mix or perhaps (rarely) not even conduct it as apparently has happened with COBL there's no way a final mix and even the final mastered version is released without the producer's final approval.

Personally I believe many of the songs and particularly COBL have been worked by too many people, something which in my view conspires against consistency and in particular with this song while I'm not fond of the mix I think that what I find wrong with it goes beyond mixing levels.

 

[fatherless]

i wish edge would play an over -long intro. I wasn't aware such a thing was possible.