Enter Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac). Known for his "no-compression, no-effects, all-mic-bleed" approach, Albini was the anti-producer. He didn’t want to produce Cheap Trick; he wanted to document them.
This is not a remaster. This is not a remix. This is a complete philosophical re-imagining of a classic, filtered through the man who hates reverb, worships distortion, and famously recorded Nirvana’s In Utero .
The premise was radical: What if Cheap Trick, in 1998, walked into Electrical Audio (Albini’s Chicago studio) and played In Color as if it were a live set in a concrete bunker? No double-tracking vocals. No chorus pedals. No studio tricks. Enter Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac)
This is the shocker. Without double-tracking or plate reverb, Zander sounds uncomfortably close. You hear the saliva in his mouth. You hear the room. His falsetto on "I Want You to Want Me" is no longer a sweet serenade; it is a desperate, ragged plea in a small room. In FLAC, the sibilance is natural, not digitized.
In the sprawling, often contradictory history of rock music, few intersections are as fascinatingly volatile as the meeting of Cheap Trick and Steve Albini . This is not a remaster
For the Cheap Trick fan, it is essential. For the audiophile, it is a speaker test. For the student of production, it is a masterclass in using a room as an instrument.
The hallmark of Cheap Trick. On the original LP, it rings like a bell. Here, it is a clanking, metallic chain. The low-end is dry. You feel the fret buzz. The FLAC resolution (16/44.1) captures the attack of the pick on the winding of the string perfectly. The premise was radical: What if Cheap Trick,
But buried deep in the digital catacombs of collector circles lies a holy grail for the purist: .