What I Heard: Evil Empire

Trying what may be a recurring series. I listen to a ton of music in the car doing rides to and from school and am often in the right headspace to listen critically. I hear things, sometimes in albums I’ve listened to hundreds of times. Then I come home and listen to them again in the headphones to make sure I’ve got it right before writing about it. I’m interested in mixing and production but hardly an expert, this is an invitation to learn and marvel with me, nothing more.

Evil Empire is my preferred Rage Against The Machine album. It doesn’t have the quotability of the first album, no “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” or “FREEDOOOOOOM!”. It’s looser and more ambitious musically. The songs sound like they’re pretty new and not as honed as the material on the first album. The production style comes across as raw and real. It feels like it puts you in the room with the band, just off a ridiculously successful first album and taking a big swing at a second album that is its own thing and not a copy of what they already did.

Some observations:

1. The drums sound amazing.

Andy Wallace is the man. When Rick Beato interviewed him, Rick seemed to get the same kind of joy out of the drum sounds on this album as I do. At one point they just sat and listened to the whole intro to People of the Sun so they could talk about how much fine detail you can hear in the kick. If you believe Andy, he’s really not compressing much at the mix stage, just a bit for character and only on the direct mics or the drum bus, never both. This was kind of a revelation when I heard it. Learning to mix in the 2020s and hanging out on mixing Reddit often feels like talking about compressors non-stop. Putting compressors on each channel and every bus and multiples on some channels, and side-chaining this to that. I felt encouraged to spend more time thinking about stuff like arrangement and EQ.

2. Backloaded

This is an album with a real short opening salvo. It starts with two back-to-back bangers. After Bulls on Parade, we’ve got Vietnow, which is good enough and has that wicked bridge. Then, starting with Revolver, the album slumps. There’s not a bad song on the album, but in the middle there they’re less great imo. Then there’s this amazing back half starting with Down Rodeo, consisting of four mind destroyers in a row. Then they cap it off with Year of tha Boomerang, which is a perfectly decent Rage song but should never have tried to follow Roll Right, which is my favorite Rage Against The Machine song.

3. Creative Panning

The guitar is by itself way off in the right channel a lot. It’s really comfortable there by itself. That’s fairly unusual in the hard rock I listen to, where guitars are almost always doubled and hard-panned right and left, making them sound huge and wide and making room in the middle for kick, bass, and vocals. If there are two guitarists, sometimes they’re hard-panned left and right. Sometimes each guitarist gets double-tracked for 4 total guitar tracks. Butch Vig claims that some of the Siamese Dream tracks have on the order of 100 layered guitar tracks. The hard-panned single guitar is not unheard of. Van Halen 1, for example, has Eddie hard-panned to one side and his reverb hard to the other side. It’s certainly not usual though. But Rage is not the usual hard rock band, they’ve got a killer rhythm section, a bass player with a selection of great tones, and a guitar player who is all over the place, often riffing, sometimes just following the bass, sometimes making weird repeated chirpy sounds. The guitar being way off to the right by itself rather than doubled and laid on top of everything like a blanket leaves a ton of room to hear the nuances of the drum and bass, and the great-sounding room they’re in.

There are guitar doubles used for effect, never through an entire song, and not necessarily where you’d expect. Bulls on Parade is probably closest to the approach you’d expect. The guitars are doubled on the “Come with it now!” parts and (I think) on that spikey octave riff they open with. Then the left channel disappears until the wah pedal bit just before the guitar solo. Then the doubles are back for good when they come back from the solo. This is pretty straightforward: you take elements out during the quieter parts of the song so you can throw them back in to make other parts louder. Then you have Vietnow, in which the left channel guitar is there for the verses, for the second half of the bridge, and for one tiny one-measure accent at the end of the guitar solo, but not for the hook.

Sometimes the bass shifts to the left, maybe to balance the outrigger guitar on the other side. The biggest examples I could find are in Roll Right. The final coda, over which Zack sings “Send them to… the seventh level”, is opened by the bass playing its part with a mostly clean tone over Tom making wicky wacky noises with his wah. As soon as the drums hit, the bass gets a lot more distorted and moves significantly left (ironically). As soon as the guitar double in the left channel comes in and Zack starts singing, the bass seems centered again. Similarly, in Down Rodeo, during the “Now I’m rolling down Rodeo” hooks, the bass is way left again but then comes back to center as soon as the bridge ends. I’m up against my ceiling trying to figure out exactly what’s happening in these cases. It sounds like more than the track being simply panned left. In both cases the bass is fairly distorted and it sounds like there’s more highs far left and still a substantial amount of bass in the middle to just left. This could be a couple layers of bass either as a result of merging two takes, one less distorted, or as a result of the bass signal chain having been split on the way in. In the intro to Tire Me, we hear the bass distorted and panned slightly left, but when he hits the (beautiful) harmonics they’re way to the left. My guess is that it’s two recordings, one that’s just the harmonics and another that is everything else, but there’s a chance it could have been one track with the panning automated. I don’t know enough about what the large-format consoles are capable of to even know if they could have done that. In other songs, we have more subtle bass panning. In Bulls on Parade, during the “Rally around the family” hooks we’ve got bass just slightly left of center, and if I’m not imagining it, the vocal too. I’d like to think that Andy just thought the mix was a little more balanced with the bass and vocals slightly left that way to offset the single guitar in the right channel.

The bass being panned feels more heterodox to me than the guitar being in a single ear. That feels like a pan knob that you’re supposed to leave dead center, but it obviously works here. I would also think that having the bass move around during the song would be distracting, but I never noticed this before in 20 years of playing this album. I’d have to do a lot more analysis to be sure, but if my theory about the bigger shifts being mostly in the top end of the bass is correct, then it does leave substantial bass frequencies closer to the center which would keep it from feeling like the low end of the song was moving around.

4. Loud but also quiet

This is related to the earlier point about the tasteful use of compression. Rock albums in the mid-to-late ’90s were mixed to have a lot more dynamic range than they are today. If you grok LUFS, Down Rodeo measures out at -11.1 dB LUFS-i whereas a modern-sounding rock record produced to sound good will probably be at least around -7 to -9 dB LUFS-i and a more pop-oriented record, mixed mainly to sound good on a cell phone, would be above -6 and maybe above -4. This record, like Nevermind, another Andy Wallace joint, pulls off the trick of sounding huge without big loudness numbers. Further, I suspect but can’t prove that the additional dynamic range helps achieve that feeling of being in the room with the band. Everything sounds three-dimensional rather than smashed flat. And although it’s not exactly a dynamic range thing in the same way, there’s that part in Wind Below where it gets super quiet for like 16 bars, and when they come back in they sound SO LOUD. Really fantastic stuff.

5. Pleasantly low-fi vocals

I can hear what I believe is preamp saturation on Zack’s vocals, just a little bit of fuzzy distortion. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of high-end detail. Sources say that the record was recorded in their practice space so they may not have been able to capture pristine high end. But you can also hear that placement wasn’t perfect. You can hear his breath hit the mic capsule here and there, and the bumpiness of the signal gives the impression that he’s right up on the mic. I’m guessing it’s a dynamic mic, some sources are guessing SM7B, and maybe he even held it.

This is one of the albums I remember listening to over and over in the basement of my parents’ house as a junior in high school and it still moves me today and rewards me with stuff I never noticed. I’m kind of wondering if I’ve made a mistake by making this one the first in the series. Let me know if you want to see more of these.