Song of the Moment: Sirens

[Jorge]

Oh. That wasn't so bad.

[Jorge]

waaaaaaait a minute

[Jorge]

You'd rank it higher than most of No Code

[VinylGuy]

Why you are...

[stip]

You'd rank it higher than most of No Code

Songs I prefer Sirens to: Sometimes, Smile, Off He goes, habit, Lukin, Mankind, I'm Open, Around the Bend

Songs equal to sirens: Who you are, present tense

Songs better than sirens, In My Tree, Hail Hail, Red Mosquito

[E.H. Ruddock]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

[Dr. Van Nostrand]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

Im not sure how it will effect stips list, but songs shouldn't be able to be ranked until the newness wears off

[stip]

yup, that's a huge caveat

[verb_to_trust]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

Yield with no 4's

[mastaflatch]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

Yield with no 4's

one can only hope there's many fives on there

[mastaflatch]

Sirens is good. it's a pretty successful exercise in style.

[stip]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

Yield with no 4's

one can only hope there's many fives on there

Yield is 5s and 3s

[Neo]

I'd like to hear unplugged version of Sirens, with just Mike on acoustic and Ed on vocal. That would definitely sound better to my ears.
On the studio version, the guitars are drowned in the background, its just Ed, Matt and Brendan on the piano for the most of the song... and only 15 seconds(wtf?) solo by Mike.

[Mine]

I'd like to hear unplugged version of Sirens, with just Mike on acoustic and Ed on vocal. That would definitely sound better to my ears.
On the studio version, the guitars are drowned in the background, its just Ed, Matt and Brendan on the piano for the most of the song... and only 15 seconds(wtf?) solo by Mike.

I think the length of the song may have impacted the length of the solo. It's almost 6 minutes as it is.
I can hear the acoustic and especially Stone's electric well enough though. I think it's more the compression that hurt the mix than the mix itself. This song in particular would benefit from a wider dynamic range or better space that compression when overused compromises. Especially the busiest parts sound claustrophobic.

[Dr. Van Nostrand]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

Yield with no 4's

one can only hope there's many fives on there

Yield is 5s and 3s

what all did you give 5s to ? GTF and DTE ?

[Mike]

I try to be a stip apologist whenever I can, but that list is not helping things.

Yield with no 4's

one can only hope there's many fives on there

Yield is 5s and 3s

what all did you give 5s to ? GTF and DTE ?

Wishlist is gonna be the third one.

[McParadigm]

Still pretty much an average beginning for a second single at radio. It's got about half the plays and half the audience size that Mind Your Manners had within the same time frame...typical follow-up figures. Just Breathe was doing better by this point, but that was an exception. Otherwise it's business as usual. The only real point worth noting is that it's already at #10 on Triple A. That's typically a very slow moving chart. A fast climbing song might typically reach as high as #25 or so, after two weeks.

Mind Your Manners is still #11 at Active rock and #7 at Mainstream after 12 weeks. It's losing numbers by the day, but will definitely match or best WWS before falling off.

Mind Your Manners is also a pretty good example of why Billboard chart history is often misleading about past successes. In looking at Pearl Jam's Alt-radio statistics on their website, you'd see the following information:

Mind Your Manners
Peak: 12
Weeks: 11

Amongst the Waves
Peak: 17
Weeks: 13

While you can see that Manners did better than Waves, it doesn't look like all that extreme a difference. Manners spent a total of seven weeks in the 12-14 range, however, while Waves peaked at 17 fairly early on and then floated around the bottom of the chart for a long while without much impact. As a result, Manners managed nearly 10,000 plays and an average audience size of 3.6 million at Alt-radio alone. Amongst the Waves, by comparison, received less than 4,000 spins and had an average audience size of about one million.

[harmless]

I'd like to hear unplugged version of Sirens, with just Mike on acoustic and Ed on vocal. That would definitely sound better to my ears.
On the studio version, the guitars are drowned in the background, its just Ed, Matt and Brendan on the piano for the most of the song... and only 15 seconds(wtf?) solo by Mike.

I think the length of the song may have impacted the length of the solo. It's almost 6 minutes as it is.
I can hear the acoustic and especially Stone's electric well enough though. I think it's more the compression that hurt the mix than the mix itself. This song in particular would benefit from a wider dynamic range or better space that compression when overused compromises. Especially the busiest parts sound claustrophobic.

I find the live version on the video pretty clunky, but the only reason I prefer it is the strummed electric in some parts. It reminds us it's actually a rock song, and the studio version doesn't have it. But there are two guitars, as Mine says: Mike's twelve-string acoustic, and Stone's electric which is washed in reverb and is mostly punctuating the song every now and then. Both things are nice but you do have to listen pretty hard for them... I guess I feel lucky that I don't hate the piano, and it's all fairly bass-heavy which is nice as well.

[Blenheim Augustine]

I find the live version on the video pretty clunky, but the only reason I prefer it is the strummed electric in some parts. It reminds us it's actually a rock song, and the studio version doesn't have it. But there are two guitars, as Mine says: Mike's twelve-string acoustic, and Stone's electric which is washed in reverb and is mostly punctuating the song every now and then. Both things are nice but you do have to listen pretty hard for them... I guess I feel lucky that I don't hate the piano, and it's all fairly bass-heavy which is nice as well.

The problem with the bassy piano is that Jeff plays a really simple line to avoid clogging up the low end - I'd prefer a more innovative bassline and no piano - although it is nice in parts. I can hear the guitars fine on this too but it is a busy arrangement so you need decent speakers / headphones to avoid it being the wrong kind of wall of sound.

[harmless]

I find the live version on the video pretty clunky, but the only reason I prefer it is the strummed electric in some parts. It reminds us it's actually a rock song, and the studio version doesn't have it. But there are two guitars, as Mine says: Mike's twelve-string acoustic, and Stone's electric which is washed in reverb and is mostly punctuating the song every now and then. Both things are nice but you do have to listen pretty hard for them... I guess I feel lucky that I don't hate the piano, and it's all fairly bass-heavy which is nice as well.

The problem with the bassy piano is that Jeff plays a really simple line to avoid clogging up the low end - I'd prefer a more innovative bassline and no piano - although it is nice in parts. I can hear the guitars fine on this too but it is a busy arrangement so you need decent speakers / headphones to avoid it being the wrong kind of wall of sound.

I'm listening to simple cheap earbuds, but I hear what you're saying. If I could afford great headphones the song would sound better. And I also hear what you're saying about the low end piano forcing Jeff to rein it in a bit. I feel a more complex bassline could've added to the groove as well as the general "Pearl Jam" feel of the song. Black is made so much stronger because Jeff is allowed to play around the frets. I guess what you feel about Jeff's simpler part here will depend on whether you think the inclusion of the piano was worth it. That's a hard question to answer, but there are parts of the piano I love and parts I wish weren't there. All in all I like it, but I might prefer it if it wondered in and out more and the bass was allowed to muck around slightly over the groovy drums. I'm happy that, like ATW (which I liked but others didn't), it's the drums kind of "driving" this song. Matt would be playing it more sensitively, maybe in a Light Years way, if there were thicker guitars. But because there aren't, he doesn't.