Birds in Hell wrote:It's interesting because I think it demonstrates how the songs suffer from being played in a lower key more than they benefit from retaining the same (relative) vocal melody.
As the live versions of Habit demonstrate (at least to these ears), I think the songs sound more 'right' when played at the original key, regardless of whatever Ed is doing.
I'd prefer he just chose a new melody to work around the notes he can't reliably hit anymore.
In theory I agree with you, but whenver he's done this on a small scale, I've always liked it less.
Hearing the studio versions pitched down is an interesting experiment. To me it highlights that the real selling quality of a lot of those vocal performances is the
reach in them -- those moments of strain, where Eddie is pushing himself to or slightly beyond the limit of where his voice can go. Since a lot of these songs were recorded when Ed's voice was simply in better physical shape than it has been in the past, say, 10-15 years, hitting that threshold caused the voice to take on certain physical traits -- a quality that could be described as shredding, gravely, gritty, etc., but an altogether different sonic property than when he is singing "smooth" -- where, nowadays, when he pushes that same threshold, it causes his voice to go into that weird shreiky cracking thing it does.
Even in the downtuned versions of the studio tracks, you can still hear that grit, because it's a characteristic of the original recording, even if it's pitched down a half step. When he sings these same songs live, the downtuning is done with the goal of keeping him from having to push that threshold, because it makes his voice do something ugly (and probably uncomfortable), so he's singing not only in a lower key, but also trying to sing everything without crossing into that danger zone. So you end up losing not only an emotional push, but also a variation in vocal color, and it makes everything sound duller and generally less alive. Add to that the additional (and increasingly imprecise) reverberation you get in the guitar and bass sounds by tuning down a half or whole step (or just by playing lower in general), and all of a sudden you have an increasingly leaden vocal performance laying on top of this increasingly muddy bed of sound -- by degrees, of course, so it's not like it goes from great to terrible in every case, but there is a sense of the song kind of having come unwound. It's like when your kid takes a new roll of toilet paper and rolls it down the hallway, and then you try to roll it back up -- it's never as tightly spooled as it was at the beginning, it's all there in the same shape but it's loose and saggy and you can pinch parts of it that you couldn't before.
That's what modern PJ feels like sometimes to me -- a roll of toilet paper that has been rolled out and then rolled back up.
