Daniel Amos Message Board | Print: DA - Darn Floor Big Bite 20th Anniversary

Posted by audiori on 11-14-2008 at09:40:

DA - Darn Floor Big Bite 20th Anniversary

Darn Floor - Big Bite 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Coming Soon from Stunt Records and the Arena Rock Recording co.!

The classic album that remains the favorite among many DA fans is finally returning to CD! This Deluxe 2 disc Edition includes new artwork & packaging, 20 pages of liner notes and photos, a brand new interview with Terry Taylor, remastered audio and never-before-heard bonus material! Keep watching for further details!

Disc: 1
Return the Beat Menace / Strange Animals / Darn Floor-Big Bite / Earth Household / Safety Net / Pictures of the Gone World / Divine Instant / Half Light, Epoch and Phase / The Unattainable Earth / The Shape of Air

Disc: 2
The Unattainable Earth / Return the Beat Menace / Safety Net [Live at Cornerstone 1998] / Interview with Terry Taylor: Concept / Interview with Terry Taylor: Music with Cassette Demos / Interview with Terry Taylor: Lyrics / Interview with Terry Taylor: Recording / Interview with Terry Taylor: The Band / Interview with Terry Taylor: Looking Back / Pictures of the Gone World / The Shape of Air [Live at Cornerstone 2000] / Half Light, Epoch and Phase / Darn Floor-Big Bite [Live at Cornerstone 1988] / The Unattainable Earth [Live at Cornerstone 1988] / Sacred Heart

Posted by wakachiwaka on 11-21-2008 at18:51:

Thumb Up!

Well, mine arrived today and I just spent the last 20 minutes poring over the artwork and liner notes (whilst on the can - shhh!), and I just gotta say... WOW! This thing is really put together well, and Terry's notes are as insightful and revelatory as always. I'll be going straight for Disc 2 once I've completed a bit of Internet shenanigans.

Posted by jiminy on 11-21-2008 at20:37:

those extras will be awesome. am looking forward to getting this soon.
(cmon....bailout!)

Posted by servantsteve on 11-21-2008 at22:51:

Mine came today but I can't open it until Christmas.

Posted by wakachiwaka on 11-22-2008 at00:38:

quote:

Originally posted by wakachiwaka
Well, mine arrived today and I just spent the last 20 minutes poring over the artwork and liner notes (whilst on the can - shhh!), and I just gotta say... WOW! This thing is really put together well, and Terry's notes are as insightful and revelatory as always. I'll be going straight for Disc 2 once I've completed a bit of Internet shenanigans.

Aaaaauuuugh! My posts are replicating across topics - head for the hills!

Tongue

Anyway, the bonus disc:

Great interview with Terry, and the instrumental-only remixes were, again the word fits, revelatory - you get a real sense of just how good this band is. The vocal remix of "The Unattainable Earth" sounded better sonically than the original, but I couldn't say that there was anything significant added to or subtracted from the mix to make it a totally new experience.

The live tracks were culled from different decades and band configurations - only two were contemporaneous with the original release of DFBB, so the rest provide a slightly different take on the material. The "unreleased demo" is as rough-sounding as anything could be, extremely brief and highly indistinct, more like a kernel of an idea which appeared to resist attempts at further development, which is probably why Terry abandoned it mid-way after puzzling momentarily over a confounding turnaround.

The video material will be familiar (as was previously hinted at) to anyone who owns the "Instruction Thru Film" DVD. Still, it's fun to view it in the context of the album.

Bottom line: Brilliant album (of course), brilliant packaging, worthwhile extras. If you don't got it, get it!

Posted by me-is-e on 11-22-2008 at15:56:

Now I'm really getting excited for this to arrive. Hopefully Monday or soon after.

. . . patience . . . patience

Posted by audiori on 11-25-2008 at19:49:

From the DADL...

----------------------------------

From: "E. Eduardo"

Just FYI: I just received the Darn Floor reissue and it is even more spectacular than anticipated. And that's without popping out the bonus cd. Beautiful packaging; great liner notes; crisp music.

I was a sophomore in college for the first release and it was a marvel then.
Now I am reliving that time but appreciating tone, beat and other subtle notions that my audio equipment couldn't afford me the first time.
Thank you Ed (I never did like him), Tim, Greg and Terry.
Thank you Jason and Eric. And thanks to all the other unknowns.

For bonus points: I am set to drive to Florida (from DC) this weekend - I can't think of a better audio experience. Though I know my wife may not agree.
Eduardo

Posted by audiori on 11-25-2008 at19:50:

From: "Shawn"
-----------------------------------------

I received mine Thursday evening. My internet was down or I would have shouted loudly via DADL just how freakin' great the whole package is.

This is the album that got me to take music, made by christians IN the christian market place, seriously. Well.....this and The Turning, by Leslie (Sam) Phillips. I respected certain work by The Choir, Mark Heard and the like, but these were the albums that enabled me to believe that "quality" and "Christian music" were not mutually exclusive terms.

I stayed home from work yesterday (nadaed psciatic nerve) and listened to DFBB ALOT. I cried several times at the beauty and depth of the project. Listening to the instrumentals only confirmed my suspicion that Greg Flesch might be the most seriously under-valued musician in the universe. Tone, articulation, rhythm, effects....everything was spot-on perfect. And Terry as a lyricist is just as good. I was one of the few that liked DFBB instantaneously, as it was the only thing I had heard that matched the things I was listening to at the time (Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Replacements, REM, MArshall Crenshaw, Elvis Costello) and I wanted to embrace it wholeheartedly.

I had the time to listen to Terry's entire catalogue yestreday and, without reservation, DFBB is STILL my favorite album, by a long shot.

Shawn

Posted by MarkyMark77 on 11-25-2008 at20:58:

I visited e-music today, and I saw DFBB on their front page, which has six featured new releases. So, it was cool that this was one of them. Unfortunately, they only have the first disc, and not the second. But, it was still cool to see this on there, and that it was on the front page.

Posted by MarkyMark77 on 11-25-2008 at21:03:

From the e-music website:

Full disclosure: I am not an objective reviewer — I am the Executive Producer/Project Co-Ordinator on this reissue. Here's why I thought this record was worth reissuing:

In 1989, I walked into a Christian record store in Sayville, New York with a clutch of used Stryper, the Tuxedo Clad Megastar and Petra tapes and a mission to better myself musically. Having been raised in a religious family, my musical choices were limited to whatever arena rock pabulum was being foisted on me by various youth pastors and the occasional odd Smiths album I could sneak without my parents noticing. At a certain point I became convinced that there had to be religious music that didn't suck, and so my plan was to trade in my bad Jesus music for something a little more challenging.

The cassette I left with that day, Daniel Amos' Darn Floor — Big Bite was, from its first few notes, utterly baffling. A weird, jittery collection of nervous new wave, the album contained no huge hooks, no stacked-harmony choruses and — most notable to me at the time, no Capitalized Masculine Pronouns. A little digging gave me some backstory: Daniel Amos was a hugely popular Southern Gospel group in the late '70s, leading tent revival services for hippies who'd decided to follow Jesus — no turning back, no turning back. The band sold stacks and stacks of records and regularly packed out Southern California's Calvary Chapel, an honor Daniel Amos frontman Terry Taylor would later describe to me as "the equivalent of selling out Madison Square Garden every weekend for a month." Over time, though, they became disillusioned of the pat phrasings and turn-or-burn message being presented to new converts, and so they turned on a dime. In 1981, Daniel Amos released Alarma!, a strange, bleak record of angular post-punk that stunned their following and reduced their audience to the low triple digits. It's a bold instance of art-over-commerce if ever there was one, a band choosing to follow their muse rather than to follow the money.

The result, of course, is that Daniel Amos became even more marginalized. When Darn Floor — Big Bite was released in 1987 it sold 7,000 copies, a paltry number even by Christian music standards. It fell almost immediately out-of-print, with the few scant CD copies fetching in the low hundreds on eBay.

Three years ago, I got the wild idea that this record should be reissued. Not only is it one of my favorite records of all-time, it seemed aggravating to me that bands like Mission of Burma and the Germs and Nick Drake had the opportunity to have their catalogs reappraised but, because Daniel Amos existed on the fringes of the fringes, they were routinely ignored. The story of how Darn Floor — Big Bite went from a vault in Southern California to record stores and online retailers isn't all that interesting. What matters, as always, is the music. What stands out to me about Darn Floor, 21 years after its initial release, is what always stood out: how the music pulls off some weird hybrid of Robert Wyatt and Brian Wilson, matching weird, loopy verses with huge, aching choruses. "The Unattainable Earth" is dizzying and majestic, a single spiraling guitar line whirling over and over and over, spinning the song into a towering refrain. "Divine Instant" is like prototype Pixies, a glassy-eyed surf number interrupted by fits of electric guitar and hefting ominous lyrics like "I see the clock on the wall/ I see the skull beneath the skin." Two decades on, Darn Floor — Big Bite still sounds utterly bizarre, like some kind of warped Martian new wave.

What also stands out is the timelessness of topics: "Return of the Beat Menace" takes to task conservatives who use fear as a weapon, manipulating the flock into submission by railing against the menace of popular culture ("He's meeting all your strange requirements/ He thinks you can't be fooled/ He'll keep the rules and laws and sacraments/ By sending checks to you"). The title track compares a gorilla's attempt to describe an earthquake with man's inability to explain the unexplainable. "Pictures of the Gone World" is a cross-eyed lament for a slowly eroding environment. Needless to say, an audience buying Amy Grant's Lead Me On in mass quantities was not ready for a record that contained the lyrics, "We saw rouge and vermillion, we walked by the water."

Daniel Amos continued to make records through the '90s and up to the present day (their 2001 ELO-channeling double-album Mr. Buechner's Dream is as wondrous as anything they released in their prime). Their music doesn't require any level of faith to enjoy it (as this severely lapsed Christian can attest). All it takes is a bit of imagination and an appreciation for the strange, the daring and the creative. Darn Floor — Big Bite has all of those, and more, in spades.

Posted by jiminy on 11-25-2008 at21:08:

its been such a long time coming- I'm so glad to hear this great response.
Theres a number of DA fans that have not even heard this- so what a treat.

Posted by DwDunphy on 11-26-2008 at14:58:

Okay, let's get into the changes on the CD.

First, and most noticeable is that the volume level is now up to snuff. No need to crank it to 40+ just to get to an acceptable "fun" level.

Second, because the level is now natural and not mechanical, you don't get anti-doppler (which is the wrong term but the closest I can think of at the moment). When your speakers have to work harder, it causes a degree of compression to happen. Clarity and depth get drowned out by volume, even if the original isn't at optimal level. That's why your prized CD from 1989 sounds almost like mono even though it's now barely at that "fun" volume level.

With the remastering, the speakers now have the drive to really crank, but not at the expense of the sound field. You feel as though sounds and instruments are all around you, even from just two speakers, and that is exactly what a good mix should do: put you in the middle of the widest audio aspect ratio without being gimmicky (too much pan left or right). "Darn Floor Big Bite" in specific sounds incredible in the car, which I can tell you is not an audiophile dream scenario.

Third, the bass level on the original Frontline release was as wanting as the audio level. Yes, you heard Tim's bass but you didn't feel it. Now, the bass really thumps, but not at the expense of the treble. Literally, in one song, you can differentiate Tim's bass from Greg's guitar (which sounds like he's using an e-Bow high on the neck) and Terry's three or four layers of vocals - You can actually hear distinction between Terry's tracks, which was really impressive. Often, harmony parts flatten out into this one mass sound or voice, but on this, you can almost hear space between the vocals even though they're perfectly in sync and right on top of each other.

For those out there still holding out on buying, I really mean it when I say they should give it a shot, if not because you want to have this release, then because it is a textbook case of how to remaster (or master) right. Money was spent, and you can hear every penny of it.

Posted by UnderDawg on 11-26-2008 at16:27:

I finally got down to my PO Box and sure enough, DFBB was waiting on me. I popped it into the ol' CD player on the way home, and I was amazed....I wasn't even sure these were the same songs! I had (and still have) my original on a cassette tape, and the sound quality is worlds away. I'm hearing stuff that I didn't even know was there. It's as if these songs were rerecorded.

Worth every penny.

Posted by Brent17 on 11-27-2008 at12:44:

I got mine on Monday and have listened to it several times. The bonus disc and liner notes are more than worth the price of the disc. They did a good job with the remastering, although I did an A-B comparison with my vinyl copy and it still beats the cd, however thats more of a testament to the quality of vinyl than anything else and an example of how rotten the original Frontline mastering was.

It's just a great package, and I hope it ignites the process of future re-releases, even starting with stuff the band currently owns. Hey, I've bought the albums in the Alarma Chronicles three times now (vinyl, cd and book set,) and I'll buy them another time!

Audioris, if you're looking for a fundraiser to kick start things, I'd gladly pay $20 for a cd-r copy of the entire Cornerstone '88 set. The tracks on the Darn Floor bonus disc are awesome.

Posted by S/T on 11-27-2008 at21:16:

Just got my copy in Canada. It's been worth the (loooooooooong) wait! Thanks for getting this out again!

Posted by Tyler Durden on 12-06-2008 at21:12:

Darn Floor Big Bite Remaster

Bonus: I did not expect to see the extra videos with the rerelease. A huge thanks goes out to those behind this project. The sound of the original is great and the bonus stuff is pure gravy. Very very cool.

I feel that I let the DAMB down because I ordered mine at Amazon. I was placing an order and was stoked to see Da offered there. Interview is cool. Liner notes are insightful.

Thank you thank you thank you Townsends and everybody else involved.

Posted by Tyler Durden on 12-07-2008 at11:22:

Why no mention of bonus videos?

I have not seen anything mentioned on the danielamos. com homepage nor webstore page regarding the bonus videos on the bonus disk. Another great little extra thrown in for the benefit of the fan.

Again, great release. The low price does not reflect the great value. Most bands would be charging at least twice the price like U2 has and they have millions more purchases in order to lower the fixed costs associated with such a project.

Posted by audiori on 12-07-2008 at13:53:

Hmm, thought it was mentioned somewhere.. maybe in the news announcement.

Most of that text was probably written before we knew for sure the video stuff was going to be there. Its also not really "new".. since its been available on DVD for a while. It could be that when it was written, we were focusing on the actual new stuff.

Posted by me-is-e on 12-07-2008 at16:26:

I've made a few comments about the main disc on a few other threads, so I'll start with my favorite moments of the bonus disc here and then see what other details come tumbling out after that. Wink

For me, the bonus disc is essentially a second album itself, featuring a stroll through instrumentals, live versions, an unreleased song, a remix, and the big Terry Taylor interview. Starting out is the remix of Unattainable Earth. The sound is excellent and it even has an even different energy than the album cut. Taken as a whole, the main stand out is the 22 minute interview with Terry Taylor. Fun, insightful, and covers all of the major ground. The more I listen to it, the more I love the intermingled cassette demos, especially the acoustic guitar Shape of Air. With the statement that, "We make 60's pop records" the demos remind me of the three tracks of recordings of Strawberry Fields on the Beatles Anthology 2. The whole bonus disc takes on that kind of air from the closing demo track inclusion as well.

For the live tracks, we get the great, raucus takes of Unattainable Earth and Darn Floor Big Bite from 1988. The next stand out is the live version of Safety Net from Cornerstone 1998 (Personally I even favor this over the album version). And finally is Shape of Air from 2000 (all from Cornerstone performances). The Shape of Air version is another another blessing just to hear an ongoing evolution of the song (back to the Beatles Anthology idea I suppose).

Not to forget the instrumentals, they are each nice to have, but I LOVE this instrumental of Half Light, Epoch and Phase. Hearing that funky, rockabilly, country guitar during the chorus just gives me an incredibly goofy grin every time I hear it!

Again, I cannot say enough that I have liked about this album. Bonus disc is great fun. The main album is lyrically fine. The music does make me think of 1987 styles, but I'm also hearing the experimental 60s pop and few other styles lightly blended in. The commentary for each song and from member throughout the booklet is a fine treat, and honestly, I keep thinking that middle photo panel of all the guys in a line would be the ideal place for the hopeful autograph or two. Big Grin

As always, many thanks to all involved. Looking forward to whatever may come.