^ Yes, I agree that Kyouiku is their best album. Sounan and Yume no Ato cement that for me.

I love Fender guitars. I'm thinking of switching to a Jaguar for my main single coil guitar and turning my Strat into a Maiden-like metal machine. At the very least, I'm going to put a P90/P100 in the Strat bridge. If it works for Sugizo, it works for me.

I cheat when it comes to matters of the Education. I sneak in Dynamite after Sounan and replace Yume no Ato with Kokoro. Kokoro is my absolute favorite Tokyo Jihen song from either phase, Dynamite is just a fun song that works really well cushioned between Sounan and Crawl, and the Heisei Fuuzoku version of Yume no Ato blows this version out of the water, so I don't feel bad about scrapping it.

I find myself falling in love with Education all over again. I just love the sloppy/hectic production/playing and wonder how Variety might've sounded through this filter. There seems to be a calculated precision to Variety that just doesn't work with this band; they need to be loud and messy and not so hamfisted as Jihad Jihen would type.

I strongly disagree because of two things:

- The missing "humming" bass part. It was even missing in the Phase 2 version.
- The weak ending in the HF version. The Kyouiku version has a hectic, desperate ending that conveys the song's mood better than the generic HF broadway ending.

I totally get why you'd prefer this version to HF's. I just think there's a clarity to the newer version (especially with the piano) and Ringo's voice is more emotive, especially when she gets to wailing like a nervous banshee. That right there is the stuff of wet dreams for me.

^ Haha, yeah. My Strat has a hybrid of his old pickups. I have a Seymour Duncan Antiquity in the bridge and SD Antiquity II Surfers in the mid/neck. Sugizo's VIII model guitars have an SD SP90 in the bridge so that's what I'm going to use. I'm also planning on purchasing an S-III (with sustainer) when I'm in Japan for school.

I'm not completely clear on this, but the singles had a different recording/mix than the album, right? I was listening to the Sounan single for the first time in forever and it didn't sound as bad as I remember Kyouiku sounding.

Holy crap
 

Now I understand why people say this album's sound quality is utter crap...

I just loaded up a couple of the tracks in a sound editor and each song appears as almost a complete rectangular block instead of the waveform that it is supposed to look like...

It is just too insanely loud...everything is clipped to hell... :L
Was it truly meant to be this way??

Maou> I think it is just because you've not been listening to Sounan for a long time. I loaded both Sounan album and single versions and they both look like rectangular blocks...

Ringo and Kameda know a thing or two about recording/production, so it's safe to assume that it was intentional. I think the songs were compressed to within an inch of their lives to give off that amateur/homegrown/garage band vibe, although that can cause a headache if consumed in big doses.

I think this might have something to do with the loudness war that has Bobby Zimmerman all verklempt.