Sugarfree’s ‘Dramachine’ gets the classic vinyl treatment

For years, fans have clamored for vinyl releases of Sugarfree’s albums. Their contemporaries have been rolling out remastered editions of their catalogs, and Sugarfree surely deserves the same.

AT A GLANCE

• Ebe Dancel's 'Baliktanaw' album provided comfort during the pandemic by revisiting his songs from Sugarfree with stripped-down arrangements, focusing on themes of loss and healing.
• While Sugarfree's debut album 'Sa Wakas' was released on vinyl, it was criticized for poor sound quality, prompting plans for remastered releases of their next two albums by Backspacer Records.
• Jett Galindo, an experienced mastering engineer, is set to improve the sound quality of Sugarfree's albums, ensuring that the emotional dynamics of the music are preserved and enhanced.

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During the pandemic, Ebe Dancel’s Baliktanaw album became a quiet companion for many of us. Dancel revisited the songs he wrote for his former band Sugarfree, stripping the arrangements to acoustic guitar, keyboards, and strings. The songs, and Dancel’s earnest vocals, soothed the ache of disconnection, of loss and longing, while the world stayed home.

Sugarfree never claimed the title of patron band of loss and longing. The bands that came before them and their own contemporaries also wrote about heartbreak, approaching the difficult topic with irony, anger, novelty, or social commentary, usually with big, audacious gestures. Dancel went small.

His songs are confessional monologues: plainspoken, conversational, raw. They hang on small details that put you in a specific time and place. They leave you with a feeling that is hard to shake. Listen to the tender “Tulog Na,” or the grief that fills a messy room of memories in “Kwarto.” Dancel’s best songs, however, do not stand in place. They never wallow in grief. There is always movement in them, a search for healing, a step past the hurt.

For years, fans have clamored for vinyl releases of Sugarfree’s albums. Their contemporaries have been rolling out remastered editions of their catalogs, and Sugarfree surely deserves the same.

Less is more

The band’s debut, “Sa Wakas,” did make it to vinyl, and it was a letdown. The sibilance hisses, the sound is muddy, and the dynamics are flattened. It sounds like an album that went direct to vinyl without anyone stopping to master it for the format.

That major oversight is being corrected. Indie OPM label Backspacer Records is releasing the band’s next two albums on vinyl: Dramachine and Tala-Arawan. The vinyl masters are by Jett Galindo, and the choice is perfect. 

Galindo grew up in Quezon City and earned a psychology degree from the Ateneo before leaving for Berklee to study audio engineering. In 2013, she became the assistant to legendary cutter Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab in Ojai, California. Sax founded the first independent mastering studio in 1967, and Galindo calls him “the grandfather of mastering.” He taught her to cut vinyl.

She then spent nearly a decade at The Bakery, a mastering house on the Sony Pictures lot where she mastered and cut vinyl for Green Day’s Revolution Radio, the La La Land soundtrack, and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft. Her credits also include Barbra Streisand, Weezer, Pink Floyd, and Neil Young. She now runs her own studio, Jett Galindo Mastering, in Los Angeles.

What she brings to Sugarfree is her mentor’s creed: less is more, and stay faithful to the music. She also knows the format’s traps. In interviews, she has named the hazards that make vinyl cutting tricky, and sibilance tops the list. That is the very flaw that sank Sa Wakas.

I heard a test pressing of Dramachine, and the difference is immediate. The soft-loud dynamics, the album’s emotional driver, are intact and in balance. The quiet passages breathe, and the loud ones land without flattening everything around them. The clarity puts Dancel’s voice where it belongs, front and center, every word legible. This is how a classic album should sound.

It has been a busy year for Backspacer. Since its first OPM release during the pandemic, the self-titled album of indie darling Peryodiko, the label has collected a string of Awit Awards and earned the respect of vinyl collectors for its design, packaging, and mastering. Its catalog now includes emerging acts, legacy pop singers, P-pop superstars, and elder statesmen of rock and jazz.

Robert Tuazon, who runs the label with his wife Tasha, talks about the work like a fan, not a businessman. “As music fans, this gives us the ultimate pride and satisfaction,” he said in an early interview with this writer. “So as long as we can accommodate them, we would love to keep continuing to press more and more OPM records on vinyl.”

That leaves one piece of unfinished business. Tuazon is hoping for a second crack at Sa Wakas, with Galindo at the board.

I say give it to them. The album that started it all deserves to sound like the classic that it is. – Rappler.com