Quote Originally Posted by Sotosound View Post
The production on the "Yesterday's Dreams" album is very different to earlier Tops albums and, I suspect, reflects changes in the studio technology combined with the end of dedicated mono album mixes.

This latter change gave rise to the need for stereo mixes that sounded good in mono as well as stereo, which was hard to achieve since mono and stereo were always very different animals.

As an aside, in this century, a lot of modern stereo mixes are, therefore, hardly anything more than mono plus an ambient wash, and can be this way because the average buyer probably doesn't even know why stereo involves having two speakers. Instead, two speakers is just the way that 'stereos' are.

Back to 1968. The resultant sound on YD is, to my ears, very clean, very dry, quite lifeless, and very boring when compared with the loud and raucous productions that preceded them. Digital remastering plus relatively expensive 21st century audio equipment can drag a bit more life out of these mixes but, to my ears, the original issues still remain to a large extent.

As for IIADW, this track suffers a bit from this 'deadness' unless you get hold of the single mix, which has added guts and a slightly different feel.

Having said all of that, I still really like the track. Also, strangely, the first version that I owned, and the version that I got used to, was on a mono pressing of the UK Motown Chartbusters Volume 3, wherein the stereo mix was folded to mono and then EQ'd a bit. Perhaps, it's because it's the first version that I really got to know, but this is probably my "go to" version.
You summed it up perfectly. For me, a lot of it really does have to do with the radically different sound of a lot of the music post 1967. I got the "Yesterday's Dreams" album back in the 80s and was expecting something along the lines of the Reach Out album, sonically speaking. I was disappointed because there was what you called, a kind of "deadness" to everything. Plus, everything seemed to be a bit overblown production-wise.

The songs on "Reach Out", even the non HDH material seemed to have a more natural, effortlessly brilliant quality. As Motown went on though, it seems some of the tunes were bogged down by the sheer amount of moving parts in the music.

Now, over the years I've gotten hooked on a couple of things from the Yesterday's Dreams LP [[By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Remember When, We've Got A Strong Love On Our Side), but overall, any of the Tops' albums after 1966 feel as if I have to MAKE myself enjoy them.