St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
It's just a coincidence that I've listened to the Atmos mix of this album (published several months ago) for the first time on the day after the released the Spanish version of it, but hey, there you go anyway.
This is a bit frustrating. This music calls for an aggressive, bold Atmos mix, and it's exactly the opposite. Very, very front centric. It is discrete, but the sounds coming from the channels other than FL and FR are really shy most of the time, and the center speaker is basically silent. I'd compare this mix to Marillion's
Script for a Jester's Tear, Devin Townsend's
Powernerd or Riverside's
ID.Entity (Devin's being probably the best of the four), at least when it comes to my personal impressions about it. It's like, yeah, sounds nice, and occasionally it gets it right, but most of the time you can't help wondering "where's the surround content?". Also, like those, it seems a bit inconsistent with the mixing choices, as if the mixing engineer only decided to go beyond the stereo soundfield at a few random times. It sounds great when they did, so why not always like that? All in all, frustrating. This could have been absolutely epic, and it ended up being merely good at best. At least, it sounds noticeably more dynamic than the stereo mix.
Wonder if the Spanish version has been mixed differently? Not holding my breath, but I'll check it out soon (being Spanish myself, I'm also curious about her performance there).
I've heard that her previous album
Daddy's Home has a superb Atmos mix, which I haven't heard yet. But I don't like that album nearly as much as
All Born Screaming, which is honestly one of my favorite releases of the last few years.