I was a huge fan of Razormaid during their golden period of the late '80s, having bought many of the original monthly issues on vinyl, and picking up all three of the CD box sets in 1992. I bought the first In Hindsight collection when it was compiled in 1997.Yesterday I listened to In Hindsight II for the first time. Holy cow, what a load of CRAP. The classic Razormaid sound was generally a re-edit with some additional EQ, and sometimes a reworking from the master tapes. It always retained the feel of the original song, with more emphasis on the beat, and DJ-friendly intros, outros, and breaks.In Hindsight II was Joseph Watt discovering how to digitally adjust the tempo of a track without shifting the key, and going crazy. No one wants to dance to a s l o w e r Confusion. He abandoned his keen ear for editing in favor of a kitchen sink approach, grabbing 4 bars here and 4 bars there, jamming them together where they don't make sense, instead of carefully restructuring the track in a way that maintained a consistent feel. The original idea behind Razormaid was to streamline tracks that were forward-thinking, and this was him going in the complete opposite direction, making tracks more complicated.He was always a greedy a-hole (I've had very unpleasant, personal dealings with the man), but he at least put out a quality product. In Hindsight II sounds like it was thrown together in a single afternoon as a blatant cash-grab from the fans, banking on New Order's name and Razormaid's past reputation.(And don't get me started on his claims of copyright. His original deal with the labels was no more than 1000 copies of any track pressed, but 20-plus years later he's now selling CD-Rs through his website. He's never paid any royalties.)
[EDIT]
In Hindsight II is a very unsatisfying listening experience.
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