As a terminally uncreative person, one who's basically never the Idea Guy but more the Idea Implementer Guy, I probably shouldn't be commenting on stuff like this, but here goes nothin'…
I neglected getting any sort of streaming music app for a good little bit. I was a late adopter of social media, a late iPhone buyer, the only TV in my house 14 years old, and I still have a PlayStation 3. I used CDs up until the point I got an iPod for Christmas, and when it was finally time for that iPod to go, not because it broke but because streaming had piqued the interest of the lazy bum in me, I hopped onto the paid version of Spotify. Pandora had become full of live performances to keep licensing costs down and was nearly incapable of pulling up any specific song you wanted. It was nearing the point of uselessness, so I bit the bullet and opened up my meager wallet.
Welcome to the future
I've told you that tiny bit of history to tell you this: Spotify doesn't and didn't have everything. A shocking revelation, I'm sure, but it bit me in the ass a number of times. One of those bites was rolling back around to Cartel's album Chroma after having iPod'd it for however long. All was well until the sixth track "Save Us" started. It was different. It deviated. The old version, the one I knew and thoroughly enjoyed, was gone! In its place was a new(er) and inferior version!
The original album was released in Sept 2005 via The Militia Group. Cartel signed to Epic in March 2006 and rereleased the album three months later. It hadn't even been a full year yet! This would've been fine and dandy if "Save Us" hadn't been touched, but for some reason they rewrote and rerecorded it to include the whole band. It's not known, beyond some tiny inner circle of folks, if this was the band's idea or if it was forced on them by their new corporate overlords. Perhaps they were tasked with making the song more "epic" to better fit their new record label.
Either way, the newer version is, in my opinion, overdone to the point that it feels out of place. They could've tacked it onto the end as a bonus track rather than do a wholesale replacement, effectively throwing the original in the trash, but alas. I've never liked this replacement version, and it kinda screws up the flow of the whole album. "Save Us" was a lull, a dip in the action, that connected the first half of the album to the last. As this is one of those albums that does the whole "two sides of a vinyl" thing, this song was a perfect end of Side A. In being updated it became something else ⸺ a song that felt forced to be overly dramatic for the sake of it.
The updated version starts deviating from the original very early on, and it's nothing like it by the end ⸺ not even remaining in the same key. The original version has no guitars or drums, more subtle strings that better match those at the end of the album, and no awkward and forced pitch shift that fails to capture whatever emotion was being attempted in that moment. This is the song as it was meant to be, and there are literally dozens of us that care about it being that way! The new version may be more "epic", going from a guy and a piano to a whole band, but at what cost? It was a better song when it was simpler.
For what I'm assuming are monetary reasons, streaming services usually only offer the most up-to-date version of albums. Why offer two versions of the same album when you could offer one for half the price? Thus, this "epic" Epic version is what you'll find on YouTube (via official channels), Spotify, Apple, et al. This is frustrating in our current post-disc and post-iPod world. Streaming is how people access music now, and occasionally, maybe even only very occasionally, the history of how things were originally is lost.
Here we go again
An album is a time capsule comprised of all the talents and emotions of its production. To come back later and rerecord things necessarily changes those things. No matter how faithful a reproduction Taylor Swift's rerecorded versions are, they will always be different ⸺ if for no other reason than she's physically a different person than she was back then. Even if everything else is kept the same, she's older and sounds older. These aren't songs she would make now; they're songs a younger version of herself made.
I'm not sure where I heard it, but someone once said something to the effect that a band's first album will have been written for their entire lives. In that way it's kind of the most "pure" version of the band. With subsequent contractual releases comes more forced songwriting, and most songs on those albums come not from the Before Times but from a post-"we've made it" point of view. Plus, everyone's older, and being older changes how the brain works eventually. It's not that later songs and albums are automatically bad or even worse; most bands put out at least a few albums before things start going downhill and/or undertaking genre shifts, member changes, and the like. Those not-first albums just don't come from the same place, you know? To take an existing first album and redo some of it later is some kind of musical sacrilege.
Annoyingly, this whole song replacement business with Cartel wasn't the first time I'd experienced it. One of my favorite albums of all time is Third Eye Blind's self-titled release. I'd had the CD since middle school and listened to it end to end countless times. I even had a mental music video (remember those?) that I ran through my head every time "The Background" came on. Having recently joined the future in buying into Spotify, I was excited to listen to it anew. Much to my dismay, the fifth track "Graduate" had been replaced with a new(er) and inferior version!
It's not that different, nothing like the massive shift "Save Us" went through, but it's different enough to notice and make one wonder what the hell is going on. This song was fine as it was for more than a decade, but when it came time to be put onto Guitar Hero some 13 years later, the band rerecorded it and changed it. And that would've been fine if they'd kept it to the game or tacked it onto the end as a bonus track. But, no, they or the powers that be replaced it on the album and rewrote its history.
There's not much of a point to my silly ranting in the end, so I will close off this overly long post with a high-quality version of "Save Us". If I ever owned the disc I couldn't find it when I went looking for it recently, but I found the version I'd put on my iPod back then, and that's what I uploaded to YouTube. Unsatisfied with that I bought a used advance copy of Chroma from Discogs for $2.50 that I ripped to FLAC. Here's that lossless version for your enjoyment and safekeeping.