The City Veins

Charles and I have been working in the studio for 8 hours now.  That’s just today alone.  We put a good 12 hours during the week, which was no easy feet given the fact that Charles is working right now.  There is about zero chance that this post will avoid the sort of whiny drivvel that people hate to read.  But somebody has to blog, and it looks like today it’s going to be me.

The NCAA tournament was not properly timed this year, as they should have considered the effect it would have on my psyche to both devote my life to basketball and the band simultaneously.  Between recording every track I check the scores of the games.  Duke lost and I cheered, but it would have been way more interesting if the had fallen to Belmont, rather than the mild upset at the hands of West Virginia.

Now it’s 11 and this post has taken me three hours.  We’re working on Oh, Backwards, which is not coming across as well as it does live at the moment.  I’m telling you people:  Look out for “The Boy Makes Good”.  That song has come together really well.  It won’t win us a grammy, but it’s a track I’m really proud of right now.  “Oh, Backwards” is my favorite song at concerts, but we have to do a job to translate the intensity on to a recording.  Not such an easy endeavor.

Above is a picture of our band.  We’re very pretty people.

Today is our day of rest, our brief respite from our hard work on the EP.  Every night this week I’ve gone over to Charles house at 8 and worked until 11.  This is no problem for me, but Charles is working this week, so his day has few real breaks.  Maybe it is to celebrate the beginning of the tournament, or maybe it’s so that Charles won’t die, but we decided not to do any recording today.

(By the way–are any of you watching the Duke/Belmont game?  What a ridiculous contest.  Actually I can’t focus because it’s the last minute.  Okay, commercial)

So, today I’d like to write about some stuff I’ve been listening to on-line.  I’ve spent alot of time in the last few weeks reading blogs such as pasta primavera (pastaprima.blogspot.com) and Instrumental Analysis (instrumentalanalysis.blogspot.com), and they’ve got some real good stuff on there.  At this point they are just feeding me new material.  I especially like the guys at DC Rock Club (www.dcrockclub.com), but not so much for their review expertise as their witty banter and portrayal of ridiculous situations.  They are funny as hell.  Anyway, here are some of my favorites:

1)  Yeasayer, Final Path

I know a lot of people are on these guys “jocks” these days, but those people are right:  they are good.  There are few bands that can mesh that dark, almost Joy Division type of sound together with modern indie rock without sounding like they are  completely ripping them off.  And they aren’t whiny.  And there is a bit of groove and soul to their music.  The tone of the track is all their own, yet I’ve heard it before.  Just excellent stuff.

2)  Le Loup, Planes Like Vultures

Again, who hasn’t written about how great these guys are?  It seems to be the unanimous opinion of everyone everywhere that they are the best thing ever.  Forever ever.  So my initial reaction is to hate them as the new children of destiny.  But this song builds so well, has such a wonderfully church-like melody, that I can’t help but love it.  These are the melodies lost from my childhood, going to church on sundays and singing Irish Folk-inspired hymns at voice lessons (I was a snotty kid).  All of it is wonderfully repackaged as a palatable dose of indie.  Good shit.

3)  Middle Distance Runner, That’s A Lie

Though I’ve heard alot about this band, I’ve actually only listened to a few of their tracks.  Most of their other stuff hasn’t moved me, but everyday as I assemble my playlist this goes straight to the top.  I love the strong, abrasive synth in the beginning, the simple and understated vocals, and the manner in which the vocal line resolves itself.  Also, the vocals follow a pattern that is a bit untraditional for a song in 4/4.  Give it a listen.  Somewhere else, though.  You can’t stay here.

4)  Cadence Weapon, Oliver Square

If you listen to one hip-hop track this year (you’ll probably listen to more than that) it should be by Wale.  But after our DC brother, you need to check out the Canuck.  This is a fantastic track:  great rhyme, great backing track, solid beat.  You will find yourself saying over and over “I solemnly swear I’ll make it back to Oliver Square”.  I can’t believe this guy played at DC 9 a couple weeks ago and I missed it.

So that’s my synopsis.  I’m not going to go over all of the stuff that I hate, but suffice it to say there is also a bunch of much-heralded stuff I do not like.  However, I’m becoming a hard-nosed supporter of everything DC in terms of music.  I think it would do me some good to immerse myself in all of the great local bands as we work through this album, not for the sake of copying local convention (which we couldn’t do if we wanted to) but just to feel a part of it.  This is by no means a complete list, so I’ll have to add some in a later post (some New Rock Church of Fire and other “hot” sounds). 

Or maybe I’ll decide that this form of writing is boring as shit.

As Charles pointed out yesterday, the patience of the members of the band seem to be running a bit thin right now.  This, I think, is occuring because we are forcing ourselves to look very critically at what we do throughout this whole recording process, and that leads to bruised egos.  Thankfully we each possess a healthy amount of ego, so it takes a while for any of us to be torn down to the point where we can’t get anything accomplished.  

However, this is all inevitable.  We have to scrutinize ourselves as harshly as possible in order to make sure we come up with the best possible product; something that we are happy with in the end.  In the past, as Charles I have gone through this process many times together, we have done a poor job at REALLY looking at what we do in all aspects of our music.  Lyrics have never been our strong suit.  This is not because we don’t like writing lyrics or that we are particularly bad at it–we just have never focused our energy on it.  I’ve always fealt I had a lot more to learn and hone in terms of my songwriting apart from lyrics.  But this time, we all think we should make every element of the album the best it can be.

This brings me to the album title.  Do you know how hard it is to come up with an album title that is not awful?  Even in the event that you find one you like, eventually you will hate it as you say it to yourself over and over again.  For a while we were agreed on “Something Much Louder”.  Then the following problems occured:

1)  Is the album louder?  Louder than what?

2)  The phrase “Something Much Louder” does not roll off the tongue.

3)  Charles does not like adverbs, and apparently has a problem with qualifying the degree to which volume has increased as it relates to “something”. 

4)  The phrase has begun to haunt me.  I wake up from sleep with my mind racing, thinking,”Should it be ‘much more loud?’ or ‘Something much more louder?’ or ‘Something more loud?’.  My brain can no longer evaluate the grammatical accuracy of these statements.

So we’re going to switch gears, find something we like better.

Until we hate it.

The other night WAS a lot of fun!  Stalking Horses and The Surge were both great bands to play with.  Very different from us, but great fun and excellent at what they do.  I know it seems premature to say that about The Surge since it was their first show, but there is something very compelling about their brand of Indie-pop.  I enjoyed the melodies and songwriting of both The Surge and Stalking Horses. 

While we were all waiting for the show to start (everytime we play there is a good 2 hours when we are at the club before anyone else is there) the lead singer from the Surge (forgot name) said to me,” I really liked your post the other day, but if that is true you’re going to hate our band.”  Two things have happened as a result of this statement:

1)  My emphatic surprise that people outside of our band read our blog.

2)  The sense that I need to clarify my position about Indie music.

Normally I would not necessarily feel inclined to clarify my position on anything unless I was bored because, frankly, who cares what I think about anything.  But in this case I think this band would like to be part of the DC Indie scene (as opposed to running around looking for a record deal or playing radio-friendly pop rock) so I don’t want these mystery people who read our blog to be mis-informed.

I love Indie music.  It’s an awful descriptive, but aside from that it is all I listen to.  One of Indie music’s greatest strengths is that it tells you very little about what you are going to hear.  It is designed as a counter-weight to mainstream music; you are defined as an Indie band by your business status, not by what you sound like.  While that makes it crappy as a descriptive it remains a very liberating scene.  Indie bands traditionally draw from a wide range of well-defined genres, mixing in a wonderful vegan sloppy-joe of goodness.  Melody seems to be derived from almost any of the instruments, with no one instrument becoming more important than the others.  If you take an Arcade Fire song, you could hum along with the bass just as easily as you could the guitar, the vocals, or pumping your fist to the pulse.  Indie songwriters are writing great melodies, much better than the re-tread crap of major labe music.  Or at least that is my assessment.

I (and I think Spencer) was pointing out that there seems to be only a scant few Indie bands that are drawing iunfluence from harder, more aggressive rock of the past.  My sense of Indie stems from Q and Not U, Fugazi, Beauty Pill, and other bands that were aggressive, inventive, and powerful.  There are a good number of bands that draw from a number of diverse influences quite well, but not from the bands I just mentioned.  Furthermore, it seems that alot of the bands that are getting very large within the Indie scene sound very similar, as if ”Indie” is becoming a descriptive term.  I was just pointing out that I think there is a trend towards falling into convention, and the drums seem to be the most visible example.

I admit that my sense of the Indie “scene” is extremely limited.  So much so, in fact, that I feel somewhat guilty about having a strong opinion about it.  But as I’ve started paying more and more attention to Indie blogs in the last month, I’ve started to sense that the scene is becoming a bit limited in scope.  Or maybe it’s just that Radiohead keeps kicking everybody’s ass at it, so everyone else is giving up on being as creative as possible.  But, in my opinion, it would be best if the Indie scene didn’t become guilty of the same limitations to which the majors have fallen victim.  And, since the scene is built on opinions, the flow of information, reviews, and transparency, that shouldn’t be a problem.  Or the scene can be run in a gestapo-esque was by a few bloggers with big and loud opinions about what is objectively good and bad, without the type of knowledge of music that Charles has prescribed as mandatory in past posts.      

It is amazing how quickly things out of hand. When we first planned this whole EP thing, we figured we would record a few songs, mostly in my apartment, get the damn thing printed, and sell it to some people. We figured the whole process would take a few weeks, and we could have a nice album release party in mid-April. It was a lovely dream we had.

Spencer has also done a good job coming up with time-tables and spreadsheets, and it is amazing how long a lot of this stuff takes, and how expensive it gets. Mid-April has turned into June, and Aaron and I are currently fighting about administration stuff. A good time is being had by all. Fortunately for Spencer, a lot of what we are fighting about has to do with our last band, leaving Spencer able to avoid the whole conflict. This argument hasn’t gotten nasty yet, but it is still early. Honestly, I think this argument should be decided by the internet.

In lighter news, the concert on Saturday was a lot of fun. It was nice to play a concert where the bands supported each other, and actually watched each other perform. That doesn’t happen as often as it should. I look forward to playing with The (still websiteless) Surge and The Stalking Horses again soon. It was also nice to just let loose while playing, and not have to worry about a click track.