I can't sleep so here's an update.
I'm moving again. Maybe some more music will come out of it. I've been breaking my rule about being prolific.
I've been working occasionally on a post about 10 albums I think are "near perfect". I might never finish it but having the list is nice. More importantly:
I'm surprised no one has talked about this already. Clyde "went electric" and made an album with Ryan in Moscow a few months ago. I think Ryan took a bunch of pics he might post when he has time. It's definitely his best yet. I played a few of the songs with him in "Clyde Webb and the Seans" a year ago or so. It was a lot of fun but when we tried to record it turned out terrible. This album sounds way better than we ever did. Also a lot of the songs I heard every night on the summer tour we did together but they sound way better electric. I'm just rambling but really I'm just glad it was made so I can listen to it. To me it's easily the best thing he's ever done and that's exciting.
Feel free to not read any of the rest of this:
There's new Vipe stuff in the works. I have to mention it occasionally so I don't forget about it or something and also to get other people excited about it. Ian and I have written about 15 or so songs. Vipe was the easiest and surprisingly most satisfying musically overall of any band I've ever done. There was plenty of difficulty getting stuff to work but I always thought the music worked too easily well and came off sounding how we wanted. It always felt like we were pushing ourselves without any of the baggage that sometimes comes with that. Getting along and getting the recordings together was always a stressful hassle but whatever.
My songs are mostly from stuff that was initially written for other projects but came out sounding like Vipe songs more than anything. Actually I don't know how much they sound like Vipe as much as they were written in the Vipe frame of mind. Once I decided they were Vipe songs they changed a bit. I don't know, they were written all over the place and are kind of varied but to me they sound super cohesive. Who knows, varied and cohesive probably mean different things in my mind than they do to someone else's ears. I also have some ideas for more jammy parts which we never did as much as I think we might have wanted to. Either way, lot's of blast beats and 4/4 so, you know, rock and roll.
Ian wrote six songs a year ago or so. I think he wrote a few more that turned into a couple Smuts songs and maybe something else. Either way the six songs sound to me like more extreme versions of his stuff from the Downsided split. But they're also weirder in a different way. I'll have to just see how they come together.
I don't know when it'll get started and it will probably be a year after that when it gets finished at the rate stuff's been going. It also might end up being two releases depending on how it goes recording. If it happens it will probably be a continuation of the first two recordings but maybe more removed. As in more dissimilar from the second recording than the second was from the first. Mostly because of the amount of time between them. It's like I (and I assume everyone else) has already had ideas for a hundred new recordings instead of the dozen or so between the first two.
I feel like musically Vipe was always solid but the recordings always turned out weird and were recorded under kind of strange, stressful circumstances. Or maybe the circumstances were normal but the way we came at the music was different? I think the circumstances this time are going to be a lot stranger. With the bands I've been in, most of the time we each record our parts days or weeks apart from each other but have practiced together quite a bit before recording. The last Tim Blood wasn't that way cause we weren't all in the same town and I don't think this new Vipe will be either cause we're even more spread out.
Despite everything I feel like if it happens it will be the best thing we've done. I have too many ideas and trust everyone too much for it to not come together well. If the genre concept for the first recording was "hardcore and skate punk" and the concept for the second one was "post punk, proto grind and skate punk" then the concept for this is maybe "thrash, screamo, jangly alternative, grind and skate punk... and hardcore".
First things first here's pix from the Cat Massacre recording. We used a streamlined but better version of the mic setup we used for Vipe. Or we just knew what we were doing more and it went faster.
We recorded bass in a padded closet. I don't know if this helped but it was fun.
One of the speakers fell off inside the cab. Cool!
We got the Vipe vocals finished up that Friday, spent all Saturday editing all the music and artwork, then put all the cds together in the car on Sunday. In Grangeville we spent all our gas money on baja's at a gas station.
Eye by controlforce
Figuring it out. Problem solving. Friendly.
So we're 8 drums tracks into our album.
We decided to record drums in our front room
We called in favors and got some nice mics this time.
We took a couple days to get everything set up and sounding how we wanted. This has been the most laid back recording yet.
If all goes to plan we'll start recording some guitar this weekend. And also some horns for one song. So it'll probably be out in May sometime.
