New Monday 43
Here's a thing to listen to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHp3x3CFmj0
Common Saints is the nom de studio of Charlie Perry, an Englishman, multi-instrumentalist and producer who just released his debut album, Cinema 3000, on Oct. 29th.
Good, wet fun!
I suppose Common Saints' genre is psychedelic soul music. On a practical level, it's what you'd get if Roger Waters was less interested in why the British education system screws people up and more interested in having tons of sex in a room lit with Moby’s lava lamp collection. On Idol Eyes, the chorus is “Wanna make love? Wanna get high?" Exactly. Cinema 3000 is the ultimate sexytime album, as well as the ultimate sleepytime album. Both. At the same time.
But that isn't to say the record is shallow. Rather, it's poetic and hopeful, all about good vibrations and not recriminations. This isn't Nu Metal, and why one has their issues. This is dinner with friends who are smart, nice, and upbeat, touching on ideas with a smile and some edibles and not wallowing in complicated soup with Nietzsche and Freud.
I love this record.
The songs are a strange mixture of hooks and dreaming, sometimes structured but often simply musical events happening over the same set of chord changes. And then something super-catchy happens. There's definitely a healthy dose of Pink Floyd and AIR in the recipe, but also a dollop of vintage soul music, especially in the sonics of the low, drums and vocals. Great bass lines abound. There are slick guitar solos that also sound off the cuff. And slide guitar. C'est La Vie is what would happen if the Rolling Stones decided to clean up the basement while working on 'Exiles on Main Street'.
And wonderful production. Mr. Perry records loosely but puts things together with infinite discipline. And he's a master of ambiance and reverberation. In fact, the record is a masterclass in what to do to make things wet without getting soaked.
Reverb and ambiance, the sound of it, the amount of it, is an instant clue as to the era in which the music was recorded. Nothing makes things sound dated like reverb. A trend on a lot of contemporary recordings is to evoke a past by using reverb... a lot of it. Often too much. Cinema 3000 is lush, thick with washes of ambiance, but it’s all used creatively and in really musical ways.
Some sound examples, cued up for you.
Check out infinite decay time on the end of this slide guitar lick
Here, Mr Perry uses vocal reverb to basically generate a pad. Notice how the reverb is phrased around the sections of the song. By the way, send this song to someone you’re romantically interested in, it’s as romantic, gorgeous and heartfelt.
Listen to how each part is in its own distinctive environment. Starting with the drums, which are in a boxy small room, and then each part comes in, enclosed in its own little reverb bubble, until the chorus, when the whole thing is suddenly in a zeppelin hangar.
All of these clips sound much better on a better streaming platform. The whole album is really really worth a listen.
Articles and Ideas
Highly inspired by Common Saints and with indirect sound in mind, I pulled together a bunch of ideas on using reverb, a few previous articles, a new one written just for this New Monday Episode, a bit of this and a bit of that.
Don’t Think of Reverb Acoustically - Luke’s thoughts on the matter.
Practical and Impractical Reverb - Dan’s thoughts on the matter.
Hearing Different Reverb Types
I'll leave you with this, from Cinema 3000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZSqc3uSYmg
Warm, fuzzy, somewhat hazy, trippy regards,
Luke
