New Monday #94

The beginning is mono down the middle, with rolled off highs and lows, clearly meant to mimic an old 60s record. You can knock off this sort of sound in minutes using our Pumpkin Spice Latte. The vocals come in and are very slightly wider, or at least the reverb on the vocal is. Listen for a very slight snapback on it—could also be a slappy reverb. At 1:15 the arrangement thickens out. The piano and strings are wider, but nothing is ever hard panned. The whole thing is maybe 60% wide? At 2:00 the vocal is dead dry.

So, the song musically doesn’t evolve. It’s the same two or three chords the whole time, with a limited melody. I like the way they squeezed more drama out of it using space. Well. Not more drama, because there’s no drama to be found, but it is a little more interesting. Saint Motel is an American indie band from California. This is off their latest album, Afterglow, which came out about a month or so ago. Interesting, very varied production on it.

Reminds me for some reason of this:

One of the Boys - Mott the Hoople

It opens with a telephone dialing. It’s three chords on the verse, and add two more on the chorus. Still, not much of a song. Check out the hard panning on the guitars—these are mono tracks pushed full right and left. At about 3:30 the guitar on the left starts playing a lead, and wanders around the stereo spectrum a bit. Then the whole song wanders off right. At 4:27 the phone rings on the right, it gets answered on the left, and the music creeps out of the phone and grows across the mix into stereo with full frequency response. A fun trick. Cross-fade at the console during the mix? Or perhaps a two-track mixback to the 16-track master. Whatever, a bit more dramatic and slyly subversive. The phone and the panning idea is something I’ve wanted to steal and put somewhere since forever. Feel free to find a use. Produced by David Bowie, recorded at Olympic and Trident Studios in 1972. Interesting consoles involved—we’ll hit on that in the next few months.

This is KILLER

Molly - Ecca Vandal

Ecca Vandal is from Australia. She’s billed as a rapper. Maybe on the early stuff, but this two-week-old single is a mouthful of noiserock rage. Surprisingly melodic, in a Nirvana sort of way.

It too begins in mono, and with a band-pass sounding frequency response. Not as extreme as the Mott the Hoople song, more in line with Saint Motel. But the whole thing explodes in both space and frequency on the choruses. Bass played with a pick overdubbed with a synth at times. Listen for three-part vocals on the bridge, panned wide, and fun wandering stuff in the fade out, as it turns into a modern version of the ending of Layla or some such. The drums never get out of mono, and I can’t tell if this is programmed or a guy bashing in a room. I hope it’s a guy bashing in a room.

Molly is state of the art modern rock production. It’s a wall of guitars, bass and voice, using ducking and EQ’ing to create separation between the parts. It’s a wall, but one can see the individual bricks. I love the video too. She might be a big thing soon, certainly someone to watch for.

This is a Masterpiece

I Will Dare - The Replacements