Punk 'n' Bowl V!

This is our next show, be there or be square...

crunch wrap supreme

our friend Owen Richards was snapping away at our show at South Of The Border last friday, here are some of his photos...

everything sucks today, tomorrow!

we are playing our first show since the beginning of may tomorrow night in east london. it should be a lot of fun, we are going to play some new songs i think...

here is the poster with all the info that you need to know;

in other news, the holy Joseph Pies finished up the artwork for our long awaited split 7" featuring El Morgan featuring us and Kelly Kemp featuring Bangers - i guess that means that it might be out soon...

we'll keep you posted!

recording 'Dead Sea' - Day 6

We carried on with vocals as soon as we got to the studio yesterday morning, we had four songs and a cover to do...

We used the same technique of Miles doing a song or two and then giving him a breather whilst i did the back ups, we got there in the end. Once the vocals were done we had a list of various other things that we still had to record, but before we could get down to doing all that stuff Pugs had to lay down one line in the Dead Milkmen cover that we have recorded, he did it in one take, what a pro!

The cover, as well as another song is going to be featured on a split 7" entitled, 'Banana Split' with New Jersey's Static Radio some time soon.

We recorded a bunch of roomy sounding screams and breathing and shit,

we recorded our friend Nic saying a couple of lines of a song over the phone

and we recorded a bunch of other bits too that will be subtly featured in various places on the record so look out for them.

That was it, we were done!

Now all that is left to do is mixing and mastering. Tim had time to mix one song and gave it to us to take away and think about, i think it sounds great so in theory mixing the rest of them shouldn't be so hard. We are heading back to the studio this coming friday to finalise everything, then the plan is to get it released as soon as possible, hopefully before october, fingers crossed!

Recording 'Dead Sea' - Day 5

Yesterday we did vocals all day long! 

There were a shit load of songs to get through, ideally we wanted to get them all done so that we could spend the whole of the final day mixing but it didn't really work out this way, we did get a lot done though, it's just that everything takes way longer than we initially think... especially the small things and it's the little things that count right? 

(insert small dick joke here)

Miles has loads of super high parts and and screamy bits in these songs so to keep him from blowing his voice out he would do a couple of full songs and then i would do the back ups straight away so that he could have a little rest...

I suck at singing, the difference between mine and Miles' singing stamina is pretty obvious when we are recording. I pretty much  blew my voice out just doing the back ups.

 arghhh wooo oohhh ahhh, kinda like that but load as sh*t!

In-between songs we hung out in the control room, we watched a little bit of this, some of this and a whole lot of these!

By the end of the day the checklist looked like this, it was actually pretty productive in hindsight.

One more day to go...

Recording 'Dead Sea' - Day 4

I didn't get to the studio until lunch time yesterday, Jenks cracked on with his guitar parts until about 3:30 and then Tim finished off the rest of his parts, it took all day long but the geetars got finished!

Big Bad Roy Jenksins popped in for a quick listen on his way home from work, if we get time Roy is going to record a few guitar licks for one of the songs, i really hope we get time!

that is more or less all that happened yesterday i think... sorry that this post is kind of boring, blame Jenks and Tim i guess. We are doing the vocals tomorrow/today (geez) and then this record is done...

Last week our friend Owen Richards visited us and come to a practice session to take some photos to put together for the insert and what not - we went for a Joe's Ice Cream too.

Recording 'Dead Sea' - Day 3

Yesterday we continued with the geetars...

Jenks got right into it from the word go and powered through about 5 songs

Then Tim showed up. This was the first time Tim had been here because of his grueling work schedule as Timmy train driver. As he is so pushed for time he had to boot Jenks out of the live room and get right to work with his own guitar parts - Jenks wasn't happy about this at all because he was "in the zone."

Tim got down to business and was killing lick after lick. 

Meanwhile the rest of us sat around and listened, we also drank lots of coffee... again! 

I don't usually drink any coffee at all, the caffeine is starting to mess with my mind i think.

There are quite a few songs on this record that have plenty of room for feedback and dynamic noise. Yesterday we spent quite a lot of time fucking around with pedals to try and create intense feed back, it was pretty fun listening to Tim and Jenks fuck around with it. Miles is a bit of a pro when it comes to this so he was watching them like a hawk and giving them all kinds of tips. For example, if you flip the guitar around and face it at the cabinet then you get high tones, where as holding it to the cab with the strings facing you get low tones, pretty cool right!?

These are some of the pedals the they used, most of the coolest noise was created by a pedal named, 'Dr. Distorto!'

Things are moving along swiftly but these damn 6 string folk sure take their sweet time over the in between stuff! This is what the check list looked like at 7pm;

Hopefully we will start vocals the next day (which is today as I am writing this, man, this coffee is confusing the space/time continuum in my branium.)

Thanks for stopping by!

Jamie

Recording 'Dead Sea' - Day 2

Yesterday we arrived on time, the drive up was pretty entertaining, we listened to some Richard Pryor stand up, i would like to quote some of his jokes but they don't come across quite the same so i'm not gunna bother, the main gist of it was a story involving a voodoo lady healing his friends swollen feet by pissing on them, it's a gas!

Anyways... we started by listening to everything that we laid down the day before just incase we had to re do some of it and we did, so we got right to it! 

We had 6 songs and a cover to do, it took a while but we got into it eventually

It's been a while since we recorded like this. The recording process for songs that we recorded for 7"s and various other stuff at the end of last summer and earlier this year was pretty different, we did everything live all in the same room, with no headphones, played one or two takes and then moved on and just ignored little mistakes, we did the same thing with the demos of these songs and it's what we've gotten used to. Doing things this way is great and i'm sure that we will continue to use the same process again with future recordings but right now we are trying to get everything right and it can be pretty frustrating, especially with drums - There are so many little things going on and if just one of these tiny variables gets missed then we have to start over! That's the part that we aren't totally used to i guess. 

I don't know if it's an excuse that we have told ourselves but yesterday we figured out that there is no such thing as a perfect take and maybe this is another excuse but i think that it's probably a good thing. It's not like we're fucking session musicians, we're a punk band and mistakes are human right?

So yeah, we just powered through all morning. By about 2:30 we were getting hungry and tired and takes were getting worse so we took a break for lunch.

After lunch we finished off the last couple of songs and recorded a Dead Milkmen cover, then we were done! well, drums and bass that is...

sweet! 

By this time it was about 5pm, Big Tim did some futurising stuff to the tracks on his computer and we made sure we had nailed everything, then Jenks got ready to play some guitar. Meanwhile we watched videos of Dwight Schrute on you tube and played with a fat cat.

Jenks drew a picture of me and Rhys and got his guitar sounding nice

Then a lead broke and needed re-soldering and shit, it was almost 7 so we called it a day.

We are back here right now and Jenks is killing it, he spent the last 20 minutes playing with feed back!

Recording our 2nd album - Day 1!

Woah... it's been a while! 

so, since our last post we have been busy bees, the months of April, May and early June were pretty much engulfed with physics and photography degrees/exams, we only played one show in May and before that the last shows we played were on that short UK tour with Bangers in mid March! 

But... it's not like we've been doing nothing in between - we've been playing with some ideas for new songs since the end of last year and pretty much since January this year, we have been writing new songs with the intention putting them together as a full length album. 

We got about 12 new tunes together and pretty much completed before shit got physics crazy and demoed them live at our practice space in late April. This worked out well as it gave us time to sit on the songs and think about them while all the uni junk was happening throughout May/early June.

 From about the second week of June until last weekend we have been working on the songs we demoed (and some more new ones too) fucking with the structures and trying to get everything just where it needs to be. 

We started recording yesterday, we are back with Big Tim Hamil at Sonic One (the same place that we recorded the Blood, Sweat and Beers 10"s and LP.) we will be here for 6 days in total...

We Got here a little late yesterday because Miles was still in the shower when i went to pick him up and getting up early sucks. But once we got here we talked about what we want in terms of the sound of this record and the factors that we are into regarding the sound and feel of the live demos that we did in April. We talked with Big Tim about the big open drum sound and driving, dirty bass sound on records such as Nirvana's In Utero Weezer's Pinkerton. That was pretty much as far as we went, by the time we were recording Beers I think Tim started to understand us properly so it's not like we were talking about these things to someone that had never heard our music - we set up our stuff up and then started playing with the sound.

Once we got the drums and bass sounding cool we drank a shit load of coffee and then had lunch

we watched the fresh pots video on you tube a few times and then drank some more coffee

then we started recording bass and drums...

Mark from Above Them lent me his Sans Amp, thanks Mark!

It was about 3:30 by the time we started laying stuff down, in the past we have just rocked up and started recording pretty much as soon as everything is mic-ed up, but not this time - it was cool to take much more time over the sound before we started getting into it.

We made one of these so that we don't forget to do anything;

Oh yeah, this new record is going to be called, Dead Sea. 

We will explain later...

Once we got rolling it didn't take too long to get into the swing of things

By the time 7pm rolled around our sheet looked like this;

The day ends at 7 so then we had to go. 

we saw this guy on the way back home

All in all it was a pretty productive and positive first day.

more updates to follow tomorrow...

jamie

thanks...

We had a total blast at all of the shows just gone with Bangers...

 Thanks so much to Sam, Trev, Moving North, Music for Lovers and Not Shy of the DIY for taking care of us and making sure that they all ruled, thanks loads to everyone that made an effort to come along, especially people that made it to more than one!

here are some photos that our friend Stu took at the Chuck Ragan show in swansea on saturday;

and here are some that Nathan Blaker of NGNG took;

we are going to be busy as hell over the next couple of months finishing off school but just before that stuff gets really crazy we are going to try and finish writing (and demo) our new record, it's well on it's way but we still have a whole lot to get done... 

watch this space i guess

see you in the summer time