If you know this San Jose band, you probably know the essay Lester Bangs wrote positively drooling over this album, which got him so excited he made up a bunch more Count Five LPs that didn’t exist. The Count Five – who wore Bela Lugosi-style Dracula capes – had a touch of the Zombies about them, and some similar melodic and rhythmic panache, albeit with less flexible grooves. This record is catchy as hell, with a couple Who covers, but more highlights in terms of originals. The hit title track borrows the rave-up gambit from the Yardbirds’ “I’m a Man” – a pretty bold pilfer – but opener “Double-Decker Bus” is the real rabble-rouser. Again, the American guitar-wielding teens of 1966 loved British stuff. And the reconceptualization of everyday British imagery could be pretty heady in its new seedy American digs. Don that cape!.
Psychotic Reaction which reached number 5 on the Billboard charts in 1966 and was selected as one of the five hundred most influential songs in Rock n’ Roll History by the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Psychotic Reaction was released worldwide and obtained prominence in United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, and Mexico.
At a rehearsal in early 1966, Psychotic Reaction was composed by the group. Psychotic Reaction” is an early garage rock song released by the band Count Five in 1966, and also the title of their only album. The song Psychotic Reaction was written by the five members of the Count Five, Craig “Butch” Atkinson, John Byrne, Roy Chaney, Kenn Ellner and John “Mouse” Michalski. The song started off as an instrumental jam between Ellner, Chaney and Michalski and was composed in the living room of Craig Atkinson’s at the beginning of a rehearsal. Kenn Ellner was breaking in a new harmonica for the first time and Chaney and Michalski were jamming and composing. The harmonica was a C harmonica, so the jam was in G. Atkinson and Byrne joined the rehearsal and added to the jam and composition. Many weeks prior to this monumental rehearsal Byrne had a psychology class at San Jose City College. The lecturer was discussing psychotic reactions and a friend and classmate Ron Lamb thought it would be a good name for a band. John Byrne had mentioned to the band about that event and it evolved from the name of the band to a good name for a song. At the rehearsal Ellner and Byrne looked at each other and said this is “Psychotic Reaction”.
Count Five (also known as Count V) is a garage rock group that was founded in 1964 in San Jose, California. The band is best known for its hIt song Psychotic Reaction went to #5 on the Billboard charts. Count Five continues to write, play music and is available to entertain at events, private parties, cop orate events and festivals.
Band Members:
Kenn Elner, Roy Chaney, John “Mouse” Michalski, Phil Indovina and Rocky Astrella.
Former Band members: John “Sean” Byrne, Craig “Butch” Atkinson
Classic blues ridden garage from Count 5 Originally released on Double Shot in 1966.
In advance of the release of “That’s Why We’re Running Away”, the new album from the Roadside Graves, their first new music for five years, we recently shared the excellent album opener “Sit So Close”.
Roadside Graves have carved out a small and strange piece of musical territory over the course of their nearly twenty years together. Their sound emerges as much from their longstanding friendships and personality quirks as it does from their eclectic musical influences. That’s Why We’re Running Away was engineered and mixed in Brooklyn, NY by Robert Lombardo and mastered at Strange Weather by Daniel Schlett. On this new record, the group has created a cycle of songs about acceptance – the struggle to accept defeat and loss, and whether to give up peacefully. It’s about finding comfort in seeing the reality of a situation and reckoning honestly with your own part in it. If the question is acceptance, one answer then is to run away – not alone, but together. This a record about living in the tiny space between “I want to leave” and “I want to believe.”
All Songs written by Roadside Graves. Colin Ryan: drums, percussion, vibraphone Dave Jones: bass Jeremy Benson: guitars, violin, harmonium, keys John Gleason: vocals John Piatkowski: electric piano, organ, synths
Guest vocals by Renee Maskin and Dana Sellers
Last Friday, the record was officially released and so that seems more than enough reason to share two more tracks from the record, which on first few listens, is just another very fine example of their reflective and compelling Americana.
So check out the gentle There Was A Way, and the mournful piano lament Dead Kids from the record, which you can order from Bandcamp here.
Old Sea Brigade & Luke Sital-Singh have announced details of their EP All The Ways You Sing In The Dark, out August 28 on Nettwerk, and released lead single Call Me When You Land.
Despite being friends for just three years and this being their first collaboration, Nashville-based Old Sea Brigade – aka Atlanta native Ben Cramer – and LA-based LondonerLuke Sital-Singh wrote most of the EP at Luke’s place last summer in just seven days. New single with my good friend Luke Sital-Singh. This is the first song from a collaborative EP we have coming out later this summer:
Call Me When You Land coasts along on a breeze of acoustic strumming and soft strings, as verses are traded back and forth before a dreamy guitar lead takes flight.
Old Sea Brigade & Luke Sital-Singh – “Call Me When You Land”.
How about some new music? Our new signings Honey Lung have just shared their fuzzy new indie/alt banger Juggle, which is streaming everywhere now – https://orcd.co/juggle . They’ve also announced that their new EP Post Modern Motorcade Music will be released digitally on May 29th so look out for more from that soon!.
London shoegazers Honey Lung have recently released a new single, “Big”, which is taken from the band’s forthcoming Post Modern Motorcade Music EP, set to drop 29th May via Big Scary Monsters.
Drawing inspiration from acts including Car Seat Headrest, Sparklehouse, Elliot Smith and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, the EP introduces their newly-refined melodic sound whilst keeping still keeping roots firmly in the world of fuzzy, grungy guitars and clattering percussion.
“Trying to finish this record was really hard because Neal passed away as we were about to go into the overdub stage,” keyboardist Adam MacDougall explains, as he describes the push to complete Circles Around the Sun’s third full-length studio album.
The project originated in 2015 when director Justin Kreutzmann asked guitarist Neal Casal to create some original music for the films slated to screen at setbreak during Fare Thee Well. Casal then enlisted MacDougall, bassist Dan Horne and drummer Mark Levy for what they all believed would be a one-off session. However, the response was so overwhelming—and the musicians’ camaraderie was so resonant—that they decided to revisit the collaboration, first on the road and then in the studio.
Circles Around the Sun could have ended following Casal’s tragic death this past August, but, in a note he left behind, the guitarist encouraged his bandmates to continue. MacDougall reveals, “It was a very long letter—a half-an-hour read. This was not something he scribbled down at the last minute, which makes it really heavy. He touched on every person in his life, every piece of gear. So this is something he was revising and working on for a long time. The perspective is deep.”
The week before Casal took his own life, Circles had tracked the tunes that would eventually end up on their self-titled album at Jim Scott’s PLYRZ Studios in Valencia, Calif. The guitarist laid out specific plans for these recordings in his final message.
“There’s a whole paragraph on how he wanted us to finish this record and have Jim Scott mix it,” MacDougall discloses. “He said, ‘I want it to come out, and I want you guys to keep playing.’ It was the whole stupid thing where people get stuck thinking, ‘I’m the problem. You guys would be better without me,’ which is just ridiculous.”
After much contemplation, the band elected to honour Casal’s memory by both completing the album and returning to the road, with Eric Krasno and then Scott Metzger assuming guitar duties.
As for the album, beyond Casal’s entreaty, MacDougall credits Scott for helping the band bring it on home. “It was really hard for me to put this record down,” the keyboard player acknowledges. “If it wasn’t for Jim saying, ‘Here are the dates that I’m going to mix the record, and it has to be finished by then or I’m going to pull you out by your hands,’ I probably would still be working on it. I just couldn’t let it go because of the Neal thing. Nothing was good enough. I was trying to make everything perfect and overthinking everything, and I had to get out of that headspace. Jim was really cool about it but said, ‘It’s done. I’m going to mix this record. You guys did great. Let it go.’”
Babyman
Babyman is a cat who lives in a studio in Detroit. Almost a year ago, we had a couple of days off in Detroit during a tour, and Dan had a buddy who had a really cool studio, so we thought, “Rather than sit around, why don’t we just go into the studio?” We had a couple of ideas that we’d been running at soundcheck, and “Babyman” was one of them. At first it was just some chords that I had, but Neal came up with the verse guitar bits and Dan came up with an epic bass line. We also thought it would be cool to use a drum machine and make it a disco-ish song. It quickly became the first of the new songs that we started playing live.
One great thing about instrumental songs is that, because they have no lyrics, you can name them anything you want. So, yes, there was this fat studio cat whose name was Babyman. We just thought, “Perfect.”
You Gotta Start Somewhere
We did some demos at Dan’s studio out here in Echo Park and continued on with the drum-machine thing. We didn’t necessarily think it was going to be for CATS. Dan and I are neighbors—I mean, in Los Angeles, we’re neighbors. I’m 10 minutes away from him. He has this really cool, old Sequential Circuits drum machine at the studio. I was like, “What if I come to your studio, bring my gear, use that drum machine and try and make some weird, electro-funk stuff.”
We recorded a version of this song and then, because we were starting to get ready for the album, Neal came down from Ventura. He heard what we had done and said, “Wow, that’s cool. We could turn that into one of our tunes.” So he played guitar on the demo. And it ended up being a song we recorded for this album, although the initial intent was just for me and Dan to mess around and make some electrofunk music for fun.
Leaving (Rogue Lemon)
As far as writing goes, that was a stand-alone for me. I was dealing with an emotional relationship at the time and feeling very sad about something. I just sat at the piano and this one came out fully born. I sat down and played it, then recorded it on my phone and went, “OK, that’s done.” For me, at least, that’s a rare thing. I know there are people out there who can instantly write a fully formed song, but I usually slave away on something and come back to it. An idea might sit there for weeks or months, until I hear a melody in the shower that works with it. But “Leaving” just happened. That one wrote itself.
I wasn’t sure if it would be appropriate for the band but, during our second to last day at Jim’s, I said, “Look, I’ve got this piece. I don’t know if it’s appropriate for us or not, but here it is.” And it turned out to be totally appropriate, and I’m glad we did it.
I should point out that Jim is amazing. Instead of saying, “Do this or don’t do that,” he would have me come into the control room and he’d say, “Listen to this, man. What do you think?” And then I’d come to my own conclusions. He leads you in the right direction, but he sets it up in such a way that you think it’s your idea. And that is the sign of a true, amazing producer and engineer. You don’t feel like someone’s on your case or saying that you’re not playing well. You don’t think that you’re doing the wrong thing. You go back into the live room to recut the track going, “Man, I’ve figured it out. I know what I have to do.”
He really understands what it means to make music and how people can get stuck in their heads or in a bad place. He’s really aware of that at all times, even if it doesn’t ever really seem like it. He seems lik
he’s your favorite uncle, but he’s always thinking one step ahead. That’s the best way to work with weird, sensitive musician types who can be complete idiots.
Detroit Dos
This was a soundcheck piece. Last summer, we started messing around with it in Asheville, N.C. It was one of those times when we wondered if we could really pull it off because it was pretty much straight disco. We also recorded it in Detroit—that’s how we came up with the name.
We wanted some rave-ups and that was a rave-up, just like “Babyman” and “Money’s No Option.” So that was us going, “Alright, we’re going to do this. We’re going to go full four-on-the floor disco.” Dan is great at doing that late-‘70s disco octave bass stuff, but he doesn’t do a lot of it because there’s not much of a call for it. So we decided to go for broke on this song and make it into a full dance thing because we need those types of tunes in our set.
We have all these gorgeous, dirge-y midtempo things, so it was cool to just blast off on the disco train for a bit, and then come back to the mid-tempo stuff. It gives us more ammunition to make a cool set.
Landline Memories
The title for this song was given to us by a guy named Ben Knight, who plays in a band called Beachwood Sparks. He’s also a schoolteacher and just a really rad dude. He was good friends with Neal [who also played in Beachwood Sparks] and had been around the Chris Robinson Brotherhood scene for a while. He just said, “Landline Memories.” Neal and I were like, “Whoa, that’s a great title.” I’m in my mid-40s and Neal was 50 when he died, and we would often look back at the days of answering machines and phones—when you still could escape the world for a bit.
You weren’t tied to your cellphone and if somebody wanted to meet you somewhere, you’d get a message saying, “We’ll be in the Lower East Side tonight. See you there.” There were no specifics. Without any technology, except for your answering machine, you would just end up meeting up with your buddy. That was a really beautiful time. You could float a bit and still find the people you wanted to hang out with. If you didn’t, you didn’t. And if you did, you did. But the only way to know if somebody was trying to get in touch with you, unless you had a pager, was your answering machine and your landline.
That title just nailed it. It wasn’t even a song at that point; it was just a phrase. A “landline memory” is what it was like before we were all stuck to our personal computers. Now, everybody is expected to let everybody else know where they are and what they’re doing. This song is not necessarily about that, but it seemed like there was something in the tune that evoked that idea—the choruses are joyful and the verses are kind of mournful.
Pete Jive
One time we were on tour and had an opener that was touring with us. I forget where we were, but the venue didn’t pay attention to the fact that we had an opener, so they hired one to play with us. When we drove up to this gig, the marquee read “Circles Around the Sun with Pete Jive.” And we were like, “Who is Pete Jive?” Then he showed up in his van, with his stuff, and was like, “I’m playing with you guys.” And we had to go, “I’m really sorry. It’s a snafu. You’re not opening because we have an opener.” I hung out with him a bit, smoothed it out and that name just stuck with us.
The song sounds a bit like go-go music. When I was coming up in New York, gogo bands used to play all the time. Chuck Brown would play at this place called Tramps that doesn’t exist anymore. I love that go-go feel. It’s over-swung to the point where it’s almost silly.
“Pete Jive” began with a little riff that we came up with at soundcheck. Then, when Dan and I were messing around in his studio with different drum machines and other stuff, he came up with that drum beat. The song actually [features] Dan playing pedal steel on it, which is cool. It’s a fun romp and the name just fit.
Money’s No Option
I love Stuff—Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Chris Parker, Eric Gale, Cornell Dupree and Gordon Edwards. Their first record, with the Looney Tunes logo on it, is a big one for me. And I love the fact that they were a bunch of top session guys that kept ending up at the same sessions and finally said, “Let’s just get together and play.” So they ended up being a cool instrumental band, though they hadn’t intended to be. Obviously, I’m not in the same category as Steve Gadd or Richard Tee or any of those cats—none of us are. But it felt similar to the gradual way that we came about. There was no real intent to be a band. It just happened. We enjoyed playing with each other so much that we said, “We can’t stop doing this.” So that felt similar to us and I completely ripped off Stuff for this song. [Laughs.]
The title is just stupid because the thing that people actually say is that “money’s no object.” I got that wrong once at a dinner. Dan has a band called Grateful Shred, who I play with sometimes. We were at the end of a tour, driving back to LA, and stopped at a nice restaurant that had one of those $125 seafood towers. I looked at the menu and said, “Money’s no option. Let’s go.” I said it wrong and it was hilarious. After that, we just ran with the theme forever because it sounds like you’re saying “money’s no object.” So the person you’re talking to might think, “Oh, cool, they have the bread.” But, actually, you have no money. So that became the schtick. We’d be like, “Another round of martinis—money’s no option.”
The song is a sunset for Neal. It felt like the perfect last song on the record, given what had happened, because it’s pretty much just a guitar solo from start to finish. It felt like a good way to drive off into the sunset.
“Then Play On” is the third studio album by British blues rock band Fleetwood Mac, released on 19 September 1969. It was the first of their original albums to feature Danny Kirwan and the last with Peter Green. The album, appearing after the group’s sudden success in the pop charts, offered a broader stylistic range than the classic blues of the group’s first two albums. The album went on to reach No6 in the UK, subsequently becoming the band’s fourth Top 20 hit in a row, as well as their third album to reach the Top 10. The title is taken from the opening line of William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night — “If music be the food of love, play on”.
The Peter Green-led edition of the Mac isn’t just an important transition between their initial blues-based incarnation and the mega-pop band they were to become, it’s also their most vital, exciting version. The addition of Danny Kirwan as a second guitarist and songwriter foreshadows not only the soft-rock terrain of “Bare Trees” and “Kiln House” with Christine Perfect-McVie but also predicts the future sound of Rumours. That only pertains to roughly half of the also excellent material here, though; the rest is quintessential Green,
The immortal “Oh Well,” with its hard-edged, thickly layered guitars and chamber-like sections, is perhaps the band’s most enduring progressive composition. “Rattlesnake Shake” is another familiar number, a down-and-dirty, even-paced funk, with clean, wall-of-sound guitars. Choogling drums and Green’s fiery improvisations power “Searching for Madge,” perhaps Mac’s most inspired work save “Green Manalishi,” and leads into an unlikely symphonic interlude and the similar, lighter boogie “Fighting for Madge.” A hot Afro-Cuban rhythm with beautiful guitars from Kirwan and Green on “Coming Your Way” not only defines the Mac’s sound, but the rock aesthetic of the day. Of the songs with Kirwan‘s stamp on them, “Closing My Eyes” is a mysterious waltz love song; haunting guitars approach surf music on the instrumental “My Dream”; while “Although the Sun Is Shining” is the ultimate pre-Rumours number someone should revisit. Blues roots still crop up on the spatial, loose, Hendrix Green’s influence was on Mac’s originality and individual stance beyond his involvement. Still highly recommended and a must-buy.
Expanded edition featuring original UK track list plus four bonus tracks.
New sleeve notes by Anthony Bozza, which include a personal foreword by Mick Fleetwood.
Real Estate named their fifth LP after a Roxy Music song from 1982—a dark, seductive groove that defines the band’s mastery of hi-fi mood. It’s an odd reference on paper; after all, it’s not like frontman/chief songwriter Martin Courtney has started channeling the glammy art-rock stylings of Bryan Ferry. But the inspiration holds up in a roundabout way: After years of defining “dreamy guitar rock” for the modern indie era, the band was eager to experiment with a more expansive sound.
“With this record, we were looking to not repeat ourselves— that was kind of the main thesis,” says bassist and cofounder Alex Bleeker. “We were at this place of, ‘What is the point of making a fifth Real Estate album in 2020 when it feels like our lives have changed; the musical climate has changed; the cultural climate has changed?’ [2017’s] In Mind was critically well received as ‘good ol’ Real Estate,’ and we were like, ‘We just don’t feel like there’s a point to doing that again. So how do we make sure we don’t do the same thing?’”
They found the answer at Marcata, a massive barn-cum-studio outside New Paltz, N.Y., where they hunkered down with engineer Kevin McMahon. A longtime friend and mentor who co-produced their 2011 album, Days, McMahon helped the band whittle away at their massive pile of songs for more than a year, urging them to question their entire creative ethos along the way. As Courtney would ponder throughout the finished LP, he and his bandmates had started to question the driving force behind this “main thing,” this music career to which they’d devoted their lives.
“It’s funny that we went back to someone we worked with before in order to achieve that,” notes Bleeker. “I kept making the joke that it was like Rocky going back to Mickey’s gym. We needed to get back to the emotional center of the band—we needed to remember who we were before we were on Domino and had much of an audience. We needed to get back to the musical heart of things.”
The process began as it always does, with Courtney building up a stack of rough drafts at the band’s gear hub/demo space. Ironically, given the album’s lengthy gestation period, he started quickly—around six months after the release of In Mind, with the aim of breaking their streak of three-year gaps between records. Even more ironically, he spent less time than usual labouring over the minutiae of the arrangements: With three young children at home, including one in kindergarten and another in preschool, Courtney opted for a series of more structured writing sessions this time—an efficient process that churned out a number of tracks in bare-bones, guitar-and-vocals form. But that shift brought its own unique challenge, too: letting go.
“I left some of these songs a little more open for the rest of the band to interpret,” he says. “I wanted to keep writing and didn’t want to linger too long. I almost want to say it’s harder to get excited when a song feels half-done. A lot of times, I record the drums, bass, lead guitar and keyboards parts when I’m writing. And it’s a lot more exciting to listen to those demos because they’re fully finished songs. Sometimes, I can’t stop listening to them. With these demos, it was like, ‘OK, this is promising. This is a good seed of a song, and I’m psyched about this vocal melody. I’m gonna leave it at this and move on to the next one.’”
Since the band’s formation in 2008, the other members of Real Estate have always helped shape their own parts. But Courtney completely relinquished the reins for The Main Thing, opening up his songs to new grooves, arrangements, even instrumentation. That sense of freedom became a throughline for the entire process, allowing Bleeker, drummer Jackson Pollis, keyboardist Matt Kallman and guitarist Julian Lynch to help bring Real Estate into an entirely new era.
“It can be frustrating, going through the process of fleshing out a song with the band,” he says. “Even if I haven’t finished the demo, I sometimes have an idea of how the song should sound, and if it starts going in another direction, sometimes I get really frustrated. But the process of making this record was me trying to let go of that feeling and just let it be more of a collaboration. This band has been together for a long time, and that’s where I was: Just allow these songs to evolve. I can always go back and make a solo record, and do everything myself and scratch that itch. Sometimes it’s exciting to see the songs go in a different direction and take on a different life than what you expected them to.”
For Bleeker, that process was liberating—an excuse to incorporate influences that may have previously been deemed incompatible with the Real Estate brand. “Certain songs that Martin wrote, like ‘Friday’ or ‘Paper Cup,’ didn’t really have [our usual] rhythmic groove underneath them in the demos,” he says. “That came with other people putting their spin on them: Jackson playing a soul beat, me playing a funky bassline and Martin having the grace to be like, ‘OK, let’s try that. That’s not the song that was in my head but, you’re right—maybe we should push it into some new territory.’ It can be difficult. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve found ourselves in this position where, in places that we thought we’d have more stability, we’ve actually realized there’s no shortcut. You almost have to work twice as hard because you’ve already invented this one sound and—in order to expand on it successfully or change in a way that’s not disingenuous—you’ve got to put in at least twice as much work.”
However, The Main Thing isn’t a major departure from the band’s sweet spot: The hazy electric jangle of “Friday” and “November” could slot in seamlessly on their previous albums, from their partly home-recorded debut, 2009’s Real Estate, to the polished In Mind. But it’s their most confident tweak to their signature sound: Early single “Paper Cup” finds Courtney singing over a vintage soul wash outfitted with strings, auxiliary percussion (courtesy of The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick and Brazilian Girls’ Aaron Johnston), buzzing synthesizers and the call-and-response vocal of Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath; and the ambient interlude “Sting” layers reverb-heavy piano over a pitter-patter beat; the gently cascading “Also a But,” Lynch’s first composition for the group, veers more into full-fledged psychedelia.
Lynch’s fingerprints are all over the album, including the liquid-y guitar solo on “Also a But” and a particularly glorious melodic part on “You,” a song Courtney wrote for his then-unborn child. The guitarist—who grew up with Courtney and Bleeker and officially joined Real Estate in 2016 after the well-publicized exit of cofounder Matt Mondanile—became fully ingrained in the group’s creative process on The Main Thing.
“With In Mind, I’d just joined the band and there was some degree of hesitance on my part. I didn’t want people to think: ‘Who is this stupid guy who’s in the band now? Why’s he playing guitar in my favourite band and not me?’ There was some suspicion toward me initially, and I didn’t want to be blamed for some new element introduced—some guitar sound that wasn’t characteristic of the band. I didn’t want people to say, ‘This guy just ruined my favourite band.’ So I didn’t take too many chances on In Mind, but my guitar approach was much more deliberate on this album. I had more time to think out my solos. I was in an environment I felt really comfortable with.”
That environment, friendly yet philosophical, was fostered by McMahon, who has known many of the members of Real Estate since their teenage years. But McMahon was still an unlikely choice for a band hesitant to repeat themselves. Their record label, for one, was afraid everyone would be too comfortable. But the opposite happened. When Courtney reconnected with McMahon to record some songs for a friend’s movie, he realized they’d both wound up in a headspace of creative self-doubt—leading to lengthy conversations about career goals and their place in an erratic industry. It was the perfect time to reconvene with Real Estate—the familiarity of working with an old friend, away from the stress and clinical atmosphere of a top-dollar studio, gave them the confidence to branch out of their comfort zone.
“One thing I remember him doing is asking us why we were doing things,” says Bleeker. “Not in a negative way but just like, ‘Why are you playing the bass like that?’ He was like, ‘If you have an answer for me, that is satisfactory. I’m not making a judgment call on whether that’s good or bad.’ I realize now that five albums deep, you tend to be like, ‘This is what we do.’”
“Obviously our lineup has changed a few times, but we became a 10-year-old band two years ago, and this is our fifth record, so we don’t want to start going through the motions,” adds Courtney. “The idea was to question every decision we were making as we were doing it, which was also something really encouraged by Kevin. The record was as important to him as it was to us, and he was really invested in it both in terms of his career and since we are friends. It’s been a collaboration with every producer we’ve worked with, but this was deeper in some way.”
McMahon was crucial in urging the band to embrace their new sounds and sound-makers—one of many factors that led to the album’s long arc.
“We made a conscious decision to work with outside musicians for the first time,” Courtney says. “That was something Kevin encouraged us to do—maybe to make it feel fresh. In the past, we’ve been really [hesitant] to do that. I’ve always looked at this band as four or five people and whoever we’re working with as a producer at any given point, and that’s it. Whatever sounds were on the record were made by us, and I’ve become very protective of that. I was [scared of what would happen] if someone else came in and we didn’t like it. You don’t trust anyone to tamper with your sound. But I’m really glad we did. We were pushing ourselves to try new things, trying to be more thoughtful about the parts we’re playing.”
“We got to some places that were uncomfortable and scary,” adds Bleeker. “Julian’s song is one of my favorites and a standout because it’s by a songwriter who’s never written for Real Estate before and has a different sensibility. I remember being psyched on the song when we were recording it, but I also thought, ‘How are our fans gonna take this? It doesn’t sound like Real Estate.’ You have these weird little neuroses that build up and you have to push through.”
The sessions were revelatory. They recorded enough material for a double album, though they decided to table some of the recordings—including the recent, jam-heavy live favourite “Half a Human,” which they hope to revisit down the line. (“I’m the resident jamband lover of the band,” Bleeker says, breaking down the track.) Despite the productivity, the length of their process eventually started to wear on Courtney, as deadline after deadline slipped between their fingers.
“I did get frustrated a few times because I wanted it to be done,” he says. “I kept setting these arbitrary [timelines] for myself, ‘We’ll get this record done by June and get it out by October.’ Then, when we realized that wasn’t going to happen, we said, ‘We’ll get it done by October and get it out early next year.’ But, these deadlines meant nothing. Maybe I was just excited to have the record come out. Then it was like, ‘This record has to be done within the calendar year of 2018.’ And then, January comes around and we’re still recording strings and stuff. I kept having to be told to just relax. Alex and Kevin kept being like, ‘Why do you need to have this record done? Really ask yourself that question—there’s no reason to have this record come out at any given point.’
“Making a record becomes stressful because the band is pretty off the radar,” he adds. “We were touring a little bit, but we didn’t have anything new coming out, so people stopped talking about us. You feel like, every day that goes by, fewer people are going to care when the record actually does come out. I’ve felt that way with every record after our first one, and I’ve always been surprised that [fans] end up caring, no matter how long it takes.”
More crucially, Real Estate still care about Real Estate. Recording The Main Thing reinforced their reasons for making music in the first place.
“[That’s] part of the reason we ended up working so hard and for so long,” Courtney says. “It felt a little more important this time around. We really felt like it was a milestone record for us. If we’re gonna do it, we should try to make it the best thing we’ve ever made.”
Real Estate – from ‘The Main Thing’, out now on Domino Record Co.
“Deceiver”, their third LP, is a tidal wave of slow-core ruminations and shoegaze distortion that finds singer/ guitarist Zachary Cole Smith surveying the planet’s demise and his own recovery after a well-publicized battle with drug addiction. But those cathartic songs helped the frontman chart a clear path forward.
“I’ve gained a lot of clarity in the distance I’ve had from active addiction—the shitty times I’ve had in my life and the shitty times we’ve had as a band,” he says, brushing off the suggestion that these songs, played onstage, might serve as reminders of a more painful period. “Mostly it’s trying to communicate lessons from that time, rather than living in it or revisiting it for the sake of itself.”
It’s impossible to tiptoe around the substance abuse narrative that’s dominated the press cycles throughout the band’s career. Smith, a Brooklyn indie-rock journeyman, formed the first iteration of DIIV—then called Dive—in 2011, and his shimmering, guitar-driven dream-pop captured an instant audience with their debut LP, 2012’s Oshin. But a dark cloud soon hovered over the band: The following year, Smith and his then-girlfriend, singer Sky Ferreira, were arrested after heroin and ecstasy were reportedly found in his van; original drummer Colby Hewitt quit in 2015; and bassist Devin Ruben Perez, who left the lineup in 2017, was discovered to have made offensive comments on the website 4chan.
The band’s long-awaited second record gestated during that stretch, emerging in 2016 as Is the Is Are—a more hi-fi and somewhat optimistic song cycle that drew on Smith’s recovery. But in real life, the dark cycle continued: After canceling a stretch of tour dates due to what band reps called an “urgent health issue,” Smith checked himself into a long-term inpatient program in 2017—leading to stints in rehab and a sober living house.
With all that drama in the band’s collective past, it’s only natural that Deceiver hits harder than their previous work—full of sculpted fuzz, mammoth dynamic shifts and woozy tremolo bar dives that recall the majesty of My Bloody Valentine. The thematic heaviness seemed to breed sonic heaviness: “I think it definitely did,” Smith confirms. “To match a lot of the lyrical themes, I think the music had to meet it halfway, so they work together. I’m sure there’s a relation there.”
Much credit goes to coproducer/engineer Sonny Diperri, who helped the quartet—Smith, guitarist Andrew Bailey, bassist Colin Caulfield, drummer Ben Newman—zero in on maximizing the “sound of a four-piece rock band.”
We’ve been called a ‘shoegaze band’ ever since the beginning, and I don’t ever feel like it fit us,” Smith says. “The more we worked on the songs, the more we got feelings and textures from certain shoegaze bands that we loved. And we wanted to bring those [ideas] in for emphasis on parts. In the middle of working on the record, Sonny got the call to go out to Ireland and work with My Bloody Valentine. So he had a pretty intimate knowledge of how the album they were working on was made and how their previous records were made. He taught us a couple things that MBV does for some of their textures. It’s a small part of the record— we didn’t lean on it too hard. We just tried to use it where it made sense.”
Smith also chalks up that dark descent to a 2018 tour with post-metal act Deafheaven, during which they experimented with new material before entering the studio. “Deafheaven were big influences on the way we approached stuff,” he says. “We were trying out slower tempos live. A lot of our references were slowcore bands that we all love, including ‘90s stuff like Bedhead and Red House Painters and Duster. Though some of those slower tempos are difficult to adjust to, they gave us more freedom to write the songs we wanted to write.”
The word “freedom” is key. Deceiver is the first DIIV album credited to the full band, rather than Smith alone—and they relied on that collaborative spirit during the writing sessions. Everyone swapped influences and reference points, focusing and pruning back the arrangements, even chiming in with occasional edits or suggestions to Smith’s words in a Google document.
The lyrics, which arrived during the final writing stage, focus on deception and “personal responsibility”— raging against climate change deniers (the apocalyptic postpunk surge of “Blankenship”) and reflecting on “youthful sins” (the feedback-laced crawl of “Lorelei”). For Smith, it could have been a bit weird to give up that creative control. But, in a clear sign that he’s newly focus after a time in rehab, the DIIV frontman quickly embraced the opportunity to reapproach the project. “We’d already developed a very productive dynamic for how to speak to each other,” he says. “It was awkward the first time, like, ‘Welp, here’s the lyrics I’m thinking. Read my fucking diary.’ But everybody’s input was helpful.”
For DIIV, the collaborative process was about more than music—it’s the fresh start for a band that likely would have fallen apart without one. “I feel like it was just one facet of a bunch of shit we did as far as maturing into a real, functioning band that was long overdue,” says Bailey.
We got into a good rhythm,” Smith adds. “I’d love to see it go even further.”
Exciting news all, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of ‘Olympian’, Demon Music Group will be releasing an 8LP deluxe edition vinyl box set on the 14th August.
Nineties British group Gene see all their albums reissued in a limited 8LP coloured vinyl box set – with signed print – and via a nine-CD box set, which includes an extensive amount of bonus material.
The vinyl package features all four studio albums – Olympian (1995), Drawn To The Deep End (1997), Revelations (1999) and Libertine (2001). It also features the 1996 compilation To See The Lights. Three out of those five are double albums, so that gives us an 8LP vinyl set.
These sets are limited to 1000 units and come with a 12″ x 12″ print signed by the band. It also includes a booklet with notes written by each band member and a piece by journalist Keith Cameron, who signed the band to his Costermonger label back in 1994.
The albums are pressed on coloured vinyl and the colours are as follows: Olympian (white), Drawn To The Deep End (maroon), Revelations (green), Libertine (pink) and To See The Lights (gold).
The nine-CD box set offers all of the above and adds bonus CDs for the following albums: Drawn To The Deep End, Revelations and Libertine. Live album Rising For Sunset (due to be issued on yellow vinyl for Record Store Day this year) is the ninth and final disc in the CD box. The bonus material replicates most of the content from the 2014 individual deluxe CD editions, but not quite everything. For example, the Revelations-era BBC ‘Live In Concert’ is notable by its absence. Like the vinyl set, this CD box comes with the booklet with notes.
The best drum machine always is a human being,” says Leif Vollebekk, underscoring the organic aesthetic of his fourth LP. With the soulful New Ways, the Montreal native aimed to escape “the grid” of modern music production: rejecting rigid metronomes in favor of the wavering pulse of a drummer, recording live to tape instead of endlessly editing in software. “The computer or the click track is a robot, so you’re working within robotic time,” he reflects. “You can be human within it, but I want the human to be on the outside.” New Ways exudes humanity. Over the fluid, oceanic piano chords of “Never Be Back,” Vollebekk alternates between a raspy Ray Charles moan and rapid-fire Kendrick Lamar triplet rhymes—occasionally just ahead of or behind the beat, depending on where the groove takes him. “It’s basically only about the feel,” he says, noting the record’s discarded placeholder title, The Way That You Feel. Given how gracefully these songs flow, it’s surprising to learn the album nearly didn’t exist.
Discouraged by the collective shrug that greeted his first two LPs, a pair of folky projects more blatantly inspired by his formative hero Bob Dylan, Vollebekk contemplated pivoting to another career altogether: “I thought, ‘If this doesn’t work, I might hang it up for a little while,’” he recalls. “Nobody needs another record, and I don’t need to keep recording when people aren’t coming to the shows.” He decided to go out on his own terms: Ignoring any kind of outside perceptions of his music, he wound up crafting his 2017 breakout, Twin Solitude, a set of “chill” ballads that generated an influx of Spotify streams, TV syncs and a shortlist nod for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize. New Ways, then, was built on the foundation of that goodwill. He wanted to “connect with people,” to be less meditative and “solipsistic.” So he used a bare-bones recording process that broke down almost every barrier between artist and listener: In the studio, he played and sang accompanied by a live drummer, later embellishing the tracks with unobtrusive bass and strings to “shape” the atmosphere. Having “cleansed his palette” of balladry, he moved away from “ethereal” sounds into a vibe slightly more upbeat, tighter sounding and direct. “For the longest time, I thought I wasn’t supposed to have feel,” Vollebekk says, reflecting on his sonic evolution. Now that feel is everything.
