dressing to undress

more varied than SUBLIMINAL BILE, and not quite as consistent as a result, but some good stuff lives here.

hurt like it should is one of our more rhythmically interesting songs, and one of my more intense vocal performances up to this point. at the end there are two outbursts that are pitched somewhere between screaming and weeping but don’t become either one, coming off more like some weird feral howling. it felt like i was ripping pain out from inside of myself while singing it, which i guess was kind of what i was really doing. the odd rhythm came out of tyson pointing out a part near the beginning of “vicodin” where my guitar stutters at will and follows a different rhythm from what he’s playing on the drums, and he suggested that we intentionally try to craft something similar that was a little off-kilter rhythmically to mess people up—but this time, instead of a brief moment at the start of the song, it would be a recurring thing. gord was a few hours late showing up at my place, so we had time to cook something up in the music room while we were waiting for him, and for some reason the first thing that came out of my fingers was one of the nicer-sounding things i’d played on the guitar in a while. by the time gord arrived the seed of the song was there, with three bars in 4/4 followed by one bar in 5/4 at double-time. could this have been the beginning of tyson’s interest in odd time signatures? we may never know. tyson brought over his video camera to record the session, and when we watched it later it sounded to me like there was a harpsichord playing a decorative figure an octave or so above the guitar. i’m not sure where that came from, and i’ve never been able to figure it out or hear it again. maybe it was my brain’s stoned way of telling me to overdub something along those lines. i didn’t, though tyson tried to get me to add some harmonies after the fact. i tried, and i also tried adding a bit of additional guitar, but it seemed wrong. i preferred the song naked, like most of our music. i did consider replacing my guitar solos because i had no idea what i was doing at the time and they sounded kind of shitty to me, but tyson said they were “relaxing”, so they stayed.

eating my own waste is strangely upbeat, with my guitar echoing in druggy ways and gord and tyson laying down some funky shit. there’s even some silly scatting at the end. gutter trash is one of the most accessible things we ever did, and you could almost call it pretty, which is kind of scary. it’s got a bit of a reggae ballad feel to it, though the lyrics keep it from getting too normal. i like the bit at the beginning with tyson laughing and fooling around before he realizes we’re recording. it sounds like he’s responding to something i said, though i can’t remember what it was. what else? almost resembles a conventional rock song, with one of my best guitar solos on the album, and provided some amusing moments when, during rehearsals for one of the few gigs we played, tyson would ask, “what else?” after we finished a song, and i would say, “that’s the next song!” only to get a blank, uncomprehending stare back.

this time out, a few of our improvisations don’t cohere as well as they had on the last album, particularly on asphyxiate and tonsillitis in a vacuum. the former features a few nice harmony bits and a very stylish entrance from tyson, but doesn’t really do anything interesting for most of the song (this time i really meant it when i said “i got nothing”), while the latter features some of my best discordant guitar playing and a monster of a bass riff from gord, but again doesn’t quite find its feet…though i have to admit i dig the last bit, when it segues into an unexpected little funk vamp that has nothing to do with the rest of the song. i did make some pretty angry facial expressions when I was snarling some of the lyrics in asphyxiate, and tyson told me he was genuinely frightened by them. absolutely perfect is simultaneously one of our catchiest tunes and one of my filthiest diatribes, and tyson felt my lyrics were some of the best i had ever come up with off the top of my head. we were just getting up after a night of recording, drinking, smoking and videotaping (tyson not only taped us recording the first four or five songs, but there were also some insane skits we improvised in the park later, though i’m not sure how much of that survives today because i imagine he probably recorded over most of it). i was still half-asleep and my brain felt like it had a layer of motor oil gumming up some of the gears, so i’m not sure how such a silly little song came about or how i managed to sound like i really was awake and mentally alert. too bad about tyson’s out-of-tune attempt to harmonize with me at the end…which is why the song fades out before an extended coda that goes somewhere else entirely.

something about lies would be one of our best mellow tracks if it wasn’t for all of the wrong notes, but i guess that’s the price you pay when you never really rehearse anything. gord looked strangely comatose while we were recording it, and later claimed to have no memory of the session at all. on the video of our final live performance you can hear the song the way it was meant to sound. blood at the back fares better, with a nice smoldering buildup to the overdriven climax. gord provides some tasty lead bass while my guitar fills in most of the low end. we all get off is the most violent thing on the album, taken at a pretty fast tempo, and tyson somehow manages to make it sound like he’s playing some fills with a double bass pedal when he isn’t. things end on a demented note once again with old together, but where “vicodin” was psychotic this song is more playful, and nowhere near as lyrically driven. indeed, it was one of the only times i got to stretch out on an instrument with keys in the final phase of the band (tyson said he hated the sound of the piano, though he would later change his stance on that subject), and there are long instrumental passages that border on jazz, or at least as close to jazz as we could ever hope to get. i like the eerie repetitions of “you know what you want” and tyson not being able to find his beer at the end of the song. he wanted me to start the album with an interlude, which is a little skit where i become the host of a game show called “guess their dick size” (’cause we’re guys with dicks, don’tcha know), during which contestants must try to ascertain how well endowed each member of the band is. he and gord thought it was hilarious, while i thought my little monologue was pretty lame and far from my best work. i kept it near the end of the album where it belonged, because i felt hurt like it should was a much stronger and more appropriate beginning.

once the album had been mixed, tyson called me from work and told me that the music was better than SUBLIMINAL BILE, but my singing wasn’t as good. i couldn’t really get much of an explanation out of him beyond something about me being more emotional on the last album. a few days later i asked him about it again and he decided that my singing was up to scratch after all. gord didn’t seem to have a preference between the two cds, but thought the ladies would like gutter trash. alas, we never got to find out if girls would swoon to the song during live performances and plead with us to take them backstage where we would make wild, passionate love to them for twenty eight seconds.

TRACKS:

hurt like it should
eating my own waste
asphyxiate
tonsillitis in a vacuum
absolutely perfect
something about lies
what else?
blood at the back
gutter trash
an interlude
old together

STUFF TO LISTEN TO:

Gutter Trash

What Else?