Stellar (2002)
this rivals A ROOMFUL OF SEXINESS for the worst drum sound i ever recorded, but this time the drummer himself is to blame; tyson took it upon himself to school me in the art of microphone placement, and completely killed most of the kit’s sound in the process. i was able to get the new sound to work well enough on the second half of GOOD LUCK IN THE NEXT LIFE, but here i was forced to eq the shit out of the kick drum in an attempt to get rid of the mud he had created, and nothing brought back the attack the snare had lost, though the sound does improve quite a bit on the last half of the album due to tyson’s more aggressive playing. maybe it was the presence of his iron cobra double bass pedal that muddied the waters. he said he was generally more comfortable playing double bass, but this was the only cd of ours for which he actually brought the thing over to my place. while i could probably improve the overall sound quality significantly if i remixed the album now, i think the muddy sound suits the material. this makes our previous two albums sound pretty warm and fuzzy by comparison.
some of my best rhythm/lead guitar-playing is here on the likes of mean it and beauty breeds confusion, and on the latter track i still can’t believe i was able to squeeze all of those ideas into one live take. today i would probably use at least two different guitar tracks to get all that information across. a lot of the songs are shorter and are starting to sound more like “proper” songs with some amount of structure, though the subject matter pretty much kills whatever radio-friendly potential they may have had in someone else’s hands. we’re out of tuna is the token extended track, and it’s one of the strangest things we ever did, featuring some pretty unhinged singing with barely any actual words, some creepy laughter from tyson, a section of backwards beer bottle slide bass from gord, and one part that sounds something like an elephant stampede on peyote. the unpredictable ending is too insane for words. gord always wanted to play this song live because he thought it would really blow people away, though we never got the chance to try it.
tyson has another moment of spontaneous vocal interjection that doesn’t quite come off on beauty breeds confusion, and even adding vocal harmonies of my own after the fact couldn’t cover it up this time. strangely, whenever we would listen to the song he would shoot me an ugly look when it came to that part and imply that i was the one who was off-key. whatever makes you feel better, i guess. he does it again in the middle of barbiturates, though his brief off-key moan actually sounds more like microphone feedback than a human voice, which is kind of funny, and he would always duplicate it whenever we would play the song in rehearsals for what turned out to be our final gig. tyson had a thing for occasionally singing when he really felt it in the middle of a song. sometimes it really worked, like on redound, where there’s this weird melodic sound that fades in and out near the end when i’m singing falsetto, and it definitely adds something to the song. it took me months before i figured out that it was tyson singing into his overhead drum mic and not some strange cosmic microphone feedback of my own. he does some nice high falsetto singing for a bit in the middle of barbiturates too, though it doesn’t come through as well as it should because of how far the drum mics were from his mouth.
i don’t solo nearly as much here as i had on the previous two cds, picking my shots more carefully. when i do take a guitar solo, it’s a lot more dense and compact, with a lot of ideas squeezed into short bursts. i’m not sure how to explain it exactly, but where SUBLIMINAL BILE and GOOD LUCK kind of sound like they’re coming from a similar place, this album seems to be coming from somewhere else entirely. there’s a lot less searching going on. even on something like rancid popcorn, which might have been a nice mellow song on the last album, my singing is full of venom and warps the music into something a lot stranger. but this isn’t a one-man show by any means, and there are a lot of sexy moments from the other guys. tyson’s drumming is ridiculously creative throughout, from the dance-influenced beats and crisp fills he hammers out on mean it to the grungy throb of electricity, the jazzy solo fill at the beginning of rancid popcorn and the almost tribal rhythms in parts of we’re out of tuna. likewise with gord, who unleashes some insanely gorgeous bass playing on it’s only a game, which ends up driving the whole song, and i don’t think he was ever able to duplicate what he played there. tyson talked me into adding a long harmony section to the middle of the song when i hadn’t intended to, elevating it to an emotional place it wouldn’t have reached otherwise. it’s one of the few true GWD ballads. i feel great, on the other hand, is pretty savage, featuring what has to be some of my most intense and emotionally uninhibited singing of all time. in the past i was always the one who would keep songs going past their natural conclusions, sometimes to tyson’s displeasure, but here he was the one who urged me to kick into a final verse when i was ready to stop, mouthing “keep going” repeatedly with a mesmerized look in his eyes. i love his “OH MY GOD!” outburst at the end of the song, even if the end of it got cut off when i stopped recording. if i had let tyson talk me into smoking some mary joanna before we recorded the song, it would have come out completely differently, castrating my rage and effectively robbing the song of most of its power. he always thought it was odd that i wasn’t into recording under the influence…but then, he wasn’t the one improvising the lyrics. i wanted to be firing on all cylinders at all times. he and gord smoked out on the porch while i seethed inside, waiting to explode…and explode i did.
there really isn’t anything here i’ve ever thought of as filler, maybe because the album is only an hour long, which was a little on the short side by our usual standards, so there wasn’t as much room for lollygagging. that’s a funny word, idd’nit? lollygagging. even molest the sky, which is kind of slight compared to most of the other songs, is an oddly joyous end to an album full of self-loathing and bitterness (at least on my part; i think gord and tyson were having a good time). my little rant at the end about the formation of a halfway house for emotionally damaged animals is one of the few playful bits on the cd that recalls the silly days of old. when it was all over, i told tyson that it was interesting how it seemed like we had really become a true band by this point, and it was funny how much tighter and shorter our songs had become. i mean, the first six songs (plus a cast-off that shows up on CONDOM MINTS) all come from one session, and it still boggles my mind that we were able to pack all of that variety into an hour or two of one day. while gord agreed with me, tyson couldn’t make up his mind about the progress we had made. at one point he said that it was a good thing our songs were shorter now, because they had been “boring” when they were really long a few months back and he hated them (kind of surprising when he had never expressed anything but fondness for our music in the past). a few days later he would say, “our music’s boring now,” because the songs weren’t so long and unpredictable anymore. it was getting difficult to figure out what he really thought about anything. he also hated the fact that i kept little between-song bits of dialogue and false starts, because he felt it made our cds sound unprofessional, but i’m really glad i kept that stuff because it gives things an organic, human atmosphere. we were just three guys improvising most of this stuff in a little room between the kitchen and the living room anyway. why try to pretend we were doing something else? when i went back to remix SUBLIMINAL BILE and GOOD LUCK to fix my weird panning from the first editions, i even reinstated some bits of banter i had cut out the first time around.
the title for this cd was another one of tyson’s ideas. i think he was making fun of someone and said the word in an effeminate voice with a lisp, and something about it appealed to me. i thought it was a stellar album. i even went so far as to write on the back of the jacket, “this cd should be played fucking LOUD.” there was talk of entering battles of the bands, playing gigs all over the place, and maybe even living together at some point so we could just record non-stop. the possibilities seemed endless, and love was in the air, at least for a while.
TRACKS:
happy, happier
mean it
beauty breeds confusion
we’re out of tuna
it’s only a game
barbiturates
i feel great
rancid popcorn
electricity
pigeon shit
molest the sky
STUFF TO LISTEN TO:
