dressing to undress

well…i said it was time for a change after the last three albums seemed to form something of a loose/unintentional trilogy (though what you’d call them or what stylistic blanket they fit under, i’m still not quite sure), and this is definitely a change. where the last few albums were very much organic affairs with very little in the way of synthesized/manipulated sounds, this is a bit of a different beast. it’s still a fairly organic affair, but it’s also a pretty synth-heavy album, which isn’t something i’ve done in a good four years or so. the alt-folk-ish/bluesy thing that started out in full force on CHICKEN ANGEL WOMAN is mostly absent by now, save for the odd track like zombies on parade or organ smears. the triple-tracked vocals are still there in some places, but i made a bit of an effort to break away from that, as difficult as it was, since layering my voice all over the place has become more or less an unconscious thing at this point. the roomy brushed drum sound that’s become the norm also shows up in some places, though it’s just as often joined or supplanted by loops and/or synthesized percussion of some sort. in general the whole thing feels a little more fleshed out and “produced” than the last few things i’ve done—which themselves felt more fleshed-out than most of what i’d done before—albeit still relatively stripped-down in the grand scheme of things. in the end i’m not sure what this album turned into. it isn’t at all the heavily electronic album i went into it expecting to make, but it isn’t a rock album with big guitars, or a summer pop thing either. nor is it a throwback that takes anything else i’ve done as a point of reference. it turned into very much its own thing, and i don’t know what i’d compare it to in my catalogue. it seems to have somehow become either one of the more accessible things i’ve done in a while, or one of the least accessible. i’m not sure which it is. maybe it’s both. i mean, something like my good deed for the decade is practically radio-friendly, aside from the lyrics being too odd for commercial radio, and there isn’t even a dissonant bugle blast or anything ugly in there to derail its accessibility. but at the same time there seems to be a darkness or a sadness there that keeps it from getting too comfortable. so i guess on the surface some of these songs might be among the nicer and more accessible sounding things i’ve done lately, and if you don’t dig too deep, they might work pretty well as background music. but there’s a lot of cynicism and weirdness just beneath the surface (or usually not even trying to hide beneath the surface), and i suppose all of this was just what needed to come out at this particular time, whatever it is.

in keeping with the theme of the last several albums, the opening track isn’t much like anything that was on the cd before it. i guess it’s sort of my odd take on dub-tinged electronic jazz-funk or something. the catalyst/inspiration for the track was something as simple as accidentally setting a delay effect improperly, yielding a dubby sound i’d never used before. at about two in the morning i thought i would run some synth drums through the accidental new effect, played with my fingers in real-time with no music to work off of, and then see what happened. i went back and added some synth bass. the next day i added a bit of singing, some wah-enhanced electric guitar and improvised some jazzy piano on top. and there was the song. it was fun trying to wring as much as i could out of a bass line that almost never strays from one key.

it has to be said that a new toy is responsible for some of the songs and a lot of inspiration; one of the stars of the show is an alesis micron, which packs a mighty punch for something so small and relatively inexpensive, and it tends to show up in some form on almost every song here, even when it isn’t the driving musical force. it’s mostly eric welton’s fault for unexpectedly lending me his alesis ion (the micron’s big brother) for a few days in may, which led to the recording of weird sex dream #72. that song was the first thing i’d ever done with vocoder in it, and it was interesting trying to use such a universally cheesy sound in a way that wasn’t cheesy. i think it was successful, and the resulting song is like some sort of weird electronic ballad. come to think of it, a lot of these songs are rather down-tempo. the danger of all things adhesive joins the likes of “peculiar love” as one of the oddest love songs i’ve ever written for someone who doesn’t exist (aren’t they all about imaginary people? my love songs always are, anyway)—this one is delivered to an urn containing someone’s ashes.

to that end, i find it kind of funny how an album that i intended to be pretty dance-y ended up full of songs that are not the most dance-oriented material, and this might be one of the most down-tempo albums i’ve made in recent memory, overall. it also feels pretty dark to me. i’m not sure why it came out that way. pretty much all of the anger and nastiness i had swimming around inside of me was purged on IF I HAD A QUARTER, and none of the songs here are about any people who actually exist. i must just not be capable of making a typical summer album at this point in my life. this is a shorter album for me, too…it’s only a hair-and-a-half over an hour long, and there are only about half the amount of songs the last album had. granted, some of them are fairly long songs, and i guess by most normal standards an hour is still a pretty long album. but by my recent standards it’s a little bit leaner than usual. there are no tiny songs to act as segues or random curve balls, and no jokes or winking asides. i don’t think that’s really a good thing or a bad thing…it just is what it is, and makes for a different kind of johnny west album. if they were all the same, there wouldn’t be much point, would there? then again, try explaining that sentiment to the likes of nickelback…now that would be a fun conversation. artistic evolution/experimentation vs. having so much money you can afford to have a swimming pool built that automatically senses the presence of urine and immediately isolates and eliminates it, so you’re free to swim in the nude and piss whenever you feel the need to do so, without ever having to leave the water.

swoon.

there are some more uptempo things thrown in to keep you from nodding off, though in most cases the lyrics are still far from sunny. one exception is generic love song to play at your wedding, which is not quite what its title suggests, but if i had someone real to write love songs for, they might come out sounding something like this. so maybe i would be able to avoid getting sappy through dementia. but we’ll never know for sure, will we? zombies on parade would probably be the first single off of the album if this were a commercial release, though it would die a shameful death on the radio thanks to some fairly demented singing and messed up lyrics undercutting how catchy and fast-paced the thing is. surely there’s a hit single out there somewhere that references puss, termites and horticulture, right? surely.

there’s a whole hell of a lot of piano on this cd. i must like playing that thing. even on songs like learning to float, kamikaze daybreak and molly go home (and the list goes on) where it isn’t at all the main instrument, it was fun to just hit the record button and improvise some piano on top of the song to see what happened. so that’s what i did. there’s also a lot of electric guitar, but the 1960s teisco that saw a ton of action on the last few albums is entirely absent here; this time most of the electric guitar parts are provided by an unjustly neglected fender strat, and a kay thin twin (that funky thing’s biggest, shiniest moment is probably on molly, go home, though it’s also all over several other tracks). there’s no bugle, almost no melodica or ukulele, and no banjo to be found at all. i didn’t intentionally set out to avoid those instruments; the sounds i was after this time just didn’t seem to involve them. now watch the next album become a big banjo and ukulele love-fest. there are featured spots for things like mandolin and scrap metal, anyway, and probably more organ than there’s been on an album of mine since…well…ever. overall i think this is possibly the most sonically interesting and varied thing i’ve done so far, on the recording/mixing/general sound quality side of things. must be dumb luck, because i didn’t spend any more time pretending to be a producer than i normally do, most of the songs are first/rough mixes done immediately after they were recorded, there are still rough spots and mistakes all over the place, and i’m still not paying anyone else to master the music or anything to make it all sexy and shiny. maybe i’m still getting better at whatever it is that i do as i continue to do it. who can say?

for me, molly, go home is kind of the centerpiece of the whole album, and also the turning point, after which things get a lot stranger, darker and more interesting. it starts out sounding like something that could have fit on any of the last three albums without much trouble, very much in tune with the whole organic/naturalistic thing, and eventually mushrooms into a mantra-like wall-of-sound ending that isn’t quite like anything i’ve ever done before. i would have kept building it up  to truly gargantuan proportions, but only having 14 tracks to work with (the last 2 are always reserved for bouncing down to cd) held me back. maybe that’s for the best…i wanted the last few minutes of the song to be at once melodic, gigantic and sickeningly distorted, and by not being able to take it as far as i might have, the melodic aspect remains completely intact, probably making the repetition a lot more pleasant to listen to.

what were to be two of the most radical tracks on the album didn’t even end up making the cut. first there was a ten-minute juggernaut called “gun to the temple of love” that was going to be sort of a funk/krautrock-influenced workout, though it would eventually veer off in other directions. it was a good vehicle for some of the nastiest guitar-playing on a cd of mine in a long time, and an excuse for some fun wordplay. alas, i stopped working on it before it was anywhere near complete after realizing it would derail the flow of the whole album and probably become the “revolution 9″ of the cd (i.e. the track everyone skips over). i’m sure we’ll see it show up on some other album down the road, though. then there was a cheerful tune called “the only figure skater i’ve ever been attracted to is now a meth dealer”, which was going to make the cut until i changed my mind about it at the ninth hour. it would have probably been the bleakest thing by far on a generally bleak album, and i went for a bit of a thom yorke-ish thing with some of the singing, which isn’t something i’ve ever thought to do anywhere else. in this case it felt like i needed to warp my voice a bit (without relying on effects) to get what the song needed. the whole thing was inspired by a blog entry i found randomly on wordpress that was a somewhat abbreviated version of the song’s title, and briefly examined the strange story of nicole bobek.  in the end it sounded a bit too much to me like i was trying to emulate a twitchy radiohead electronic track, and as much as i like the fact that it doesn’t sound much like me (and the horrific mess of synth noise at the end is pretty fun, too), again it seemed like something that would derail the album. i also realized once i  mixed it that it simply didn’t seem quite up to par with the other songs anymore. it was heartbreaking, if only because i ended up losing the most amusing and lengthy song title the album had. but what can you do? it’ll show up elsewhere before long, i’m sure.

the penultimate kiss went in the other direction. to regurgitate a bit of what i posted on the main part of the site before the album was finished, it has to be one of the more bitter (”bitterer” shouldn’t even be a word as far as i’m concerned) and resigned ballads i’ve written, and it had an interesting time arriving at its final destination. it was first written on an old 1940s parlour guitar with a rather propulsive rhythm while watching the grammy awards in bed, hoping against hope that mickey rourke would get a taste of victory. it wasn’t written about anyone in particular, but the defeated atmosphere was very much in keeping with what i was feeling at that time thanks to the girl who inspired a good chunk of IF I HAD A QUARTER. i sat on it for a while, not sure if it was worth recording at all (it didn’t even get a look-in on the album it had been written for), and then about halfway through the recording of this album i thought i’d take a stab at turning it into a piano song instead, basically winging it while recording and changing some of the chords in the process. the challenge then became taking a fairly uninteresting piano ballad and fucking it up to make it more interesting. i added some synth and vocoder, but it wasn’t doing it for me, so i left it alone. i kind of liked it…i just wasn’t sure if it was really album material. when i revisited it after some time away, i suddenly found that i liked it a lot more. the vocal is a scratch track that i eventually came around to liking enough not to replace with a better take. i kind of like that it’s a little uncertain and imperfect. you can hear me experiencing a moment of brain freeze after the first line of the second verse, stammering while trying to remember the words without the lyrics in front of me. the plan was to build up layer upon layer of synth, guitar and vocals to create something sort of orchestral and bombastic, but i decided i was too lazy to do that. so the melody remains intact in spite of my best intentions to destroy and bury it. originally there was a lot more vocoder, until i decided it was a bit too much and cut out some parts. but i think it might work even better on this song than it does on weird sex dream #72, acting more as accompaniment to my unprocessed voice than a standalone thing. i also got rid of a silly wall-of-vocoder outro—it was fun, but ultimately a bit superfluous. funny how this track and “figure skater” unexpectedly swapped places; the one i liked most ended up losing its appeal, and the one i assumed was destined for out-take status (as so many things are) ended up acquitting itself. for a song that i didn’t even plan on including, i now can’t imagine the album feeling complete without it.

some of my favourite things come near the end, and i think this album might have one of the strongest final stretches of anything i’ve done. maybe i like to save the best for last. a fine line between friendship & baked goods is sort of an unconscious marriage between the synth wankery i initially intended the album to be dominated by, and the triple-tracked lead vocal, organic thing that permeated the last three albums. the electric guitar here is another example of an improvised scratch track i felt iffy about, and then grew to like enough to keep. kamikaze daybreak takes a song that might have been at home on CHICKEN ANGEL WOMAN, and then runs it through an electric cheese grater until it becomes unrecognizable. it also marks the return of the slapback echo effect i used to employ so often back in the day, though the vehicle it supports this time is a little different from what was happening during the time of guys with dicks. it might be the busiest thing on the whole album, and mixing it was a pain in the ass because i was basically mixing three different songs at the same time. it starts out sounding like a noise/sound collage piece not quite like anything i’ve done before (that seems to be a recurring theme on this album, doesn’t it?), with some pretty out-there electric guitar insanity, segues into the song proper, and then abruptly becomes something else altogether at the point where i would have ended it an album or two ago. the slide guitar coda was something i played for fun and didn’t intend to keep, so it’s not very well played or recorded because i wasn’t really trying to make anything out of it, but i ended up liking it enough to make it the end of the song.

anthropomorphism dance began as nothing more than the metallic percussion loop that runs through the whole song, and stayed that way for a while, just a rhythm in search of a song. then i started singing on top of it, found a melody i liked, added two frenetic bass tracks in different octaves, overdubbed a spastic drum part unlike anything i’d ever played behind the kit before, added some electric guitar and ukulele, and it became something completely different. still, it was difficult to keep that rhythm going in tempo behind the drums with the syncopation of the loop and the bass kind of throwing me off in places, and you can hear me start to lose it near the end. the last minute or so of the song felt like a bit of a lull without much direction as i lost steam behind the drums and the whole thing seemed unsure of where to go. on a whim, i overdubbed some organ from the micron, ran it into a tube amp for some extra grit, and messed with it throughout that lull. suddenly it sounded like exactly the ending that was needed, and more like a lopsided climax than a petering out. the end result is one of my favourite things on the album, and not quite like anything i’ve ever done before as far as i can tell (see?! there it is again!), sonically—the ukulele has a very brittle sound to it, almost sounding as if it’s a part of the metallic synth loop when it comes in, and the guitar is somehow a simultaneously upfront and distant over-driven squall—or otherwise. it hurt me a little bit to put it right at the end where some people might not hear it, but realistically i think it’s the best ending the album could have had. it’s definitely the most rhythmic and uptempo thing to close an album of mine in a very long time, if not ever, and like a bizarre ray of partial sunlight after all the downcast stuff that came before it. but it feels right.

there’s also only one dirty word on the whole album, and it isn’t even one of the dirtiest ones. what’s up with that?

this is the first time i’ve ever included a booklet with lyrics and pictures…figured it was time i gave it a try, even though these aren’t necessarily my best or most interesting lyrics. the pictures got a little grainy during the transition to the booklet, but it’s still kind of neat to have. i don’t know if i’ll do it again, but it was fun to do this once.

all in all, i’m not sure what exactly this album is or what it wants to be called, but you can smell my floral entrails all over the place, and for that we should all be grudgingly thankful.

TRACKS:

pre-prom plastic surgery
zombies on parade
weird sex dream #72
my good deed for the decade
learning to float
generic love song to play at your wedding
molly, go home
the penultimate kiss
organ smears
a fine line between friendship & baked goods
the danger of all things adhesive
kamikaze daybreak
anthropomorphism dance

STUFF TO LISTEN TO:

Weird Sex Dream #72