Works In Progress

Bill Mallonee has long been one of my most favorite song-writers. I was first exposed to him through his band Vigilantes of Love. I remember reading about them in an issue of No Depression magazine, which at the time was my preferred music reading rag because I was deep into the alt-country scene. Me and my buddy Clay would go to Tower Records every month or so and I would pick up the latest copy. The record they were writing about in this case was Audible Sigh and it said all the things I wanted to hear in a record.

When looking at the metadata associated with Bill and with VoL you'll probably see things like Contemporary Christian and Christian and Religious. To me that is a stretch. Those genres are the compilation discs you see advertised late at night on Fox News where you see people in the crowd swaying their arms and singing along to incredibly bland and lyrics. I have no problem with an artist exploring his faith, to each his own, right? Bill Mallonee does explore his faith deeply but not in an insulting or overt or pushy way. He's a man who has faith and is struggling with it, struggling with the day to day challenges of life, and using his faith to get through it. The songs are often questioning, looking at the hardships of life and how we get through them in our own ways. It's exhilarating song-writing.

I had a chance to meet Bill very briefly at a show he did with VoL at Iota in Arlington VA. It's a small club, very intimate. I remember the crowd was not that big, but he and his band put on a great show. He was a great presence on stage; he looked a bit nerdy but he commanded the stage with tics and hand waves and tilts of his head. After the show he and the band were selling their merchandise in the lobby. Usually I am very shy in these scenarios but I bucked up and bought a VoL tee-shirt, which I still proudly wear.  What I remember most is the genuineness with which Bill thanked me for coming out and taking a tee shirt home. I always try to buy something at a show, especially for bands that are out there working hard doing their thing maybe struggling from show to show.

Bill records under his own name now. He's been doing a long-running series of download-only recordings he calls Works Progress Administration. I urge you to check them out and if you can download one or two. They feature his and his wife on all instruments. I have downloaded several of them. Right now I have "Heaven In Your Heart"/WPA 18 playing. That's the last one I got and two more have come out since then. Right now "(I'm Always) The Last To Know" is playing. It's typically great. Here's a taste of the lyrics:

There's a place out here
where the sky gets clear
and tired world holds it's breath
the light finds a curve
undisturbed
and that whisper...it's either God or death

His music is a challenge against the difficulties of life. And there is always grains of hope in the trials. Sometimes that's all we need. And sometimes's that all the music needs.

Here's Bill doing the title track form the record that first caught my ear:

Singled Out!

One of the many cool things about buying vinyl exclusively is finding little 7" singles. Artists use these to release special things (like when I wrote about Record Store Day) or just a way to release odds and ends or just getting something cool out there. Here's some 7" singles I've gotten in the past few months.

Birth of the Pipesnakes by The FED - Truth be told I know these guys and I had the true honor of playing a gig with The FED last night. Happily they were selling copies of their vinyl and I was more than happy to snatch up a copy. They are a great local DC band that do a kind of swamp-boogie-thing. I describe them as Kings of Leon before Kings of Leon started to suck. Their live show definitely makes you move. My favorite track off of this is the first cut on side A, "'83," just a great piece of dirty rock n roll. The rest of it is plenty great to.

"Criminal Fingers"/"The Bear and the Maiden Fair" by The Hold Steady - This was a 2013 Record Store Day buy (actually I cheated and bought it on eBay). The A side is a mellow track called "Criminal Fingers" but it's the B side that is the real jewel: their imagining of "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" from Game of Thrones. The National did something similar with "The Rains of Castamere," keeping to the morose and sad spirit of that track. The Hold Steady do their thing here, bringing their classic exuberance and energy to a fun song. I am going to try to talk my band into covering this!

"Southern Comfort"/"Stars" by Æges. A great progressive metal band from California, leaning more toward the prog side but with plenty of heaviness. They are made up of guys from Pelican, Undertow and Rise (amongst other bands). They do the de-tuned guitar thing but have a great sense of melody and happily the singer sings and doesn't grunt or snarl. The first side is a cut off their great record The Bridge. The back side is a great unreleased tune called "Stars." It has great dynamics with heavy sections broken with mellower spots connected by a great pop sensibility when it kicks into it's groove.

"Deny The Absolute"/"The Truce" by Pelican - Speaking of Pelican, they are another great progressive leaning metal band. Where Æges has vocals, Pelican keeps it to instrumentals. These are two new tracks off their forthcoming record. Like I keep preaching, I love melody, and these guys have a sure grasp of it. The A-side is a great stomper; you can bang your head but not so much that you break your neck.  The B-side is a great acoustic-based number, a really nice touch from a normally heavy sounding band. They are playing DC9 in November...I already have my tickets! I bought both this and the Æges record from The Mylene Sheath. Check them out for a lot of interesting proggy metal acts.

Iron Road by The Old 97s - Last and certainly not least is one of my most favorite alt-country acts The Old 97s. This is another Record Store Day get (though they appear to have released it in greater quantities now). Their are two 7" here featuring 4 tracks from 1996. The first disc is a treat because it has the original outlaw himself, Waylon Jennings, taking the lead vocal on "Iron Road" and "The Other Shoe." Waylon's classic voice fits the Old 97s like a glove. Just a perfect slice of outlaw country. The other disc has demo versions of "Visiting Hours" and "Fireflies."

True Widow; Palms; Black Tusk

I've been amiss in my musings as of late! My sincerest apologies for that! Despite the absence I can assure you the records continue to spin on the turntable. I have found myself in a harder-rock kind of mindset lately so while the mood has been light the rock has been heavy.

I think it was a tweet that turned me onto a band called True Widow. They are a three-piece from Texas, two guys and a gal. I guess they get lumped into metal but they are more a hard-rock or stoner-rock kind of band. Stoner not in a Black Crowes way but stoner like when Black Sabbath tried to get deep. Sleep is the ultimate stoner-metal outfit but True Widow aren't that heavy. I checked their latest record, Circumambulation, out on Spotify after hearing about it and was just blown away. They make just the kind of heavy sound I dig: it's hard but it grooves, it breathes, it has room. It isn't fast at all, it has space and it powers along with a dynamite sense of melody. Music like this is often described as plodding. But True Widow don't plod; they stride like a giant. They remind me of The Sword but without the silliness and at half-speed. The vocals are strong alternating between boy and girl singing, and sometimes coming together very nicely. The song titles are interesting...tracks like "S:H:S," "I:M:O," and "HW:R" are mixed in with more typical heavy sounding tracks like "Creeper" and "Numb Hand."  It's not top 40...if you're looking for something radio friendly this ain't it. But if you like heavy music with a great sense of melody, strong melodic vocals, and great playing, you will like this record. They are coming to town in a few weeks and I plan to be there.

Here's the aforementioned "HW:R." Great track!

Palms are a supergroup of sorts. Not like Blind Faith or even Black Country Communion, but among the art metal set they are pretty high up there. Three-quarters the guys from Isis and one-quarter Chino Moreno from Deftones. The latter I have never really gotten into, but Isis is one of my more favorite of the progressive metal bands. Palms' self-titled debut record is mellower than either of those outfits' work. Art metal...kind of I guess...it's very atmospheric. Take opener "Future Warrior:" during the verses the drums are precise, the bass lines skip around the neck, the guitar weaves in and out and the vocals lay in over the top, then the chorus kicks in and the band locks in tight. This song is pretty emblematic of the record. Moreno does some of the best singing I have heard him do. What I like best about it is the mood it generates. Like True Widow's record it's a great headphone album. Chilling in the dark connecting with the music. Music is all about connection; good music at least. Something you can latch onto. It's lovely, if something classified as metal can use that descriptor. I think it can. Metal doesn't need to always be "Reign In Blood" (though that doesn't hurt!) and huge riffs. Metal can also be stirring, relaxing, something to soothe after the long day. A record that you can unwind to. Palms accomplish that perfectly.

One knock on it, it's a double record, two of the sides having only 1 song, granted they are both nearly 10 minutes long. With vinyl making a resurgence I'd like to see bands start to reign themselves in and get the material to fit a single record. That can be tough because the music is the music and how it comes out is what it is. But I am lazy and don't want to get up to flip and change records every 10 minutes. Rough life, right? Buy the CD and quit complaining! HA!

Here's "Future Warrior:"

Then there is Savannah's Black Tusk. Where as True Widow has an elegant kind of stoner metal and Palms soars like a dream, Black Tusk's latest EP Tend No Wounds hits like a hammer. They are more like fellow Georgians Mastodon than Kylesa (though this record is produced by that band's Phillip Cope). I like good sludge metal; music that's heavy like mud in the bottom register. This EP is heavy and it rocks with the tuned down guitars and has the requisite scary album cover. But then again they use a string section for the great "The Weak and the Wise." I like a metal band that's not afraid to do something like that; it's a nice touch. Vocally it has the usual shouting business but that's fine; even the growly parts which I usually don't like are done singing and not grunting; the singing overall is great and suits the music well. The first time I played the vinyl I played it at 33rpm instead of 45rpm. It took me two minutes to realize it was the wrong speed, though. HA!

Here's "Enemy Of Reason."

All this writing about metal bands lately. I have to admit that's where my taste has been taking me lately. I plan on tuning down one of my guitars and cranking up the distortion to see the heavy kind of tone I can get. Maybe an EP of sludge metal, sounding absolutely nothing like what we do now, is on the way. It's good to keep ones horizons wide! I promise that the next post will be something mellower.

Stories from the Studio

If you LIKE my band on Facebook, then you probably know that a couple weekends ago I spent about 18 hours at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington VA. This was easily one of the coolest, most entertaining weekends of my life.

My band has gotten to the point where we felt it was time to do some serious recording. Our demos, which as of this writing are still at our ReverbNation site, were done in Tom's basement by us. They sound pretty good, but we wanted to have something that sounded great, done by a real producer in a real studio. A lot of this was vanity. Like I have said before we don't have any delusions about quitting our day job. Music for us is a fun way to express our creativity and let off some steam. The experience of working at a real live recording studio was something that excited us all.

We were originally supposed to work with TJ Lipple. He was on the roster of Inner Ear producers, actually had a website, and produced a record by Boris Milic I wound up buying a couple days later when serendipitously seeing a show at the Rock n Roll Hotel. This seemed sort of like karma, so I emailed him and we exchanged messages and agreed on a date to meet at the studio just to get to know one another. The entire band came out and we met and talked and hung out for a good 90 minutes at the studio. We went away with a settled date and feeling confident that TJ would do a great job.

The first name on the list was Don Zientara. He owned and ran the studio and was the engineer for a ton of great DC hardcore and straight edge bands like Bad Brains, The Dismemberment Plan, Minor Threat, and all of the Fugazi records. When I saw his name I laughed, thinking "yeah, that guy will want to do our little record." I actually got a call from Don a few days after I sent the deposit check in. I wasn't going to answer the ring but it was a local Virginia number. "Hi this is Don from Inner Ear! Just wanted to say we got your check and are looking forward to you guys coming in!" I think I was kind of in shock. He seemed like a really nice fellow and I was looking forward to possibly meeting him at the studio.

Fate would step in. Maybe a month before we were to record TJ wrote that his wife reminded him of a prior commitment on the date we had arranged. He said we could either move the date or he could find another producer for us. We liked the date so TJ kindly went to find some one new for us to work with. A day or two later I get an email saying Don would work the board for us. Don Zientara, the guy who worked on this. And this. And this. And this.

At first I admit I was a bit intimidated. Mainly because I thought what would he think of our songs. My neighbor Steve had done recording at Inner Ear and said Don was cool and just another guy. So intimidation turned to real excitement, knowing we were going to work with a guy who had worked on some sensational albums. Like with TJ, we met up with Don a couple weeks before hand. We found him very personable and friendly. He asked if we had our demos with us, so I pulled out my iPhone. He seemed to dig the music and we parted all looking forward to recording.

So studio day came and we were all pretty psyched. Don had told us to bring everything we had and I pretty much did that. Even my acoustic guitar in case the spirit moved us. The drums took a while to get set up right because you have to microphone them just so. Don actually kicked us out of the room so that he and the intern Nick could finish the job without us milling about. So we hung out in the lounge and ate cookies and drank French press coffee that Mike the drummer brought. Every now and then Don would summon one of us so that he could test the levels. When it was my turn he had set up baffles around the amps so there wasn't too much room to spare. After about two hours we were ready to start playing.

The room itself was divided into two sections. The far end was where the drum kit was set up with around 11 microphones carefully set up. The room bottlenecks in the middle before expanding again and that is where the other three of us were set up. It was kind of cramped but not bad at all. A window looked into the control room where all the cool recording tools were. This wasn't just a guy tapping a keyboard, though there were computers and monitors, but a big giant control board with 30 some tracks available. It was very impressive, and looking at it was pretty much like reading Greek. There were chairs on a raised area behind the board so we could watch as Don fiddle about with controls.

The recording itself was a great experience. We did 6 songs in one day, averaging about 3 takes per song. We did a guide vocal track as we played to help keep the time but those vocals were naturally tossed out and we re-did them after clearing out the room of all our gear. I took maybe 2 or three tries per song; one gave me a particular hard time because I had to sing pretty high. Don did a neat trick where he would tell me to sing just the chorus on one pass and on another to sing just the verse. This allowed him to mix it together and not have me fighting for breathe in between.

It was all good-humored and fun. There was zero tension. For my part I took to Don's suggestions without any argument. At one point he said "Good, I like compliance!" I feel we were pretty easy to work with and we didn't obsess over every little point. None of the oh-I-missed-a-note-there stuff. It wasn't absolutely perfect, but we didn't need it to be. Nor could we afford it to be. I can easily see how it can take a year to make Hotel California where you just start obsessing over things, tinkering constantly to iron out the performance.

After 10 plus hours we broke for the day. Tom and I were coming back the next day to do the mix. Patrick and Mike had family duties to attend to. Afterwards Tom and me and Patrick went for beers and dinner at Hard Times. We all enthused about how fun it was, how good it seemed to go, and how much fun it was to work with a real pro like Don.

The mixing process was interesting. It was here we really got to tweak the songs. He sort of level-setted the first track and instructed us to start fiddling. Tom and I thought it sounded great and were hesitant to start but after a bit we got into it. We agreed that his solos needed to be brought up so that took center-stage at the right point. For one song I did start fretting over my guitar tone. I had a specific sound in my head and me being an amateur I couldn't really describe it. Finally Don says to be "do you want more bass, mid-range? More treble?" I didn't know what I wanted, so I just said "I want it to sound Black Sabbath-y." Don nodded and said "mid-range." He turned the knob and there it was...the opening chord to "Iron Man." Funny that the most romantic song in our repertoire, the most overt love song, is the one I wanted to sound like Tony Iommi. HA!! The best part was when Don turned to me at one point and complimented me on my singing. What an awesome thrill!

We took about 2 hours per song and were really happy eith what we had. Don put it on flash drives we had brought and also did a very rough master so that we would have something to listen to before we had it officially mastered. TJ was going to do this for us. Tom and I left with CDs for the car ride home and were both ecstatic with the results, even though they weren't finished yet.

So as of this writing the tracks are with the master engineer, who in our case is TJ. He also said some nice things when he listened to them. Hopefully by Early August we will have some real CD-ready songs for you to enjoy!

If you want to se photographic evidence, I recommend checking out our Facebook page. I have a whole album of pictures there! And be sure to LIKE US!!

Sunday On The Town

Looking for something interesting to do? Have I got a suggestion for you!! Come see my band, Braddock Station Garrison, do its thing at The Black Squirrel. This is a very cool place located in the heart of Adams Morgan on 18th Street in Washington DC, just down the street from where Jimi Hendrix did a five-night residency in 1967. History!!

The Black Squirrel has some of the tastiest burgers in town along with one of the slickest beer menus around. Plus it's an intimate little place to see a show. And did I mention it is FREE. As in NO COVER CHARGE! As in come on in, plop down have a burger and a beer (or three) and enjoy the free music!

We go on around about 9pm, so don't be late!! There's a public parking just around the corner, which we highly recommend if you are not cabbing or Metro-ing down. Come on down early to hang out!

Here's our sweet-ass flyer! Come on down and tell us how good it looks!!

Queensrÿche, By Any Other Name

Have you heard the new Queensrÿche album? The appropriate response (other than "no") would be "which one?" This is not something similar to what Guns n Roses did with Use Your Illusion. This is two different bands with the same name releasing albums within a month (or something like that) of one another.

On one side you have Queensrÿche featuring vocalist Geoff Tate and a bunch of hired guns who have spent time with Dokken, Candlebox, Ozzy, and AC/DC. Their new album is called Frequency Unknown and features 10 new originals plus 4 re-recordings of Queensrÿche classics, their most well known song "Silent Lucidity" included. Geoff had an incredible voice. At their high water mark (early 90s) he was among the best rock vocalists around. He's always seemed to be a bit of an ego-maniac but when you make records like Operation:Mindcrime and Empire and Rage For Order you can use it to positive purpose.

On the other side you also have Queensrÿche. This one features the rest of the band regulars: Michael Wilton, Eddie Jackson and Scott Rockenfield. Chris DeGarmo (the other classic-era guy) flies jets now and only dabbles in music. Good for him. This other version features some other guitarist and the guy from Crimson Glory. Their record is called, simply, Queensrÿche.

All the hullabaloo seems to have been caused by the brunt of the band getting sick of Geoff Tate, which isn't that surprising. Evidently Geoff's wife was their manager, whom the band fired without Geoff approving, which caused Geoff to become even more insufferable. Fair enough, I don't really begrudge them that. So now they are fighting over who owns the brand name. I am surprised there hasn't been some sort of injunction or something (I admit I am no law-talking-guy) that prevents one or the other or both from using the name. Yet here they both are. One of them is playing DC in a few weeks. I think it's the Tate version.

I saw Queensrÿche on their 30th anniversary tour a year or so ago. That made me feel very old. I enjoyed the show because they played all the old bests, but I did think Geoff spent way too much time babbling. I also saw them when they toured behind Operation:Mindcrime 2, yes they made a sequel to their album. If you know the story it makes sense. My buddy Doug went with me and he hated the sequel record. I thought it was ok. They played the first record...took a break...then did the second record. All with a couple actors on stage acting bits out. Strange but whatever.

When I was in high school and my first few years of college I loved Queensrÿche. I don't hide that I am a metalhead and prog fan and Queensrÿche skate that line in between. I still like listening to the real Mindcrime record and Empire and the very under-rated Promised Land and the even more under-rated Hear In The Now Frontier. The albums after that have been kind of meh.

The Geoff Tate album is...fine. It's kind of uninteresting. It has the usual Geoff Tate bombast: he talks over bits of songs as if he is speaking to someone next to him in the recording booth. The music is fine...it sounds like Queensrÿche but is missing something. Remember that it's called Frequency Unknown..."F U"...and the cover has a fist wearing rings, one saying "F" and one saying "U." Get it? Great joke, I wonder who he is talking to.

The non Geoff Tate record is, I think, much better. It actually musically sounds like a Queensrÿche album. And the vocalist, Todd La Torre, really sounds like Tate. There were a few times the first time I listened to it where I had to double check which version I was listening to. The songs are all fairly short, which is a good thing I feel. They are to the point, get in get out. Self-titling the record is a nod to re-birth, starting anew. It's interesting that Tate has the "queensryche" DNS, while the other guys have "queensrycheofficial" just to keep things confusing.

What really cripples the Tate version is the re-reecorded versions. They are totally unnecessary, just a jibe at his old band-mates. And they aren't that good...they don't even approach the originals. They make the whole enterprise kind of sad. It's too bad that a great band can't ride off into the sunset, or just do a record and tour every couple years and make their fans happy and re-live their arena filling days. Now it's just pettiness and business and lawsuits and counter-suits.

So if you like the 'rÿche, give the Tate version a listen to satisfy curiosity. And check out the self-titled album. Neither of them are really Queensrÿche but it's closer to it.

Here's the best track off the record I like: "Redemption." It's got a cool soaring chorus and the typical laser-like guitars.

Heresy: Floyd over Zep?

Yesterday my wife was hanging out with me listening to records and she said I should put on some Zeppelin. The only vinyl copy I have is Led Zeppelin II (would have had the debut if I had gotten to the record store ten minutes earlier but that's another story...well, I guess the story is pretty much told). We put it on and she asked me who I liked better: Zeppelin or Pink Floyd. I response, without hesitation, Pink Floyd.

This shocked my wife, so much so she immediately went on Facebook and announced it. "Steve says he likes Pink Floyd better than Led Zeppelin. He's proud of it and not ashamed. What the hell?!???" Happily a number of people have risen to my defense.

Like many teenagers in the 80s/90s I was obsessed with Pink Floyd. I had the posters, I had the cassettes and then the CDs. I had the VHS vide tapes. I had a Floyd visual history book which breaks my heart that I can't find now. I was even tempted to buy a guitar (even though I couldn't play at the time) because it had the Gerald Scarfe artwork from The Wall on the body. On some subliminal level I appreciate the artsy-ness of Floyd. Mainly it was because I loved David Gilmour's guitar playing: "Time," "Money," "Wish You Were Here," "Have A Cigar," "Comfortably Numb," "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)," "Run Like Hell," "Hey You" were all in constant rotation on Q102 back in Dallas when I was growing up. And Gilmour has such a unique style of playing it just stuck.

Probably what sealed it for me was when Floyd released Momentary Lapse of Reason. It's pretty much a David Gilmour solo record, but as a Floyd record it's still really really good. It came out in 1987 when I was watching MTV constantly. MTV had a Pink Floyd weekend (imagine that today!) and they spent 3 days previewing the record, showing old clips, showing the movie The Wall, showing interviews with David Gilmour and Nick Mason promoting the album. Here was an old band that had classic music I heard all the time on the radio making a new record; something that was accessible to me as a 14 year old beginning to shape my own musical interests beyond that of my parents; something I could call mine that I couldn't necessarily say about Dark Side Of The Moon or Animals. And it had some great songs: "Learning To Fly," "Dogs Of War," "Sorrow". Even "One Slip" is a great little number.

From there it was buy every record, even stuff like Relics. I admit I didn't really get The Final Cut (though I now think it's amazing in it's way). I got all the posters to hang on the wall. I bought Delicate Sound Of Thunder on CD and VHS when it came out and played it into the ground. I played the Live at Pompeii video tape constantly.

It took a while for me to warm up to led Zeppelin. There is a sinister-ness to them that I didn't quite get. And they sang, unless it was about hobbits or misty mountains, about squeezing lemons till the juice ran down their legs. I wasn't against that, but for music I was far more interested in literateness (AC/DC being the outlier to that). Floyd and Rush, later Iron Maiden and Metallica and Qüeensryche. These bands were bringing great music AND great lyrics and ideas. They made me think.

The first Zeppelin tape I ever bought was The Song Remains The Same. It's amazing I went on to like Zepplein after that, because that is probably the worst live record ever made. I think I got it because it was a double cassette and had a lot of songs I knew on it. That was the only Zep tape I ever had. The first CD boxed set I ever bought was the 4-disc Led Zeppelin box. Again there was a bit of a hullabaloo about the release of that. It might have been one of the first big box sets released..it might have been Zeppelin's debut on CD. But I remember going to Sound Warehouse on Josey Lane in Carrolton at 10am on Tuesday to buy it when it came out.

Music is all about connection. Be it MTV hyping a new Floyd record or rock mags heralding the debut of Zeppelin on CD. I was a bit older with Zeppelin...that box probably came out in 90 or 91. So I was just a bit more advanced but my musical foundation had already formed. And Floyd were a huge piece of it. Zeppelin was built on top of what came before.