Wake Up, It's The Arcade Fire!

Photo: FLAME ON! Arcade Fire in-concert.

Another new musical discovery! From Montreal come the wonderful Arcade Fire, an eight piece amalgamation of talent led by Win Butler and wife Regine Chassagne. They play anthemic, lush and dramatic pop. It's flowery and often dark at the same time, creating a sound reminiscent of The Cure and Dream Academy. Yes, 80's influenced to be sure. But instead of synths, these guys (and gals) use accordion, mandolins, hurdy gurdy, pipe organ, violins and percussion. They've realeased two full length LP's, 2004's "Funeral" and the newly issued "Neon Bible". Highlight songs are "Wake Up" and "Tunnels" from the first CD, and "Black Mirror" from the second, a tune that conjures Bowie's "Heroes" era. And if the cathedral organ chords at the beginning of Neon Bible's "Intervention" don't raise the hair on the back of your neck, I'd question whether you actually have a soul.

In April of 2005 they appeared on the cover of Time Magazine's Canadian edition, with the headline "Canada's Most Intriguing Band."

Saw them on Austin City Limits over the weekend and both I and the wife were blown away. These kids, all multi-instrumentalists, put on an energetic show, with Butler the very charismatic front-man. No big histrionics on his part, but no shoe-staring either. Very solid, and a huge cut above the average emo-alt pablum of this generation.

Get ignited with The Arcade Fire!

Me Likey!

Here's what I'm listening to this week: Eisley.

They are these kids, all siblings, from Texas. Tyler, Texas. Yup! If you don't know about Tyler, there's only a few things you need to know. First, it's in East Texas. Second, it's the Rose capital of the world (sorry Pasadena), and third, it's where the first three ZZ Top albums were recorded all those years ago. Back then it was home to Robin-Hood Studio, and the colorful engineer Robin "Hood" Bryan. I met him back in the early '80s, and he had some great stories.

But, as always, I digress.

Now Tyler is also the home of the DuPree kids. Why is the band called "Eisley" and not "DuPree"? No freakin' clue.

So check 'em out. The stuff is dark and dreamy, yet alluringly poppy. Sort of Evanescence meets The Corrs meets Belly. Neat stuff. My song of the week is "Invasion"

Ghost Harmonics

Well, I have to start with something, right? I have so much I want to post, that deciding where to begin is hard. So I went to some recent posts of mine on Gearslutz and pretty much randomly grabbed one.

It's choice was not quite random, truth-be-told. I have been listening to a couple CDs I engineered and produced back in '90 and '91 by a band called Anastasia Screamed. This was a very unusual, adventurous band. You could almost call them Avant Garde, and definitely ahead of their time (Pre Nirvana "Never Mind"). The sound-scape we created was that of noisy but flowery guitars, sometimes harmonically beautiful, sometimes clashing and dis-cordant.

http://www.anastasiascreamed.com/index_flash.html
http://www.myspace.com/anastasiascreamed23

We layered electrics (primarily Fenders) and acoustics over multiple tracks. Like, the two guitar-players would both play on the basic track along with the drums and bass, and then I'd have the two of them both do an overdub pass at the same time, often playing different parts and guitars than they had played on the basic. So in two passes we had created four electric tracks. Then we'd do leads and acoustic guitars, feedback tracks, the occasional slide guitar part, and even a dulcimer or mandolin track on a song or two.

The guitar mics we used were SM57, Senn 421, Beyer M500 ribbon (my secret weapon back then, before the whole ribbon revival), and even some very nice vintage condensers, like Neumann U67, M49 and AKG C12. Pres were usually API 512B, along with the desk pres from a Trident 80B and a Neve V. Compression, when used, was usually my standard choice, the Teletronix Urei LA-3A. Nice gear huh? Recording guitar is my love and my specialty anyway, so I was in hog-heaven. And these guys were good players, albiet unorthodox. Funny thing was, they could play everything from country to blues to jazz to Led Zepplin if they felt like it. But their original songs sounded like all of those influneces spun together in some psychedelic Osterizer. The result was challenging alternative rock music, which some might even consider an acquired taste.

So I'm driving around in my car the last couple days, listening to these CDs for the first time in 1o years, and really enjoying what I was hearing, especially the guitars. And knowing full-well there were many guitar tracks, I was hearing sounds-- voices, bells, organs, etc --that I know were NOT part of the recording. And this time I was sober as a judge, unlike when we were creating the recordings. Let's just say there was a lot of "magic" happening in the studio then.

Which brings me to the Gearslutz post:
http://gearslutz.com/board/
Replying to a guy who was hearing a "phone ring" in a mix he was working on.

Phones, choir voices, horns, acoustic guitars, harps, angels...If you DON'T hear those things in your mixes you are unusual. I noticed it much more in the all-analog days, but when all those instruments combine they create overtones and bell-like sounds that become a sounds in-and-of themselves. We called 'em "Ghost Harmonics". I remember one time we were mixing this tune and suddenly this keyboard string kinda synth part just appeared out of nowhere. There were no keys on the tracks. All guitars and vocals. When we played the finished mix for the artist, they actually thought we had added a keyboard part. Nope. Overtones.