WORDS
CHOCOLATE BAYOU
This song started w/ the working title "Swampy Fugazi", due to one of Anne's guitar parts reminding her of a swamp & the rhythm section sounding distinctly Fugazi-ish. Originally Leslie played bass, a first for her (though parts were subsequently rewrote & expanded on the record), & to get that UFO warble Anne fiddled around w/ a thick KAOSS pad delay. The funkier middle & end sections are us kinda sorta trying to play something off Head Hunters or maybe some 80's R&B groove, while a new end was dreamed up as studio experiment w/ double tracked drums & hand percussion fading in & out over an extended guitar/bass/synth workout. The title comes from an unincorporated town in Texas.
CITY of SIRENS
This is the city that won't go to bed. It greets its morning w/ a red eye, a creeping, bleary kind of mean & a handshake like the men they're fishing out of the rivers again & again. Alarms clocks litter the streets, faces bleached a sickly white. Empty, staring, tossed aside & left to rot underneath the ceaseless crackle of fluorescent light, copper wire & stifling heat. The chatter from the mouths in this town is enough to cut you down, chew you up & spit you out; a reputation, a tarnished crown. Can we hush the klaxon wail of conversation on the knife's edge of a place that hasn't slept? Kept awake by a foul mix of self loathing & caffeine binge it tries to caress but only rends. A taint, a scrape, a crash, a stain. A city founded on the sound of steel on concrete.
You need to find one patch of green. A place to rest your head & sleep clean & guilt free. Clean & guilt free.
ENDYMION SPRING
Two, two, two; I remember snowball fights in empty streets. Who are you now, so cold? The air in your wake bites like a thousand tiny teeth, to slip inside my clothes just like a thief & steal whatever heat's left in me. Summer, how can we feel the warmth you bring when all they're handing out now are steel gray skies & cutting winds? So brief, then it leaves me.
FRESH KILLS
We've grown so close, like predator & prey. I wonder, will I lay in your jaws today? It's hot breath on my neck that has me frantic & I know I shouldn't panic, but I know that smell's on me. What's to say, is this how we play? Fox, get the hell out of the hen house; you won't dine that way. It's a post-modern kiss that has my nerves frayed. When I feel your teeth so deep, I know this blackest joke's on me. Cracking smiles or cracking bones; can we get back once the mouth's closed?
HE'S ANGRY, HE WANTS REVENGE
The title of this song had been kicking around for about 3 years now (we recycled it from our last band). Anne tends to see melodies as images or stories, so we wrote this as an imaginary soundtrack to two scenes. The first is a worm's eye view of a bus stop. A bus pulls up, kicking up dust, then stops. Door opens & a boot steps down. The second is a first person view of a group of men in suits approaching a man @ the counter of the bus stop's diner. They gather around & begin to menace him. He doesn't look up. One of them reaches out & he grabs his arm. There's a moment when time seems to slow, & then...
M. HEARTLESS
Sometimes great ideas lead nowhere. This song started life as a South American (Baian, maybe?) styled drum loop on the sampler, then we added the E6/9 - D6/9 progression over it, but it never really went beyond that wonderful little cul-de-sac. So we rethought our approach & attacked it w/ a more straightforward, to us, rock & roll approach. Since heading into the studio the quiet middle break gained a new piano melody, the end gained a new guitar part (something to really push it over the top), & the whole song gained new bass & synth parts. The title comes from a profile on Comcast's Dating On Demad our absent friend Micah taped for us back in the TMVL days, on the Ruffian BFF tour.
MECHANISTAS
This song just might have the longest gap from when we started & when we finished. Very early on Anne & Leon had worked out two song fragments dubbed "Lonely Cubone" & "Butterfree" (specifically when Ash's Butterfree leaves him... way back in O.G. Pokemon) that did little else but gather dust in the intervening years. So when we started this, as a very minimal guitar/drums sequence that sort of builds upon itself, & needed a gear shift, we tried using old ideas in new contexts. The sampler patch on the end of this sounds horrible on its own, but if you pitch shift something up an octave & add a whole mess of delay, you can make anything sound good. The rest of the crazy studio concoction we call the end is Leon pretending he's Steve Howe w/ arthritis & Chris Squire @ the same time. The title comes from the fixation Leon has w/ having titular songs that don't appear on the recordings they are named for.
the MODERN TIME
This one started out as a sample of an African drum beat that we messed around with and a guitar part that Leon had written. We added various parts, and at one point, Anne said it reminded her of some sort of mechanical/industrial thing, like it took place on the outskirts of a factory. We ended up sampling us banging on various bits of metal, as well as us banging on a 50 gallon oil drum that we rolled right under the window of our practice space (on the 3rd floor) and snaked a mic out the window to catch the sound. The title of the song was inspired from this whole theme, and comes from the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times.
NEW OCEANS, WET LEAVES
Remember Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in Disney's Fantasia? In case you didn't it's presented as snapshots of the first billion years of Earth's development (right up through the end of the Jurassic/beginning of the Cretaceous). Anne was always taken w/ how the music in the early seas ebbed & flowed, & when we began messing w/ this she suggested we write each section as a stage in evolution, from single celled organisms on through mammals. The title comes from a dream Mike Barrett had while we were on tour w/ Belltonesuicide where he was playing a new song called "Wet Oceans, New Leaves".
NINE OLD MEN
I've let my nails grow so long I'm afraid that everything I touch I'll cut in two. I've spent too long patching this together just to have it come unglued through a slip of the finger or a flick of the wrist. But we all know a tongue is sharpest a moment after kissed. My mouth a wound this argument keeps opening w/o consent. Did you say the bathroom needed a new coat of red? We can paint it w/ out hands curled into fists. I've let my hair grow so long I hope that everything I've seen will fade from view. I've spent too long washing my hands of any blame to have it be untrue through the tip of a hand or a flip of the switch. But we all know we see better w/ the lights on in every room. The darkness nipping @ our heels, trying to find a new way in. You know you can never lock a door w/ a broken hinge.
SKELETON DANCES
The second song we wrote as a band, this sprang from the main synth melody Leslie plays. If "Secret" was an exercise in making a song out of disparate elements, then this was the exact opposite. The song is primarily composed of a handful of melodies we layer in different combinations. It was also the first time we wrote an entire backing track on the sampler... looking back, it's really astounding that we were able to coalesce random ideas out of the ether for that. We can't even remember the brain space we were in to write it (or "Endymion Spring" for that matter). The title comes from the very first Disney Silly Symphony, "The Skeleton Dance".
THEME FROM 88 HERMANOS
This song sprung from a patch on Anne's KAOSS pad. The beat & the basic melody was in place before Leslie came in & added the finishing touches. We had talked about using our sampler in a manner more akin to an instrument than a "press it & forget it" piece of equipment & here Les decided to put that into practice. The title comes from the three of us always managing to be playing this song while Kevin & Adam Bouvier (our friends Super 88) were showing up for practice (we backed them up on tour in '07). Throw in a little Spanish & voila!
VANCOUVER! VANCOUVER! THIS IS IT!
One of the things we set out to do when we started playing was to mix DC styled guitar playing w/ Squarepusher inspired drumming, & this song kind of cashes the check that "Fresh Kills" wrote (in that respect). As a band, we try to be very conscious of our songs as they relate to one another, & we're always pushing boundaries in our playing so we won't fall into comfortable creative patterns. Basically, this song kicked our collective ass when we first wrote it (& doubly so when the bass line was rewritten). The middle section developed under an edict from Leslie that said we needed to play multiple shifting melodies over one static main melody, while the end came about when Leon said we needed to take & layer melodies from earlier, but different, places in the song. Les wanted to name it "Gygax", in honor of the Dungeons & Dragons creator, who had just passed away, but it ultimately was named for David A. Johnston's final transmission from atop Mount St. Helen's.
WE KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET
When the house lights go down, curtain opens & you've got me all dolled up; I will not act the part I'm cast or read your scripted lines. When the run-up to the big night finds us in the schoolyard & you're crossing all the ones you've drawn I'll catch that punch you're throwing; I'll keep it like a parting kiss. Bruises are what's become of this, X the eyes of all who're left. When the audience is roaring, over roses & standing O', I will not give a hand I will not take a bow, now that we're only strangers w/ familiar faces cursing in dead languages: "We're severing these limbs before gangrene sets in." Hey, what's a bloody lip between friends? A word stained deep red? A night in another bed? It's easier to have me play the villain than to just keep up your end.