Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Wrens - At Irish Exit (demo)

It's been over 13 years since "The Meadowlands" came out, the magnum opus from indie rock band The Wrens and one of my favorite albums from this century.  There's a whole myriad of reasons why the follow up has taken so long to come out, but lead man Charles Bissell just put out an instrumental demo version of a new track called "At Irish Exit."  He had this to say about it:

"Sooo…quite a poop week (after quite an ‘interesting’ year or so), a week in which I found myself thinking that many things don’t matter or not in the way I thought, or that they used to, or at least music, or at least being overly precious & perfectionist about music (maybe that’s it, actually).

Which led me in some post-election despair-y fog to say, “what the heck, I’ll post a song” but really, that’s not fair to the label folks who have very, VERY cool & patiently waited for me to eternally wrap my shit up.

So with an eye towards the ideal politics of the hopefully-not-distant future (i.e. as a compromise), this is an instrumental version of the song I happen to be working on right now, it’s the last one still under construction and yes, that means the album is only finishing now.

There a bunch of reasons for that (the work itself, health, working at night like lots of folks, that sort of thing) but I just can’t bear to hear myself go into them all, esp. this week. I’ll post something about all that later.

Meanwhile, the finish line lies right beyond this: I’ll check the vocal version tomorrow and then create a new version w/ parallel limiting/compression to make the parts sorta squeeze out around the vocal; then it goes off to mastering as well (this is the fourth official round of mastering, all due my shortcomings, not the mastering engineer who is a sonic guru).

The upshot, if there is one, of an instrumental v., is it’ll let you hear all the parts that I’m sure, w/ my limited engineering skill-set, will be completely obliterated by the lead vocal. I hate vocals (esp. my own). They ruin everything."

Listen to the track below.  Hopefully we'll have a new record sometime next year (i say that every year).



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