Much thanks to Janice Brown, who actually makes it seem like I am capable of linear speech, and Sonic Scoop for running a super cool interview with me. I’m pretty damn honored to be featured up there, as I’m a faithful visitor and big fan of the site.You can read the interview HERE.Here’s and exclusive “outtake” … one of the more fucked up pictures that I sent over there for them to use.Sorry Janice!
Now that I’m on a tear this evening, I think that I need to post these two photos that I found earlier today of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards circa 1971. Those of you who aren’t motorcycle enthusiasts like me will be forgiven for not knowing that if Jagger himself were to pull up to a hipster bar in Silverlake on that little Honda right now, it is it, not he, who would be the center of attention. The photo of Keith is just… well Rock and Roll isn’t ever gonna be like that again, let’s just leave it at that.
It seems that per usual, I have dropped the ball on the blogging. I would say that t won’t happen again, but why start off this entry with a lie?
At any rate, things have been pretty busy around here. I just finished off some music for an upcoming play about chanteuse Nico that I think is going to be amazing, and a few projects that I’ve worked on recently have seen release.
Probably most notably, there’s Nada Surf’s If I Had a Hi-fi , which I engineered quite a bit of and mixed a tune on. One of the great highlights of the projects was having Doug Gillard, formerly of Guided By Voices (my favorite band, period), come in to lay down guitar tracks on a few of the song. Three Japan-only bonus tracks that you’ll only be able to find over there were recorded, mixed and co-produced by yours truly.
Another record that I mixed here, Trumpeter Swan’sListen For Clues, has also hit the streets, and I can’t say enough about this one. Drew Patrizi, who used to play keyboards in What Made Milwaukee famous is the man behind the Swan, and we had a great, if grueling time pulling together all of the layers of synths, horns, guitars and vintage keyboards that he had laid down during the album’s long period of gestation. You can listen to part of the album here.
New Jersey’s Those Mockingbirds, who we worked with early in the year, also got their new EP out recently. One of the songs recorded, mixed and produced up in here made it to number one on Amazon.com’s emerging artists chart. That gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Go team!
Last but certainly not least, the live acoustic tracks that I recorded and mixed for the videos of Silversun Pickups playing live at Spin Magazine of are available here.
I’m proud and thrilled to report that Scale the Summit’sProsthetic Records debut, Carving Desert Canyons (which I produced, engineered and mixed right here at Nuthouse Recording) was picked by Vince Neilsten of MetalSucks.net as one the best 20 albums of 2009. Here’s what he has to say about it.
While most instru-metal bands are following the Misha Mansoor / Tosin Abasi template (with results not up to par with either of those two), the Houston, TX kids in Scale the Summit go a completely different direction. Instead of channeling 7 (or 8)-string mind-fuck Meshuggah rhythms as their building blocks, Scale the Summit draw from a much lighter prog rock palette in their sparkling Tom Beaujour-produced Prosthetic Records debut. I haven’t spoken with these lads yet, but I’ll bet they’d cite bands like Cynic, Russian Circles, Intronaut, and even Dream Theater as influences. Though Carving Desert Canyons is instrumental, there’s absolutely zero musical masturbation (not that there’s anything wrong with that); it’s all about composition and song-writing for these guys, no small feat for music that’s likely to wear thin the patience of most listeners due to the lack of vocals. Scale the Summit are a young band to keep an eye on.
You can read the complete article with the rest of his picks here.
I was recently called to go record the French band Phoenix (you’ve probably heard their single “Lisztomania” on the radio) performing live and unplugged at the offices of Spin Magazine. Now, I happen to be fluent in French (and a French citizen, actually), but I usually don’t lay my bilingual trip on people, as I assume that it will annoy them, or at minimum make me look like as asshole.
While I was setting up the microphones for the guys, though, I realized that it would be incredibly awkward if they started talking shit about me and thought I didn’t understand them. (Why they would talk shit bout me I have no idea… that’s just how my brain works.) At any rate, having informed the guys that I was a compatriot and fully conversant in their native tongue, we were actually able to get things set up much more quickly, and I think that the results speak for themselves. Check it out for yourself …. http://spin.com/articles/phoenix-unplugged-spin-hq
Here it is, a summary of what we’ve done at the studio since I last posted. Actually let me just dispense right now with the “we.” There is no “we” at Nuthouse Recording… there is me, with valuable, sometimes even crucial assists and contributions which I will do my best not to omit.
MUTINY WITHIN
In July, I produced a track for Roadrunner Records artists Mutiny Within that the band had written as a theme song for WWE wrestler Evan Bourne. William Putney contributed his massive metal know-how on drum tracking day and slayed all of the drum edits. I had jury duty concurrent with the mixes, which was a bummer except that I got a meatloaf sandwich up the street from the Jersey City courthouse that was positively delicious.
Here’s some totally shitty YouTube video of Mr. Bourne entering the ring to the track:
CRUEL BLACK DOVE
Other bands that came through this summer included Cruel Black Dove, a female-fronted act that evokes PJ Harvey and Garbage. I think they will go places. Here’s a video from a track that I did not record. Let it also be known that the sessions did not in any way resemble what you are about to see in this video. We run a family-friendly operation here!
UPON A BURNING BODY
In late summer/early fall, Will came and recorded drums for the Sumerian Records debut of young deathcore hotshots Upon a Burning Body. Will is really stoked on the record, which I have not heard in its completed form yet, but if he says it kicks ass, it does. These kids have some serious plugs. I saw the drummer (second from left) without his is in… it was wild. FLAMING TUSK
The absolutely massively named Flaming Tusk and their debut album was up next. Crazy-ass extreme underground metal. A smarter, more well-read bunch of guys you have never met. They are obsessed with bizarre spirits (of the alcoholic, not supernatural type) and had bottles of some of the weirdest shit I have ever seen (artichoke liqueur, anyone?) at the ready at all times. Some excellent video was shot during the recording. Enjoy…
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THOSE MOCKINGBIRDS
After the punishing task of completing the Tusk album, the Nuthouse frigate entered considerably less metallic waters. I produced the debut SideCho records single for New Jersey alt-rockers Those Mockingbirds ANDY ALEDORT
I also mixed the live album for Dickey Betts guitarist and Guitar World Magazine instructional DVD star Andy Aledort. That’s Andy on the left at one of his gigs with Dickey.
FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCHLast but not least, we had chart topping metal outfit Five Finger Death Punch in the studio for a day of drum tracking. These guys will be on the main stage of next year’s Mayhem Tour, and were super cool and mellow despite the fact that they all had colds and were smack dab in the middle of a grueling tour. I was going to imbed their latest video, but youtube won’t let me. Watch it here.
The following post assumes that you acknowledge that The Who’s Live at Leeds is, in fact, the greatest live record ever. As one not given to making absolutist statements of this sort (at least not positive ones… I’ll often proclaim that an album or band is, “bullshit”), the supremacy of Live at Leeds over every other real or purported live record is a truth that I hold to be unalienable. Why? Everything. The sound. The performances. The Energy. The unbelievable luck that the band was actually set up to record on a night where God descended from above and said, “I’m here to watch your gig, and therefore, it shall be good.”Having said that, from what I can tell, Leeds University was anything but a posh venue. Dig it: Yup. The greatest live album of all time was recorded in a cafeteria. At any rate, I have always wanted to have a snare drum for the studio like the one that Who drummer Keith Moon used at this show. Problem was, no one was sure which snare it was. I asked my friend and drummer Ray Kubian to investigate, and after several months of assiduous research, he found this. Now if you’re a drum nerd, you be able to tell from this shot from the very same Leeds performance that Moon was in fact using a 5×14 Ludwig Supra-phonic. So what did I go and do? I hit the internets and got one on eBay (a ‘71, one year later than the Live at Leeds performance but it’ll do). And yes, it sounds FUCKING AWESOME.
Right On Dynamite, who recently released their Nuthouse-produced EP on Standpipe Records, just got a great review in New York magazine. I was mentioned in it as not having fucked up the recording, which is super rad. Here it is:
Lighting the Fuse
Brooklyn’s Right on Dynamite is the party for now.
Keeping up with the current crop of zeitgeisty New York City bands sometimes feels like taking astronomy, a class you signed up for because it sounded fun before you learned it involves a lot of math. Brooklyn-based trio Right on Dynamite are the Human Sexual Behavior of New York rock, perfectly adolescent yet surprisingly deep.
The band just returned from a stint opening for Scottish rockers Frightened Rabbit and earlier this year put out a self-titled EP produced by Tom Beaujour (Nada Surf, the Virgins). The five tracks come across as sunny, pleasantly unhinged pop, but the lyrics reveal deep urban angst; Right on Dynamite sound like the Strokes would have if everyone was doing mushrooms and not cocaine back in 2001. On a recent arctic Friday night the band played a homecoming gig at Pianos on the Lower East Side. Until they actually stepped out of the crowd and took their positions—Daniel Murphy, 26, on guitar and vocals, Nicholas Cirillo, also 26, on bass and vocals, and Jonathan Molina, 25, on drums—it was impossible to know which of the many ski-cap-wearing, whiskey-flushed dudes in the bar were actually in the band. That sense of seamless intimacy between crowd and group was present throughout their set, a happy party consisting of every song the band can play and some they can’t but attempted anyway. After pausing to roll up the sleeves of his buffalo-plaid button-down, Murphy turned “Time” into a rollicking sing-along. “Pull the Wool” became a call-and-response jamboree, with the goofy but handsome Cirillo barely getting the mike in time for his harmonies. But the standout moment in the short set was “Mantra for the Madness,” a propulsive surf-rock track roughed up for the city with shambolic harmonizing and giddy drumming from the perpetually grinning Molina. As the band careened through the song, the crowd was no longer a little too drunk and sweaty with no cash for a cab home and crap jobs to return to on Monday—they were glamorous eternally young party kids with indestructible livers and brilliant careers ahead.
Finished mixing an album for New Jersey’s famed glam-cock-sleaze rockers Frankenstein 3000 last night. The album will be released on Main Man Records in the spring. If you’ve read earlier posts, you’ll recall that that’s the same guys who put out the Winter Hours tribute disc, A Few Uneven Rhymes, that we recorded a track with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf for. F3K actually recorded the album all DIY-stylee (rather well, actually) on some sort of of Yamaha digital multitrack which actual sounds OK good except that it has a REALLY crispy-sounding brickwall limiter that kicks in if it’s seeing an input signal that scares it. Like REALLY crispy. Like Ministry record crispy. Eh, you live and learn. The band’s frontman, Keith Roth, has several cool things going for him: 1) He looks A LOT like Tommy Lee. Like if Tommy Lee was 5′ 8″ 2) He’s the Host of “Electric Ballroom” on New Jersey’s WRAT 3) He DJs on Sirius/XM where he also produces New York Dolls frontman Davis Johansen’s radio show. Here’s some really shitty footage of F3K performing the Dolls’ “Lookin For A Kiss” with David Jo himself on vocals.
Kudos to Right on Dynamite for getting a write up on the uber-influential RCRD LBL MP3blog(yours truly was also name-checked). You can download “Mantra For the Madness,” one of the tracks we worked on together, at the above link. They’re about to go out on tour with Frightened Rabbit and will be at Bowery Ballroom (it’s sold out so don’t bother) this Saturday. Kill it and grill it, guys!
