#effectron

St. Louis band Armadillo just released two songs recorded at Bird Cloud last fall. Here's a long post about the song "Dollar."

0:00-0:20 - The band originally wanted kind of a fake-out intro, doing that "turn the stereo up" thing. When we actually started mixing, this swelling up had a nice overwhelming quality that was lost when we tried to do a dramatic fade-in. In hindsight, the amount of effort that was put into this fade could be viewed as excessive, but it's got to be right, right?

0:25 - Yes, we close mic'd the jam block.

0:44 - Sometimes Jake, the band's guitarist/singer reminds me of a belligerent Thom Yorke stumbling around a party ranting. The way Jake says "The workers of the world unite" might be the best example of this.

0:57 - This part reminds me of XTC. It doesn't sound like XTC, but it makes me think of XTC.

1:40 - Armadillo is kind of a post-punk jam band live, and they bring that looseness to their recordings. A tracking session with this band is like a day-long improvisation. There were times during "Dollar" where I swear they were just walking around the studio picking up stuff and saying "What if we hit that and put a phaser on it?" With that said, the sound at 1:40 is a mangled skillet hit with a mallet and run through the almighty Effectron II delay space noise unit.

1:50 - The band and I share a common interest in acoustic guitars as percussion instruments. "Sweater Song" for life, y'all.

1:50 - Jake got confused at this point and said "So what?" early. I pushed for them to keep it in. It didn't take much convincing.

2:20 - Even for a post of this nature, this might be a nerdy thing to say, but Armadillo has a really sophisticated harmonic sense. In lesser hands, this walk up chord thing at 2:20 could come off like that "Spanish" thing people do when they play an E chord and then an F chord in bullfight rhythm. But that and, again, Jake's Thom Yorke-ish tendencies make this part remind me of Atoms For Peace Radiohead.

2:35 - Armadillo bassist Matt Strom once explained Armadillo to me as sounding like "The middle part of 'Magic Carpet Ride' that you always forget about," which is the single greatest self-description of a rock band since The Pixies' "Husker Du meets Peter Paul and Mary."

2:40 - I love me a good anti-solo.

2:54 - Backwards tambourine!