shut up and listen

BIG production for a three piece band. The band is guitar, bass, drums and a single vocalist, but this track sounds an awful lot bigger than that. It features a thick layered guitar riff supported by a horn section and layers of vocal harmonies that all sound like they were overdubbed by the one singer.

The song starts immediately with the signature riff that sounds like a distorted guitar fused with horns but has a droning distorted guitar underneath that suggest layers of guitars.

The verse features a cleaner more jangly (12 string?) electric guitar and a drum pattern played predominantly on toms, giving room for the lead vocal. The vocal is often supported by harmonised backing and or doubling. For example, the first lines of the song ‘You’re the analyst, The fungus in my milk‘ are sung solo but then the next lines ‘When you want no one, And you’ve got someone’ are supported by a falsetto harmony.

The chorus also features what sounds predominantly like a solo voice but there is a subtle harmony on the final ‘the greatest view from here’ line. The chorus vocal sounds a bit further back in the mix than the verses (reverb maybe) or maybe it is just sung a bit more off mic. The chorus continues with a cleaner guitar sound so that the return of the intro riff, with full distortion makes greatest impact.

The chorus is the only obvious use of stereo with a jangly guitar off to the left and the harmony vocals off to the right. It creates a sense of the chorus opening up to ‘widescreen’ in contrast to the centred verses.

The instrumental section is a return to the opening riff but with no noticeable difference in sound to the intro.

The ending is the chorus chord sequence but with ‘na na na na’ vocals.

Overall a very dense sounding production with very little use of hard panning stereo to spread things out. The guitars and the horns are melded together to operate a one big riff machine. The bass guitar also plays the riff in the intro and middle section but during the verses and choruses it becomes indistinct as a bass guitar. There are very few noticeable plucks. Instead it sounds continuous and smooth, often getting swallowed by the dense upper layers, perhaps one of those occasions when the bass plays a supporting role that would only be noticeable if it wasn’t there. Similarly the kick drum and low floor tom don’t seem particularly full of low end and seem to struggle to punch through the dense guitar/horn riffing. They seem to have been EQed so that the attack of the drums punches through but the body of the drum resonance is either swallowed by the mix or has been EQed out. The kick and toms therefore really thud rather than boom. The playing of the drums therefore seems to focus a lot on cymbals, tambourine and snare – the absence of hats in the verses, the addition of tambourine in the choruses and the splashing cymbals during the riff.