Morning Bride third album recording sessions, February 2017
It's been a while since we recorded new material - let alone a new album - and so the homespun sessions here in our seaside bolthole a couple of weeks ago were somewhat cathartic. For the first time, the studio came to us, with our good friend and sound engineer / producer Pete Hughes over from Leeds to take care of the technical business, and long-time Bride lead guitarist and as-good-as-brother Pete Bennett up from London to sprinkle his stardust over my just-hatched nestlings. With eight songs written, formatted and pretty much arranged, we spent a few days prior to the tapes rolling getting to know them and making them fit together as a unit, which was perfect preparation to dive headlong into the recording.
Despite unforeseen technical challenges, we still managed to get the lion's share down; particularly satisfying in that we were truly on it from start to finish - from the seemingly endless drum/percussion tracks I put down in a weirdly effective trance-like state, through to all my electric rhythm guitars (which, with no bass, occupy much of the mid and lower frequencies and are genuinely the rhythm of most of the songs), through to all of Pete's beautiful guitar playing (applied in often unexpected dabs and splashes, as you would hope from an artist of some standing), through to the majority of Amity's spine-tingling lead vocals.
We've been singing and playing together for many years, and even though I write the songs (and specifically their words and melodies) with her at the forefront of my mind, I still can't get used to the magic with which she breathes life into them (nor the focus she applies, with most vocal tracks in the can at the second or third take). We still have a fair bit to do before we can think about the mixing process, but we're aiming to finish the all the recording next month with a wrapping-up session over in Leeds, and then plough on the mixing a few weeks after that; so we're roughly on schedule to have the album done and dusted by the summer.
Without wanting to go into it too much before it's fully fledged and independent, it's something I and we are very excited about; it has a warm, dark, paired-back and fragile sound all of its own, reflecting the subject matter and circumstances it came from, and it showcases our strengths as individuals and as a unit better than anything we've done before. More, naturally, to follow....
in the meantime, here's the first two albums over on our bandcamp page.
