Friday, July 08, 2005

latest band rehearsal

After such a peculiar day yesterday, rehearsing was like locking oneself into a bubble; we seemed very far indeed from reality. The distraction was welcome.

Although Assistant haven't played live in four months or so, we've been building up quite a collection of new songs; 'Known To Run', 'Sixteen Months', 'Anything For You', 'Getting Away With It' and 'Nothing Else'. Musically, they're amongst the best things we've done, I think; generally quite short, melodic and interesting. Having played them repeatedly for a few months we're at the stage where we know them well enough to start experimenting with the song-structures a bit; 'Anything For You' now ends with a surprising slowed down section which threatens to speed back up then collapses. It sounds great. My secret is that, having written it and played it loads, I still can't quite get the hang of the strange rhythm, but no-one else has noticed so perhaps I shouldn't mention it.

To this roster of songs we added two new ones yesterday. The first (and best), 'Criticism' is built around a shifting, dissonant loop that me and Andrew BB created a few weeks ago, although it's mellowed and evened out to a dislocated, housey beat and a few disembodied notes (we're re-creating it, rather than playing along). Over the top of which I play a quite simple three chord guitar riff which runs throughout the verse and chorus. It developed really nicely with a quite peculiar beat and some fantastic snare drum exclamation marks on the final chorus. It's certainly the oddest thing we've done in a long time. I'll stick the demo up on the blog sometime.

The second song is pretty weird too, and not quite together yet; it's called 'Breathe In' and features a contrasting verse and chorus; the latter a strong, guitary focal point and the verses a bass and synth heavy churn with a slightly counter-intuitive beat. So far we can play the verse and the chorus, just not together - there's something about the time signature that's not quite right. Still, we'll get there.

I reckon we're getting close to a new batch of gigs and recordings.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

looking forward to hearing your new stuff - any taped rehearsals you can post?

Jonathan said...

Nothing that's really good enough recording quality for me to post it. Send me an email if you like, and I'll post you a couple of scratchy mp3s back.