assistant: half-songs and absences

Gosh, the other thing I realise when I'm going back through old posts to categorise them: I really never blog about my band these days, do I? Must get back into the habit - although 2006 was a very quiet year for the band, for a number of good and bad reasons, we had our first rehearsal for a while quite recently, and I'm gonna make sure I get something else organised soon. In the meantime, I'm stocking up on songs and have been working hard on piecing together demos so that we can get going swiftly once we shake off our apathy phase.

So in the absence of new Assistant material - although I do have some stuff which I will post, actually - I thought I'd post a few demos and bits and bobs, should you be interested; obviously without the rest of the band's input they're often just half-songs, and quite often the lyrics are just placeholders, but taken as drafts they may be worth listening to. You can tell me if not.

Here's a very scrappy demo to get started with then:

Assistant - Foot Forward (demo) [2.75mb, right click to download]

It's deliberately quite loose, going for a loping, shuffling effect rather than something pristine and precise - of the stuff I demoed recently it's probably the least carefully put together; you can hear me get the melodica line wrong on two occasions, I think, and it has no ending and pretty unprepared vocals - I think I was improvising some of them, although the "foot forward / I forfeit" line was planned. Stylistically I guess you can hear a bit of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz type things there, but that's probably just because I'm singing in a flat voice and there aren't many guitars. Anyway - only a sketch really, but hope you like it - and that you hear a full band Assistant version before too long.