I don't want your money, I want your time

Caporegime
Joined
29 Aug 2007
Posts
28,719
Location
Auckland
If it pleases the Court, bear with me on this one as it's worth it*

Without boring you with the background in too much detail, a younger mags and his Uni friends used to play some music. This sonic extravagance/achievement spanned the years 1990 - 1994 which many Roman historians later noted were as rad as the proverbial and then perhaps a dash more.

Like undercooked chicken through a wine-grown stomach, the years passed and were equally unkind and unhygenic to us. Jobs and women (and men!) appeared but we kept in touch and played some of the old songs while dabbling with newer ones. Over the last three years we've recorded ten of them, mixed and mastered them, and the album they formed, Embers, released 6th August 2021.

You can have a listen if you'd like by clicking HERE - OMG CLICK ME SO HARD! but please don't pay anything. The way we've set up the release is on a tip jar system so you can listen and/or download some/all of the tracks and pay nothing. That's what I'd like you to do. Pay nothing but maybe you'll like the tunes or it might not be your thing but your friend perhaps does so you send it to him. I don't want his money either but yours or his appreciation, or a note that says you liked it, or you listened to it and you hated it? Yeah, that would be more in line with the point of why I'm asking you to read this and listen to something you might not have otherwise.

I don't want your money, I want your love time, as Transvision Vamp once sang.

Thanks,
mags.

*it was not worth it, was it? :(
 
I enjoyed it, I sent you roughly what a CD cost here (last time I bought one).
Genuine thanks :)
Was the Morse at the start of Senseless just randomly sampled, did any of you have any idea what it was?
All mistakes are intentional (it says here, according to my lawyer) but after surveying some of the more popular Morse forums I think I ended up sampling a Youtube segment which I then spliced to fit the purpose. We did enjoy some band banter of hidden messages but I didn't get that clever on this one, sorry :)

Well, had to search it on Spotify.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/18C36KpEx3BGnRFKv7xs4P?si=U6B4gY27RMS1jQCPWwq4VQ&dl_branch=1

Except that's just single tracks right?

Yes, that's singles and EPs but not the album. Let me check on that because Spotify should be up to date along with the other channels. In the meantime you can click HERE for 40 minutes of pop :)
 
My time is all yours for the duration of the album today sir. :)

Thank you!

Sounds very much of this time...

Unfortunately, that makes it a bit too recent for my tastes and the 90s were not an especially popular period for the sorts of music I like. Sounds like it has good production quality though and comes across as pretty genuine.
Best of luck with this and future endeavours.
Thank you!

 
I asked for your time so it's only fair I respond in kind :)

Nice album. It certainly has a 90s vibe to it. I imagine it was very fun to record. What do you do in the band?

I write a lot of the songs, play guitar and piano, and mix and master the tracks.

If I can offer some thoughts on the production, Blinded seems very vocal-heavy and I'm honestly finding it hard to hear anything that isn't the vocals or drums, at least when there's singing. I'm barely getting any taste of bass (maybe I'm biased). This is on some mid-range (price-wise) headphones, so I'm not sure how it would sound of different systems.

That's useful feedback and something that we've discussed as a band. The bass needs a boost and I'm working on that as we speak.

Edelweiss freaked me out.

In a good way, right?

Right?

Oh Disaster! Oh Calamity! is cool. I really enjoyed the vocal sample, and the groove is great.

Thanks! We had some fun with this one. I'll bore you with the backstory if you even half think about prodding me to do so.

Why do you come here? Really enjoyed that and I always appreciate a bit of silliness in a song.

It's Elton John with a grump on :thumbsup:

Just listened to Blinded, some cool sounds and tones definitely taking me back a bit. Enjoyed it. The bass starts to come back around 3:18, there were some interesting riffs going earlier in the song but I agree they are either too quiet or the bass is missing too much of the low end and the guitar tracks are crowding it out.

As above, the bass is played fairly high up the frets for the main part of the song and only really drops down to 'normal' bass notes for the ending piece; the volume of the bass doesn't change but is much more impactful later on. Being tweaked to provide more balance.

Bass also sounds very central whereas the guitars are wide in the mix, but somehow it's still lost a bit until then. I'm not a production expert at all but that was also apparent to me when I listened.

Bass is normally mono'd so it feels (and actually is) planted in the mix. The guitars on this song are particularly wide, by design, and should give the bass room to shine but as said needs a tweak.

I can only imagine the work that goes into creating a record like this, so well done you should be very proud.

The vocal sample in Oh Disaster! Oh Calamity! reminds me of Iron Sky by Paulo Nutini and it's well done. Not sure if that's a compliment or not depending on your taste in music.

I'll take that compliment! I used to work with someone who went out with Paulo in her younger days. Small world.

I also really like the drum groove in 'Sinking' and the arrangement on that song stands out to me, it's well put together.

'Sinking' was one of the first songs we played live in The Subway, a now probably defunct club in Edinburgh, in 1990. It's a shameless rip-off of The Sundays for which I offer no apologies :D

Why do you come here is also really enjoyable, hearing lots of different influences in that song, there's a lot packed in there.

Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for sharing. I'm glad you liked it.

My kind of music, just over half way through the album. Wish your tour included the North, would pay to come to that gig.

We are talking about doing something live but Covid is an issue and there's the not insubstantial problem of living in different countries. I think we'll make it happen though.

e: I missed @Scougar 's post, sorry.

Good start with the first track, will listen to the rest. I hear a lot of potential in your band if the rest is like that.

@alex24 Agreed, if the songs have more 'commit' in them, I think they would be more solid performers. I am only listening on crappy TV at present though. The breaks seem well thought out (Currently on song two)

This is quite interesting. What do you mean by 'commit'? That's not a challenge but a genuine question. The album becomes more defined as it progresses - the songs (mostly) become shorter, more poppy, more direct - but are even then mostly vague and unclear. What does 'commit' look like?
 
Last edited:
I lasted about 30 seconds on each of the free tracks. Sorry, not my cup of tea. My tastes are more classical.
Thank you for the feedback and agreed re: why Bach was the bomb and Mozart was a try-hard but also rad. Quick one for you though: the whole album and the songs themselves are free so not sure if something isn't lining up. Let me know and we can fix it :)
 
We've had quite a lot of activity on our Bandcamp page for the new EP. Some of it will be from you rascals! If you had a click, thought better of it and moved on, good on you. If you had a click, and spent a dollar/pound or two, good on you too. If you mentioned it to a friend then ... :heart:

The new album will be released in November so I'll update this thread then.

mags x
 
Back
Top Bottom