"Angry Young Computer" is the 11th TA-80 release. It is a 4 song e.p recorded in Russ' laundry room studio and was released in an extermely limited 20 or so copies, that were only given to close friends and family members, in December of 2008.
This was shortly after Melissa 80 left the band and Russ returned as drummer, and aong with me, Amy and Jens, I referred to this at the time as the "All-Star Line-up." We were all finally on roughly the same page and we all fully understood TA-80.
The first track on the e.p was a song I had just recetly written on a break while I worked at Citibank, called "Late Night Breakdown." This song appeared later in a slighlty different version on the "Born Insecure" l.p. This is one of my favorite TA-80 songs. It has a late 50's - early 60's feel that's fairly common in pop-punk, but is something we actually don't do very often (except for maybe "Stop the Clock" on this same e.p.). But this version is very much still a work in process.
The remaining three tracks are from an abandoned(?) project called "Weekly World News of the World", which was basically going to be an album of new recordings of our old material. The thing about our old albums is that the songs aren't necessarily always bad but the recordings and performances often were, and we had played alot of these countless times live over the years, so we thought we'd revisit about 13 or so of them. All in all we only finished five.
"Never Forget" was a live favorite from "Junk Car Grand Prix" that was plagued by the shittiest drum sound ever put to tape. This new version is cracking though.
"Stop the Clock" was a re-recording of an old "Hepatitus Bees" song me and Russ wrote back in the day about a particularly boring trip to the mall to buy socks. It's great fun though, and I love Jens' "Heathcliff" vocal at the end.
"Warm Kites" is a frantic, high speed revision of the "Junk Car Grand Prix" song, which usually gives us a reason to freak out during our live shows. I originally wrote this for me and Jens' side project "Admiral Fantasticus & the Zodiac Shower Curtain", which was devoted to bizzarro music that would never fit on a TA-80 record, but Amy wanted to use this paticular one for TA-80, and we still play it live quite often.
We are actually planning on re-issuing this e.p along with a few more rare and unreleased tracks in the very near future. I love the cover for this record. It was basically a collage made out of an old Starlog magazine and a book of 60's magazine ads. Like I said, only about 20 were given out, but I still have a big pile of these lying around but they're not mastered and we've remixed this substantially since the original release, so the re-release should be pretty cool.
Track Listing:
1. Late Night Breakdown
2. Never Forget
3. Stop the Clock
4. Warm Kites
Note: we've actually played all of these live.
- Jamin 80
......................................................................
This E.P. opens with a track from our (then) upcoming album, "Born Insecure". It's still one of my favorite tracks from that album. This is a slightly different recording than the one that appears on "Born Insecure." For one, this one is definitely not mastered. It also has a completely different lead vocal part (notice how bored I sound? I fixed that later...) This version is also severely lacking backing vocals. It wasn't finished but we knew it was good and decided to let everyone hear what our new rough mixes sounded like.
As for the older, re-recordings of songs on this E.P., well....We have much better recordings now and we're going to reissue this E.P. and get everything mastered, so when anyone reading this finally hears the E.P., it should sound pretty damn good. However, the original release of this was rough, to say the least. But it was the most amazing release we had put out. Even in its roughest stage (the original release) it was a million light years ahead of "Junk Car" or anything on "Atari." This was when Russ came back into the band and we re-entered the studio with full-fucking-force.
We got back together with Russ and it instantly felt better and sounded better than anything we had ever done. This was the first time the line-up included Jamin, Jens, Russ and myself. Maybe it all comes down to the right timing, but something about Russ coming back at that exact moment seems like something more than just a happy coincidence. Maybe not. It just worked really well and I'm still excited over it.
"Stop The Clock" was an old song of Russ' that he recorded with his old band, The Hepatitis Bee's. This side project included Russ, Jamin and a bassist named Mike Parker. There is an old split that Phat Phorty put out with the Hepatitis Bee's and Rainy Day Schedule. I'm sure there will be more on that later...
"Never Forget" was pretty old at this point but we had never gotten (what we considered) a good recording of the song. We decided to try it one last time with this new, seemingly unstoppable line-up. That did the trick. I had to completely redo the vocals. The original release of this had some pretty rough vocals that I did in the midst of being almost deathly ill for 2 months. I went back and resang them several months later and they came out great. We finally did this song some justice. I've always felt like this is my best pop-punk song. Apart from the vocals on the pre-chorus, I wrote everything on this song and I'm damn proud of it. It's only a tiny bit pretentious. Not bad!
"Warm Kites" was always one of my favorite songs off of "Junk Car" and especially one of my favorites to perform live. The version that appears on "Junk Car" had a long, ridiculous bass solo/outro that I've always been embarrassed of. As soon as we started to practice it in our live set, I insisted that we come up with a better, punchier ending. The result, I believe, was completely Jens' idea. It's always nice having a punk rock band that is comprised of people who have spent their lives listening to and picking apart some of the most awesome punk rock out there. As soon as I said, "Let's punch it up," Jens simply held the notes of the pre-chorus a couple extra beats and we came up with a nice vocal harmony outro that nailed in the hook. Everyone always either calls this song "Breaker, Breaker" or "911". Either is fine. But the actual name is "Warm Kites" and it does say the title in the song. Twice.
- Amy 80
......................................................................
Recordings...yea, put that..pretty good...
- Klae 80
......................................................................
I like this, the re-recordings were good...I liked the new stuff. The cover was really funny.
- Jens 80
...................................................
No comments:
Post a Comment