Great Magnet

Working as a band that brings a little bit of the “live experience” to the way we make records, there are always certain moments where we just gotta make a tough call and put the ix-nay on some random live show ridiculousness we’re pretty sure won’t translate well to a recorded track. Fortunately, the interwebz have arrived.

Devil’s Elbow is the Great Magnet track that we (the band) all agree “has it all”: spooky ambient verses, riddled with atonal sonic accents. A “big rock” chorus with a great hook. A rousing, anthemic lead break. That said, those of you who’ve seen us live (all six of you) know that there’s one thing missing from the end of the song: our mentally challenged Four Sticks breakdown and eventual disintegration. I can’t really tell you exactly where this came from originally, other than to say I’d occasionally use it as an “irritant” during rehearsal to take the piss between songs, and at some point it ended up stuck permanently to the ass end of Elbow.

When it came time to track this one for the album, we certainly recorded it that way. But even during initial tracking I think we all had a little itch in our lobes telling us there may need to be a decision about this antic further on down the line. And when push came to shove, it got the axe. It’s not some kind of copyright infringement issue or the need to play “all originals” mind you: I think there’s just something quite different about capering about onstage playing a classic riff very badly that is understood as a joke. But on an album track, you’re not seeing the self-deprecation and the sophomoric stage lunges. It’s just a bunch of guys not pulling it off.

But like I said, the internet is the cure for all judicious self-control. So here in all their sad glory are three of the most moronic iterations of Four Sticks you could posibly desire…

But against that one bit of lost data was something really new and cool that we gained as well: the swirly-seasick intro to Devil’s Elbow we call Jackalope. This came straight from our weekly rehearsals and was honestly nothing more than the four of us warming up for the song we were about to play, and somehow moving from being on four different pages to hitting the first chords of the intro dead-on. Pretty cool. You had to be there. On Space Bar it’s been shrounded in tons of psychedelic effects (and sliced in half) so again here’s the real deal, just how it went down…

This track was just a blast to work on from soup-to-nuts. Hear that weird howl at the end of every line in the verses? That’s the “Magic Mic”: world’s most inferior spring reverb. We use that thing all over this damn album. Old Man Rabbit has a bit, Superflu has a bit…the list goes on. Here it is laid bare…

And that wacky tonal echo to the drums on the intro? Jason bangin’ on the body of his Epiphone Casino…

That disjoined lead line after the first verse? ‘68 Gretsch Streamliner played with fingers, with an overdub “response” line panned hard right in answer to each phrase…

Enough already. If you haven’t heard this track yet, your life is a big bowl of sad. Here you go…