Wednesday's Emotional Setup: Per Second Second
12:29 pm.
Come on, you didn't really think this was going to be about a song by anyone other than the Wrens this week, did you?
Another song off of The Meadowlands, which I really should have put on my all time top 100, relative newness be damned, 'Per Second Second' is remarkable for a few reasons.
The first is that, even after you've followed along in the lyric booklet, you cannot make out a word they sing. To explain why, I'm just going to quote part of the interview Akiva Gottleib did with them for Stylus:
"Stylus: Why are the vocals mixed so low in this song?
G: That’s the question I want answered too, dammit.
K: Greg always forgets…
C: He does this every time, because he’s got a grudge against vocal level. Then you get him in the rehearsal room and you can’t hear yourself sing.
K: Wait a second! Honestly, Charles had his vocals up a little higher. But The Wrens sing more than the fucking Mormon Tabernacle choir.
C: Even before that…the printed lyrics in the liner notes, they used to be part of an actual melody. It just never felt right, so it turned into a sort of talking/yelling part, and then the backup was added, and that’s what Kevin is starting to talk about…
G: We almost made it instrumental.
K: Which is what we wanted. But poor Charles was losing his mind, and eventually he just said “don’t fucking bother me.”
C: I just wanted to find some kind of compromise. So we turned the backup vocal into the lead vocal, which is super-distorted and kind of in the background.
K: But we all love it."
So what you get, when 'Per Second Second' starts pounding out of the speakers after the relatively restrained 'Ex-Girl Collection', is a horribly distorted guitar part that is one of the most assaultive things I've had the pleasure to hear in a while (especially on headphones - then the guitar sounds like it's about to lunge out of the headphones directly for your eardrum). There's a melody somewhere behind it, mostly carried by the yelling of two of the Wrens' three vocalists (mostly they're shouting "Per second second faster", but you can only tell that by seeing the song live), which is the aforementioned backing part.
But there is, if I understand what I've read in The Church Of Me, a punctum in the song. After around three minutes of surging and shouting (quite wonderful, don't get me wrong), the song kind of stops for a second. And before it roars back to life one more time, Charles, the lead vocalist on the song, gets the chance to spit something out.
If you write down what he's saying, it's just "Shot rock-splitter to God/take me home/take me home" repeated a few times. But, at first, this was the most interesting piece of studio trickery I'd heard in a while. Charles' voice is distorted so it's more like "shotrocksplitterto gahhhhhh/take me hooooome/take me hoooooome". It sounds like his vocal cords are splitting. It is the sound of utter desperation, and the "take me home" bit takes on all sorts of poignancy.
So imagine my suprise to find that it's not studio trickery. Sure, when I saw the Wrens Charles had two mics set up, one of which had some effects on it, but I saw him clearly when he leaned forward for those lines, and he was singing into the "clear" mic. Of course, by then I'd discovered that many of what I had assumed were studio effects or even keyboard parts where actually just the voices of the Wrens (K., who has been in some pretty impressive choirs, noted that they had the best projection of any band she'd ever seen).
Given that I found it such a powerful moment on record, little wonder the live version (which is much more exuberant except for the "shot rock-splitter" lines) sent chills up and down my spine. Truly transcendant, and honestly for impact it's one of the lesser efforts on The Meadowlands.
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Come on, you didn't really think this was going to be about a song by anyone other than the Wrens this week, did you?
Another song off of The Meadowlands, which I really should have put on my all time top 100, relative newness be damned, 'Per Second Second' is remarkable for a few reasons.
The first is that, even after you've followed along in the lyric booklet, you cannot make out a word they sing. To explain why, I'm just going to quote part of the interview Akiva Gottleib did with them for Stylus:
"Stylus: Why are the vocals mixed so low in this song?
G: That’s the question I want answered too, dammit.
K: Greg always forgets…
C: He does this every time, because he’s got a grudge against vocal level. Then you get him in the rehearsal room and you can’t hear yourself sing.
K: Wait a second! Honestly, Charles had his vocals up a little higher. But The Wrens sing more than the fucking Mormon Tabernacle choir.
C: Even before that…the printed lyrics in the liner notes, they used to be part of an actual melody. It just never felt right, so it turned into a sort of talking/yelling part, and then the backup was added, and that’s what Kevin is starting to talk about…
G: We almost made it instrumental.
K: Which is what we wanted. But poor Charles was losing his mind, and eventually he just said “don’t fucking bother me.”
C: I just wanted to find some kind of compromise. So we turned the backup vocal into the lead vocal, which is super-distorted and kind of in the background.
K: But we all love it."
So what you get, when 'Per Second Second' starts pounding out of the speakers after the relatively restrained 'Ex-Girl Collection', is a horribly distorted guitar part that is one of the most assaultive things I've had the pleasure to hear in a while (especially on headphones - then the guitar sounds like it's about to lunge out of the headphones directly for your eardrum). There's a melody somewhere behind it, mostly carried by the yelling of two of the Wrens' three vocalists (mostly they're shouting "Per second second faster", but you can only tell that by seeing the song live), which is the aforementioned backing part.
But there is, if I understand what I've read in The Church Of Me, a punctum in the song. After around three minutes of surging and shouting (quite wonderful, don't get me wrong), the song kind of stops for a second. And before it roars back to life one more time, Charles, the lead vocalist on the song, gets the chance to spit something out.
If you write down what he's saying, it's just "Shot rock-splitter to God/take me home/take me home" repeated a few times. But, at first, this was the most interesting piece of studio trickery I'd heard in a while. Charles' voice is distorted so it's more like "shotrocksplitterto gahhhhhh/take me hooooome/take me hoooooome". It sounds like his vocal cords are splitting. It is the sound of utter desperation, and the "take me home" bit takes on all sorts of poignancy.
So imagine my suprise to find that it's not studio trickery. Sure, when I saw the Wrens Charles had two mics set up, one of which had some effects on it, but I saw him clearly when he leaned forward for those lines, and he was singing into the "clear" mic. Of course, by then I'd discovered that many of what I had assumed were studio effects or even keyboard parts where actually just the voices of the Wrens (K., who has been in some pretty impressive choirs, noted that they had the best projection of any band she'd ever seen).
Given that I found it such a powerful moment on record, little wonder the live version (which is much more exuberant except for the "shot rock-splitter" lines) sent chills up and down my spine. Truly transcendant, and honestly for impact it's one of the lesser efforts on The Meadowlands.
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