The New One

This is my former band, Heat Lorraine. I'm lead guitar on this track. We had broken up already when we played this show. There was a lot of resentment floating around. We'd all had a few drinks before we went on, but our lead singer (and rhythm guitarist) Brian was drinking with a vengence.

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posted by cortex (6 comments total)

I think I saw him go through four G-and-Ts in the twenty minutes before we went up. This is basically the only song from the show that wasn't spectacularly fucked up one way or the other. You can hear Brian being pretty loose vocally, but we're in time, on key, and everything goes pretty much how its supposed to. And it's a pretty decent portrait of what our sound had gotten to when we broke up. Brian went downhill rapidly after this song; I'd say he went from drunk here to shitfaced within about two songs as those cocktails caught up with him. The show closed out with a couple minutes of pretty good cathartic rock therapy, but the middle was pretty goddam bumpy. I miss playing in that band. I don't really miss being in that band. Mysteries of mysteries.
posted by cortex at 12:10 PM on June 30, 2006

This is lovely. I kinda wish I was listening to it alone in a bar, rather than in front of my computer.
posted by Greg Nog at 4:08 PM on June 30, 2006

Hilarious! Like you said, the band is nailing it while he's hittin' the guard rail! Ha!

Does he always sound a little like Neil Young, or was that the liquor talking? Good guitar on your part BTW, nice.
posted by snsranch at 4:50 PM on June 30, 2006

Brian has a sort of nasal aspect to his voice in general, but I wouldn't put him at Neil Young most of the time. Let's call it the booze, then. I started playing with him almost three years ago, and it's actually amazing to compare his voice then with where it was by the time the band broke up—he's developed his singing voice a lot in the interim.

Playing lead guitar is one of the things I miss most about the band. I listen to some of our recordings and often am taken aback—wait, that's me? I pulled off that solo? It was always half-improvised, and I'd have great breaks and not-so-great, but I was feeling pretty proud of where I'd gotten by the end of the whole shebang.

I haven't been able to get that same wild sweaty guitar energy going on while recording in my kitchen. It's a shame.
posted by cortex at 5:41 PM on June 30, 2006

I like the drums and guitar. The guitar reminds me a little of Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek), which I love. "Sweaty guitar energy" is well put. It sounds like the song itself is pretty good too, except the vocal is really pitchy.
posted by edlundart at 6:23 PM on June 30, 2006

The vocals were really a lot of things that night.
posted by cortex at 9:30 PM on June 30, 2006