Chaos Theory Revised
Aug 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Robert Hanson
When new artists finally hit it big, they are left with two choices: They can succumb to the sophomore slump and deliver more of the same, or they can face their detractors head-on and come out swinging. In 1999, when Lamb released its second album, Fear of Fours (Polygram), the band opted for the latter. A maze of jagged rhythms, difficult arrangements and scathing vocals, Fear of Fours provided an outlet for producer Andrew Barlow and vocalist Louise Rhodes to fire back at their critics. “I was kind of trying to prove what I wasn't,” Rhodes says. “After the first album, there was loads and loads of stuff like ‘[I’m] Joni Mitchell meets drum 'n' bass.' I got called ethereal, and I got called all sorts of things that I wasn't happy about.”
Although the duo stood behind its decision to release what was best described as a reactionary record, the experience was far from ideal. The band regrouped a year later and geared up to record what would be its third album, What Sound Deluxe (Koch, 2003). As Barlow and Rhodes went back through their previous efforts, they realized that an essential part of their sound had been lost. Amid the fervor to ensure that Fear of Fours said all of the things the band wanted it to say, the essence of their debut release — as well as many of the founding concepts behind the band — didn't survive the exercise.
“I think in some ways with Fear of Fours, I wanted to prove that I was really street,” Rhodes says with a laugh. “I'm not ethereal. I'm not this. I'm not that. And reaction is never a good place to come from. With Fear of Fours, it was just like, ‘Okay, this is me.’ It's never a good idea to react to what journalists say. As a musician, you need to be really grounded and just do what you do because you love it. In some ways, when we made Fear of Fours, we kind of lost that a little bit. What Sound was kind of a returning to that, returning to what moved us.”
“We wanted to make a less-angular record than Fear of Fours,” Barlow adds. “We thought it was quite hard to actually access it. It seemed like it was its own little island. We wanted to do something that we felt was a bit less theatrical and bit more honest in a way.”
CREATURES OF HABIT
Although the group has moved in different directions stylistically, its approach to songwriting has remained essentially unchanged. “The actual technique of what we use is still pretty much as haphazard as it's always has been,” Barlow says. “Sometimes, it will be Lou tapping a rhythm on the floor and humming a melody or sometimes a couple of lyrics. It's changed a bit because Lou has started playing guitar, and she'll bring in guitar chords, or, sometimes, we'll [get things going] with snippets of film.”
Barlow now also uses Ableton Live and Propellerhead Reason to speed up the initial process of writing and arranging. “Using Live is a really good way of writing, because it's really fast and you can always leave it running and record into it. I use Reason a lot, as well, because it's really fast for writing. I had a bit of a learning curve to get into those, but, now, I feel like I'm quite confident on them, and it's so much faster than the old way of writing, which was with Cubase.”
For Rhodes, the songwriting process is a much more organic experience. “I can be in the middle of anything, and a song idea can come to me,” she explains. “So I have to sing into my mobile phone or something like that to record it. And that seems to be the best for me. Song ideas that just descend upon me are definitely the best thing. I don't particularly like, ‘Okay, I'm going to write a song now,’ and sit down with a pen a paper. That feels like creativity at gunpoint.”
And as with many artists who work with technology, studio accidents often turn into the building blocks of new songs. “There is cool thing, actually, on Fear of Fours called ‘Soft Mistake,’” Barlow says. “It was actually kind of a ‘soft’ mistake because it happened while we were working on a track called ‘Softly.’ The hard drive locked up in this one position, and this bass, like, got chopped somehow, and it came up with this really weird time signature. It was a really weird bass line. So I restarted the computer and started a new song built around that bass line. Things like that happened on this album, as well, and with things like Live, you're just harnessing chaos. You've got control over it, but unlike Logic or Pro Tools, Live is like having faith and jumping into a pool. It's like a generative way of writing music — a lot more body-based than head-based.”
METHODS OF THE MACHINE
Although all of Lamb's music is deeply steeped in electronics, much of its source material is derived from live recording sessions. Barlow explains that the pair's production process often involves several distinct stages. “Once [a track is] kind of written and we've got the arrangement, we'll go, ‘Well, this could be real drums; this could be acoustic bass, whatever,’” he says. “And then at the end, we'll do big sessions like strings or percussion or choir.
“We really don't use samples,” Barlow continues. “We tend to record and process and then make samples from that. Probably 60 to 70 percent was live at one point. We had a vocal booth, so all of the vocals were done at our studio. The string sessions we did at Abbey Road Studio 2. Apart from the strings, we pretty much did it all at our studio.”
For the recording of What Sound, the group relocated its studio to the same London neighborhood in which Rhodes was living with her family. “In the early part of that writing process, I'd been commuting up to Manchester, where our studio was,” she says. “So, basically, Andy moved the studio down to London, and it was around the corner from where I was living. So we had kind of a little community thing we'd set up in London, and we finished What Sound in that setting.”
The Lamb studio is centered around a Mac-based Digidesign Pro Tools|HD system and a Mackie d8b console. Barlow admits that most of the mixing, however, is executed within Pro Tools and the Mackie desk is relegated to mostly simple automation and EQ chores. The acquisition of the Pro Tools rig itself directly contributed to the instrumental track “Scratch Bass,” which Barlow wrote himself. “I had just gotten Pro Tools,” he says, “and I thought, ‘All right, I'm going to do a song start to finish in Pro Tools.’ It started with that bass sound, and it was just a really menacing kind of brooding bass sound, and the track really hung around it. Then, I was looking for something else exciting to go in it, and I had the idea of doing a scratch session. So I phoned up a few mates who were DJs, and about three of them recommended this guy Tony Vega, who is part of one of the UK's biggest scratching outfits. He came down and did it in, like, two takes, and I used different plug-ins to kind of give it different flavors. That one is all about the dynamics, really; it just sticks to one chord. I wanted to keep it exciting without getting too musical.”
For recording Rhodes' vocals, Barlow relies on a combination of the Focusrite ISA 430 Producer Pack and the TL Audio valve EQ, as well as a selection of higher-end plug-ins for compression and coloring. “It often went from the preamp on the TLA to the compression of the Producer Pack and then straight into the back of Pro Tools,” he says. “We kind of avoid the desk really for recording. Once it's in the computer, I really like the Bomb Factory compressors because they sound really good, and the Pultec EQ works really well on her voice; it gives it a sort of breathiness. And on that album, I used the Antares Microphone Modeler a lot. There is a phony [Ultravoice ECM] 8000 setting that always made it sound really expensive and cool.”
FIFTH TIME IS A CHARM
Not all of the songs on What Sound were as open-and-shut affairs as the track “Scratch Bass.” One of the album's centerpieces is “Gabriel,” which the band toiled with seemingly endlessly before settling on the final version. For Rhodes, the initial writing process, however, was an almost seamless experience. “‘Gabriel,’ as a song, was really easy to write,” she explains. “‘Gabriel’ was a song that came with a whole load of other songs at the beginning of the writing process of What Sound. It just kind of happened. I didn't really have to do any work at all. Those were always the best songs. It just kind of happened to me. That aspect of it was very easy. But [then] I took it to Andy, and we took it into the studio and tried to work out what to do with it after that.
“At the beginning of the process, it just had these really abstract drums,” Rhodes continues. “It was a very abstract arrangement, and it wouldn't have made a single in a million years. But we just kept coming back to the fact that it was a really powerful song. And we needed to do something much more conventional or at least vaguely recognizable as a song. So we kept working on it and working on it, and in the end, it was a case of handing it over to [co-producer] Guy [Sigsworth], who we'd stopped working with at that point, and he took it off in a certain direction that we then took back. It was sort of a starting point to take it somewhere else. It was quite a long process. ‘Gabriel’ was certainly the most difficult song on this album in terms of production.”
“We did a big string session at Abbey Road,” Barlow adds. “And I thought that was going to finish it. We used a string arranger named Will Malone, who is really quite famous in his own right. And when we had our initial meeting, I asked him to score it on a keyboard so I could hear it. And he was like, ‘No, you've got to trust me; it will be fine.’ So I kind of went along with it, and we got these 20 musicians together, and he played it. And I hated it. It just didn't fit at all. At a string session, every second counts, so I'm trying to work out how the fuck to salvage this. So, basically, we got the whole string section to play at half-time and to do it all in octaves and trills. I put it all into Tools and then spent about two weeks reworking it so it kind of sounded like how I wanted it. For the whole track, it took, like, two-and-a-half months, including all of the different guises and all of the strings and mixing. We even had to mix it three times. But it is probably my favorite track on the album.”
Prior to the final mix, however, Barlow felt that the track needed one more element. The drum track that comes in near the end of the song was actually created from some unusual source material. “I did a remix for a band — and I'm not gonna tell you who — and that was the drums that they sent me. There is this function in the E-mu 6400 called Beat Munger where you keep the sound, but it kind of twists around the groove and the shuffle. It's a live drum part, and then we just processed it and kind of got a new take on it. I think it was all ambient mic, and I really compressed it.”
NO FEAR OF THE FOURTH
What Sound has only recently made it to the United States, but the band is nearly finished with its fourth as-yet-untitled studio album. And in what seems to be part of larger pattern, the band has again relocated its studio. The new space is inside of a renovated farmhouse in rural Bath, England. “It's an old farmhouse, so we have big stone rooms and stone cellars and fun places to put mics, and we've got a really good drum sound,” Barlow says.
“It's weird,” he explains. “When I'm in the final stages of our albums, I don't listen to much other music. I spend so much time concentrating on music, it's kind of like time off when I don't have to listen to it, which is really weird because once the album is done, I'll sort of catch up on everything. I went and bought the Goldfrapp album, which I really enjoyed in sort of a pop way. I listen to a lot of music that doesn't compete. If I'm programming, I'll listen to classical or swing or something completely not programmed. I find that my enjoyment for it is pretty menial because I'm analyzing it and wondering how they did it.”
NO SILENCE FOR LAMB
Ableton Live 2.0
AKG C 414 mics (2)
Clavia Nord Lead synth
Coles 4040 mics (2)
Digidesign 192 I/O
Digidesign MIDI I/O
Digidesign Pro Tools|HD
EDP Wasp synth
E-mu E6400 Ultra sampler
FAR custom monitors
Fender Rhodes electric piano
Focusrite ISA 430 Producer Pack
JoMox SunSyn synth
Lexicon PCM 80 effects processor
Mackie d8b console
Mackie Control control surface
Mackie HR-824 monitors
MOTU 828 FireWire audio interface
MOTU MIDI Express XT
Propellerhead Reason
Roland Chorus Echo effects unit
Steinberg Cubase
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