A silverchair cover I recorded as a way to get my head around recording with my electronic drum kit.

madman (silverchair cover)

madman

I haven't uploaded the proper song for July, because it has turned into a Death by Death Ray track. Hopefully we'll have a proper recording of it for you soon. In the meantime, here's a b-side i worked on. A cover of Helter Skelter by The Beatles, in the style of the Ramones. I'd been wanting to cover this song for a while, and around this time I was also keen to start a shitty early style punk band (a desire which has somewhat manifested itself in my new band Sigourney Beaver). So this was a way of combining two ideas which had been floating around in my head. (Plus River of Snakes already beat me to my idea of covering Rebel Girl.)

July B-Side: Helter Skelter (Beatles Cover)

This song is an instrumental collaboration. The result of a jam session with my good friend Ash (who I used to play with in the band Kaviya). I was playing guitar, Ash was playing keyboard. Computer keyboard to be exact. Using it to trigger midi samples. We recorded the base track entirely improvised, then went back and cleaned up a few things at the start, and added some extra layers. The name comes from Ash's dog Tigger, who is actually an incredibly happy dog. But we needed a name for it, and he was bounding around us at the time. But it's a sad sounding song, so we decided to call it Tigger's Lament. Perhaps at the fact he'd been locked out of the jam room while we were recording.
(If you listen close near the end, you can hear the sound of a door creaking too.)

Tigger's Lament [August]

A nice doomy sludge track. Started playing the opening riff one day, got lost in it, and the rest came from there. Played most of the "lead" breaks with a drumstick à la Sonic Youth. Attempting to channel Evelyn from True Radical Miracle in the drum style. 

[September]

Punky! Listening to a lot of Trash Talk at this stage. Wanted something simple, punchy and to the point. This one may or may not end up as a DBDR song, we're still trying to see if it fits. Had a lot of fun with the bass/delay/noise jam at the end too.

[October]

Possibly cheating a little bit with this one. This is technically the last ever Committal track. I wrote it as a set opener, and we performed it a couple of times, but I don't think anyone else liked it as much as I did. Then we changed our name/bass player/style, and this one got dropped. We never recorded it though, and I really like it, so I wanted to have a "finished" version somewhere. I'd also bought a Line 6 KB37 recording interface/midi-keyboard recently before this, and wanted to experiment with that. This track seemed like the perfect base. I layered in some midi cello, that I then ran through a simulated Big Muff/Marshall setup, just to add some extra depth and oomph. I really like the way it came out (especially with the kind of feedbacky noises at the end). This one goes out to my friend Matt, who asked me to do some metal when I started this project. Lyrics by Betty Bird (or at least, my approximation of what her lyrics were).

Worms [November]

This one made it's way into the Death By Death Ray catalogue. This is our first demo, so it's pretty rough. And a few things have changed since. Hopefully we'll have a proper version to share with you soon. One of my favourite to play live. Co-written and recorded with Betty Bird.

A Room With a Moose [July]

Silly little riff I was messing around with which sounds like the intro to some 90's era thrash song. Obviously not complete. But pretty fun.

Thrash intro Sketch

Another one that had been kicking around for a while in an unfinished version. Finally came up with the intro/bridge riff which helped to tie everything together. This one had a working title of "Harvey", because the chorus riff reminded me of a PJ Harvey song, so I had to change that too. Again, once the bridge was written, the chord changes for the new chorus kind of wrote themselves. (There's a brief nod to the PJ song at 5:11 still). I almost wrote lyrics to this one while I was up in Brisbane with Death by Death Ray, but they just haven't worked out still. So it's another instrumental, for now.

[May]

A bit more in the post-hardcore style. Could have maybe been a Death by Death Ray song, but it's just not "rocky" enough for the style we're going for. So it's ended up here. Another one with full lyrics too! This is my "climate change punk rock activist" song. I can't understand when people respond to environmental plans with the argument "but it's bad for the economy!" If we ruin the environment, then everyone will die and the economy's ruined anyway. Seems obvious to me.

Evolution of a Bad Idea [June]

Drummer for Sigourney Beaver, former guitarist/vocalist/drummer for Death by Death Ray, The Committal, Sinatra's Eyes, Kaviya, We Came to be Robots and Altered. This is an outlet for songs that didn't fit into any of those projects.

wysht