2008
On one May night in Keighley (a town situated within West Yorkshire), I saw a band called Catch On Quick on a spring night. The gig was based at a building that belonged to St. Anne’s Primary School. I don’t know what kind of building that it was. The top floor was where adults would get drinks. You could say it was a pub that was a part of the school. In America, it would be called the staff bar or something. The five-piece band was emo metal. The singer and bassist were emo but the rest weren’t. The band were like Anthrax in that they sounded different from the singer but, somehow, they managed to gel. They were called Catch On Quick. They split in 2009 before the singer and bassist both joined You Had Me at Hello. The bassist is now in a band called As Sirens Fall.
At the gig, I met two male teenagers who were 17. They attended the same college that I previously did. One of them told a story about how one of my teachers got angry at a group of students from the nearby secondary school. When I say nearby, it was literally a stone’s throw away. It was too close for comfort. The teacher was in class but the outside group (who were working-class teenage boys) were disruptive. I was surprised because this teacher wasn’t the sort to get angry. The naughtiest of the duo was Jimmy. He had long black hair. He looked similar to the way that Wes Borland looked as a high school student. You know someone has got a drinking problem if they drink someone else’s beer. Thankfully, Jimmy didn’t drink mine. The drummer, whose name is Peter, asked who drank his pint. Instead of framing me or telling the truth, Jimmy cheekily said: “Not me.”
Eventually, me and the two teenaged guys went to a middle-aged metalhead’s house. The metalhead was a dark-haired woman of medium build. She had a Metallica video titled 2 of One. Now that I think about it, it’s fitting that Metallica only did one music video in the eighties. Anyway, she put the cassette into the VHS machine (what is otherwise known as a VCR) and cooked some French fries for us. After she cooked them, she sat down and observed us watching the video with a quiet yet child-like enthusiasm as we ate our fries quickly because of the hunger which consuming alcohol brings. Even Jimmy seemed innocent. With humorous affection, the woman remarked: “Oh God, You guys are so 17.”
Back to 2008, some women came over with a guy. After they settled down, our host established a rule which surprised even me - if the women strip to their underwear, the men have to spank their butts. Although I’m asexual, I didn’t want to be a killjoy. It was fun doing something that I wouldn’t normally do. We all slept in for the night. When I woke up to go to the bathroom, I could hear Jimmy having anal sex with the homeowner. I could tell that it was anal due to the spanking sounds and the sound of the pelvis colliding with the buttocks. Naturally, I was reminded of a Winger song titled Seventeen.
That happened in the spring. In the summer, I attended another house party with another group of friends in another town (Doncaster in South Yorkshire). Lauren (a young Jane Fonda lookalike) invited me. I first knew her from a site called Face Party. This was back in 2005. In 2006, she had a slumber party where some girls and herself spoke to me on a webcam. In 2007, she invited me to a Guy Fawkes Night camping trip in the middle of the woods. Skipping along to her summer house party in 2008, she made her cat follow a red laser. Luckily, she didn’t do it to the extent that the cat was worn out. In 2011, she appeared on an E4 reality show titled Sorority Girls. One of the sorority sisters was disconsolate that Lauren didn’t make it to the final rounds, so I contact her on Twitter so that she could contacted Lauren on Twitter and Facebook. She was grateful.
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While I was strolling through Burnley with a friend of mine named Rob, we were amused by a racist incident that we witnessed as we were walking to his house. There was a white guy and an Indian guy verbally abusing each other (racial epithets amongst other expletives) as they walked away from each other after having a pushing match. Us and them were a Yin-Yang. Rob and I laughed at the oddity, but the strangest thing that he ever saw was his mother have sex with another woman in his garden. He watched from his bedroom. Perhaps this is why he smoked so much weed. He tried so hard to erase the image from his mind but it didn’t work. He smoked so much that his mouth and fingers were chaffed.
On a summer night, myself and a friend of mine named Natalie went to a house party in Manchester. 2008 was when she went from regarding herself as heterosexual to bisexual. The host of the party was Laura, who’s also bi. She had a gothic demeanour but was more light-hearted in comparison to most metalheads who are either overly downcast or overtly cynical. Like Natalie, she was a budding singer. Natalie had a friend who came with her who automatically didn’t like me because I was an ethnic minority. She didn’t say anything but her evasive body language was obvious. Back to Laura, going to her parties stopped being fun since, from that point onwards, there were no other girls except for a lesbian. The next morning, I played an acoustic guitar that belonged to Paul, Laura’s boyfriend who looked Serbian like the bandmates in System of a Down. He remarked: “You’re playing it like a bass guitar. Cool.”
What I was doing was the opposite of what Cliff Burton did. He played his bass guitar like an electric guitar, except it was less to do with plectrum-plucking than making it sound distorted. My idea of playing acoustic guitar was about creating the kind of dark textures which one would associate with an alternative `90s band. Given the state of my mind, it was easy to play harrowing melodies. One of the things that I experimented with was by reversing the position of the chord hand so it was almost like playing a piano. When I returned home, I experimented by playing with two to four plectrums.
Another experiment was plucking the bottom of the strings while using the chord hand to hold all the strings. I then used two plucking hands to imitate the sound of a clocktower. It’s a shame that Sam and his friends didn’t get to incorporate these ideas into a song (they had different schedules). After guitaring, I listened to Metallica’s new song which they played in Korea. The title was Vulturus. When I showed it to Sam on MSN, he believed that it sounded like something from The Offspring (who he likes more than Nickelback). Isaias, his brother, thought that it was a sign that Metallica were going through a mid-life identity crisis. They hated to think what Metallica’s next album would be like. I thought that the song was a James Hetfield parody.
2008 was when I learned about mixing records. You can learn about mixing just by being a listener. I was experimenting with mixing by seeing how bands would sound with different levels of bass and treble. It depends on the medium. Using a vinyl player was effective for Metallica’s …and Justice for All album because of how they made do without the bass guitar. Using Windows Media Player was a different experience because it made me realize what was lost when the decision was made to have Robbin Crosby’s rhythm guitars buried in the mix of Ratt’s Detonator album. Despite Ratt being my favourite band, my favourite experience was turning up the bass when listening to Pantera’s post-eighties albums because I thought that Rex Brown’s bass would’ve made the albums heavier.
As for albums in general, it was sad to hear lead guitars buried as was the case with the chorus of Metallica’s Sad but True. It made me realize that most bands would get along if they applied the same logic towards mixing that Faith No More did with the verses and choruses of their song, Falling to Pieces (which was produced by Matt Wallace). In 2008, the Metal Hammer magazine had an issue entirely devoted to eighties thrash bands. My favourite anecdote was when Scott Ian talked about the first Anthrax album - Fistful of Metal. He mentioned that the producer was a drummer who wanted Charlie Benante’s drums to be higher than anyone else’s musical presence. This actually makes sense because thrash is primarily characterized by the style of the drumming. Even if the guitaring is slower than the drumming, a song can still be thrash if the drumming is fast.
The producer’s mixing made sense because there are not too many albums where the drums are the highest in the mix. It didn’t hurt that Charlie is the best drummer that New York has to offer. Contrary to what others may think, Fistful of Metal doesn’t have the worse mix. That credit belongs to a Holy Terror album titled Mind Wars. I’ve never heard an album where the vocals were that low in the mix. I’m sure there are metal fans who could identify another album which competes with it but the vocals in Mind Wars were mixed so low that you couldn’t hum along, let alone sing along. Do bear in mind, though, that I listened to the vinyl version, so the digital version may have been improved.
