Navigator – Bad Children
When I first started playing this album around the house Mrs. Toad’s series of reactions were instructive. ‘What the fuck is this discordant shite?’ was the first. By the third time around she was asking ‘Who are these guys?’ Then where they were from. Then she was looking them up on the internet. The Mrs. Toad Seal of Approval is a rare and elusive thing but Braden J. McKenna, from Bone Valley, Utah, has it.
To be fair to her initial, somewhat horrified reaction, the production values on this record are, deliberately or otherwise, as rough as a bear’s arse. There are even times when all the crackling of amps and peaking of microphone channels threaten to overwhelm even my own somewhat obsessive taste for this kind of low-fi style. It was, as a matter of fact, all recorded in bedrooms and living rooms, so the phrase ‘bedroom production’ is quite literal in this case. Ten songs, half an hour, a simple but excellent album. McKenna has recorded pretty much all of it himself, bar a very little cello and trumpet, occasional guitar help, and a couple of different drummers helping out.
Good tunes are good tunes, however, and as low-fi indie rock goes, this is really good. What leads the album, for the most part, is the following: firstly, a fairly constant rhythm, which comes from the guitar playing as well as how the songs themselves are written, not just the drums; secondly, a wailed, emotive vocal rendered somewhat distant and smothered by the production values; and thirdly, a constantly growling electric guitar.
The guitar has just a little country in it at times, especially when picked, but that frequently gives way to impassioned, distorted solos in tandem with crashing drums and mewling keyboards. The lyrics can be difficult to make out most of the time, but when those crescendos build there is a wounded anger to the noise, albeit muffled and disguised by the recording style. It gives the strong feeling of an album recorded in the grip of confused, retaliatory hostility born of misunderstandings, miscommunications and relationships that threated click, but never quite did. That may be nonsense, but that’s the impression I get from the music, and I honestly can’t understand enough of the lyrics to contradict it.
It doesn’t come across entirely as an album of alientation though, despite that impression being very strong in a couple of the tracks. There are comfortable, happy places to be found, providing a reassuring balance to the less harmonious moments. As its centrepiece, the truly gorgeous, acoustic Work is Done breaks the wall of fuzz at the perfect time, and with the final two tracks, Jesus Christ and Found a Fox, it winds down with a lovely sigh of acceptance. A job well done indeed, and an album perfectly executed.
Navigator – Danger Dragon
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MySpace | More mp3s | Download for free from Magic Goats Music (Click the album cover for a rar file)
What?! No love for this album?
I was real taken with Work is Done (I think?) on the last podcast and I’m loving the songs on the rest of the album.
But, I just can’t see myself listening to it as much as I’d like to: maybe it’s the crappy laptop I’m listening on, but it really just sounds like I’ve blown a set of cheap car speakers… Discordance I can handle, but the crackling is perhaps an artistic statement too far for my tastes.
Feeling old, pass me my hearing aid…
I’m not sure how intentional it is, but obviously I couldn’t tell you.
The crackle is so harsh that I couldn’t put anything but the quietest song on the podcast because everything else distorted the second I imported it into Audacity.
Looking at the waveforms, this is a normal song, with all the peaks and valleys and quieter and louder bits clearly visible in the waveform:
And this is one of the Navigator ones which is just one great big maxed-out wall of noise:
Now, as far as I am aware that could have come about due to the mastering – in which case, yes, they have overdone it a little – or it could have come about due to constantly and massively peaking the recording channels when they actually took down the songs – i.e. recording too loud a noise into a channel or a mic not set to the right gain to handle it.
If it’s the latter, then either they did it on purpose and again, I think they’ve overdone it somewhat, or they did it by accident, in which case their equipment is awful, or they don’t know how to use it.
Personally, I think it’s probably on purpose because it’s all so consistent across all the tracks, and I can’t imagine anyone peaking anything so much and so constantly.
People with more audio knowledge than me might be able to add more information than that, but that’s my inexpert take on it.
And yes, I think this is excellent, and I am rather surprised there has been so little love. Come on people, clean your ears out!
I really like this! (2nd song is lovely, yes!)
I can make out 80% of the lyrics. If only it were always so easy.
WOOO! Someone was listening at least!
Well, it took me about 6 months, but I finally got around to downloading this. Fuck. Ing. Brill. Iant. !
As for the recording, I notice that the Magic Goats Music site has other recordings by Braden McKenna, including a really really good one called Weighted Pines (15 songs and the longest one is 1:58). The sound quality on those is much better (or clearer?) than the Navigator record, so it seems that he knows how to record properly, but just chose to record the Navigator record differently. Either way, gotta like the results.
Oh, and Bad Children has now been released on cassette with a secret non-lo-fi version on the b-side, so that would seem to indicate that the lo-fi production was deliberate.