1.
sevens on repeat (3.42)
2. unrare (4.51)
3. enki (1.58)
4. casey (5.42)
5. cross purposes (3.21)
6. since last year (4.34)
7. onewordresponse (3.40)
8. regional (4.33)
9. i could beat you in a fight (4.35)
10. one more (0.45)
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The
artwork is so nice for this I'm linking to big pleasant
versions of the front cover here
and the inside front cover here.
Scroll down to the bottom of this page to download
loads of tasty free mp3s, buddy.
Fucking christ, it seems like an awful long time since
'tetch', doesn't it? I realise that for most bands,
releasing an album in December and then one the following
June would be quite fast, but in enoughropeworld that's
the kind of slack-arsed laziness that'd have people
suggesting I should do National Service to instil a
sense of discipline. The 38-minute chunk of sound that
is 'unrarities' was recorded between April and the
arse-end of June 2004, so it's something of a surprise
that it's as coherent as it is. I'm happier with this
CD than I have been with pretty much anything I've
done, so it's a little bit of a shame that very few
people are listening. Haha! I suppose this will feed
a healthy sense that I am a wronged genius who will
be appreciated by the masses once I splatter my brains
across the garage wall with a shotgun after a massive
dose of heroin, if that's the career path I take.
The two-month, bitty recording period was partly necessitated
by the fact I'd been doing several weeks of temping
work from mid-May to the start of July, but it's also
because I need to get away from doing 5-hour stints
where I make whole albums in one fevered session. Not
that the extra time made me any more concerned with
professional musical techniques such as editing, re-recording,
playing in tune, playing in time or fixing mistakes,
as is perhaps evident by the first two tracks here.
'sevens on repeat' was recorded on two tracks in twice
the length of time it takes to listen to the song,
being as it is a deliberately random string of pinged
harmonics with intentional echoes of 'a
short distance...' opener 'rising'. 'unrare' is
the best example of me deciding that editing and re-recording
would fuck up the charm of the songs; it originally
started as 3 or 4 (i forget) short demoes of songs
which I collected into a single mp3 as a work-in-progress
taster for the album, before deciding that I really
fucking liked it as it was. So you get an opening clatter
of horrible, random distorted guitar squealing fighting
with a backwards version of itself, a short moody tune,
and then a couple of minutes of the sound of a Grolsch
bottle being prodded into and scraped across the strings
while a melody crawls out of the mess, followed by
another freeform backwards ending. Precisely no fucker
liked this, but I'm too caught up in the notion that
I'm some kind of hip No-Neck Blues Band-esque experimenter
to care, and I'm starting to love the sound of traditional
enough rope melodies arguing with freeform sounds.
And like NNCK's 'Intonomancy' and much avant-rock twiddling,
sometimes the warmth and tone and feelings of just
fucking sounds can be worth not having a hooky,
capital-t Tune for.
Hence 'enki', where the melody goes up against the
unsettling sound of the infra-red beam from the bottom
of an optical mouse bouncing off the pick-up of PTA
(the band)'s bass guitar. (Cheers for that btw). And
so to 'casey', which I regard as my favourite enough
rope song ever. I love the melody, and fuck it, I just
plain, balls-out, honest-to-God love the whole fucking
thing. I don't know why, and you probably won't either
if you hear it, but do listen to it, if you listen
to anything. If you hate it, fine, we'll go our separate
ways, but I'll slap your dumb ass as you run out, and
I'll cry into my beer as fucking Do Me Bad Things play
stadiums next year and I waft tunes into the distracted
ears of two people from Cactus and their goldfish,
destined to forever be the half-heard background soundtrack
of someone's online personality quiz adventures. I'm
not bitter or anything. Perhaps you'll hear me between
Embrace and Evanescence in your playlist, which I suppose
is a small victory. Though, seriously, get some Enon
and Envy mp3s so I can at least look amateurish next
to some fucking ace bands.
Well, this is turning into a self-indulgent mess of
a rant, so rather than go on about how much i like
'onewordresponse' and some more recording techniques,
you can just click some of the links. Either to the
mp3s or someone else's site and be on your merry way.
I'm aware no-one is reading this far anyway, so I won't
talk about how clever the reversed melody to 'i could
beat you in a fight' is and point out that the place
the second melody comes in subtly changes the tune.
If you want to argue with me about how much The No-Neck
Blues Band or Limited Express (Has Gone?) or Keiji
Haino or even Godspeed suck ass and why Enough Rope
is pretentious and crap and should make proper songs
like Keane, then email me at jon@enoughrope.net.
I'd seriously love it.
Bye everyone, and thanks if you downloaded any of this.
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© Enough
Rope