1.
to the yellow house (2.07)
2. suggestive emoticon (4.25)
3. schemes are afoot (3.18)
4. nails (2.23)
5. exploding crates (4.59)
6. audiospicious (1.56)
7. now, watch me get hit in the face (3.31)
8. slow communication (3.27)
9. further schemes (crates reprise) (0.58)
10. in-store radio anthem (4.53)
11. i'm a venture capitalist, let's party (2.19)
12. goodbye yellow house (1.23)
13. i left my skeleton around here somewhere...
(6.29)
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Beautiful
artwork done by Tina, click the links to peep big versions
of the front
and inside and the
back. As ever, scroll down past all this bollocks
to find a stack of mp3s at the bottom.
Recorded in a month between May and June 2005, 'schemes'
is the thirteenth (i think) Enough Rope album proper.
With the exception of a furious Saturday where four
songs were put down, all these songs were recorded
one a day, because tragically I have to fit this stuff
around work these days, a few of these were recorded
in snatched hours before dinner or late at night. I
like to think there's a theme to this record, but I
have no idea what it is. The two '...yellow house'
songs almost top and tail the record, I was going to
try and construct some bullshit story about them forming
some kind of metaphor, but fuck it, travel metaphors
are over-done in rock. Plus 'goodbye yellow house'
was recorded on the last day almost by accident. The
yellow house in question is a mental institution in
Zagreb, we were driving past and Tina's dad was telling
me that when people go mad they say they need to be
sent to the yellow house.
In terms of sound, it kinda follows on from 'unrarities'
and 'the disquiet', occasional flashes of the older
straightforward melodicism but with added weird shit.
For example, 'schemes are afoot' and 'now, watch me
get hit in the face' both feature the sound of me slapping
the guitar strings with my palms in an attempt to make
it sound like bongoes. Again, I've been keeping it
rough, the rhythm and timing of the beat at the end
of 'now, watch me...' is all over the place, by the
end it becomes totally freeform and...wrong. 'now,
watch me...' is built from a loop of a strange echoing
guitar squeal which sounds nicely unsettling to me.
Like a lot of my recent albums, much of my favourite
stuff on here came out of improvisation and mistakes;
my favourite track, 'in-store radio anthem', was something
that I wrote when attempting to find some chords for
'exploding crates' and once I had the chords I recorded
it straight away. The main riff was pretty much the
first thing I came up with for it. Likewise, having
given up on another song I was messing around playing
harmonics, and 'i'm a venture capitalist, let's party'
wrote itself; I recorded it in 3 or 4 straight live
takes leaving in all the mistakes, and it sounds nicely
improvised and raw because of it.
The last track, 'i left my skeleton around here somewhere...'
is in three parts and was originally a track for a
sleepy side-project by the name of The Rogue Telephone.
It wasn't a song so much as an idea of chords chiming
slowly amid near-silence. It sounds little like the
RT demo now, for this recording I just put on the metronome
and recorded two takes of random two-note chords from
some scale or other. I love it because there are two
paths moving at random which occasionally hit upon
the same note before moving on. The second and third
parts use the same melody very differently; I'm always
intrigued to see how the same melody can vary when
you put it over two different chord patterns. So in
the second part it sounds quite dark and melancholy
before the third part changes it to a sort of sweetly
uplifting tune to end the record on.
Oh, listen for yourself! I worry about writing these
things because musicians talking about their own music
is fucking dreary, but since this is the official thing
I also don't want to present it with an air of 'yeah,
this is shit, i'm rubbish', because, well, if I thought
it was shit I wouldn't be attempting to waste your
time with it. But anyway, you know the deal; melodies,
the odd bit of weirdness, a couple of unusual effects...Enough
Rope. This time I put extra effort into the wacky post-rock
song titles though. Just for you. I have no idea when
the next Enough Rope record will be, I plan to do a
Melted Face Orchestra one next, but then again I didn't
plan to make this, I just recorded three songs and
then decided to make another ER record. So stay tuned.
PS. you can get this record for free if you drop your
address into the jonbox.
A percentage of the nothing you spend will be given
to Make Poverty History. I'm like a fat Chris Martin,
except with a more interesting girlfriend. Peace out!
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© Enough
Rope