Tuesday, April 19, 2022

New Recording!: "(I'm Going To) Youngstown (To Get Fucked Up)"

Severe Platter Damage included rerecordings of songs from 1990-1994, basically The Escaped Fetal Pigs and Yeast? eras with some assorted side projects mixed in.  My next album, What's Your Flow Setting, Baby?, covers rerecordings of songs from 1996-2014, basically The GoGoBots and early Wred Fright solo eras with some assorted side projects thrown in.  It's named for a question that users of supplemental oxygen have to answer concerning what level of oxygen flow they have to use to get their blood oxygen levels up to normal.  This first rerecorded song dates from 1996.  I wrote it while the proto-GoGoBots were getting rolling.  We were called The Hot Glue Guns back then (we changed because we liked the name The GoGoBots better--the band had the same lineup basically, though we might have added another guitarist around that same point).  This was one of the earliest songs I wrote for the new band.  Bruce Springsteen had just released a depressing, weepy song about Youngstown, Ohio USA, and while one could certainly find must to weep about where Y-Town is concerned, Youngstown was actually the place my friends and I went for fun (yes, New Castle, Pennsylvania USA, where we were from, was so boring that Youngstown--the locale Springsteen, even before he completely lost it and started hanging out and doing a podcast with a guy who loved bombing people with drones, found depressing--was considered a good time), so I wrote a song about Y-Town decadence.  It was one of our more popular tunes and was the one that caught the attention of the guys in Dink, one of whom, Sean Carlin, was nice enough to lend his time and major label equipment to record us (that resulted in the Noise Prescription cd).  Team Fright later played it as I did solo, so it's been a staple of the set for a long time.  The counting in Japanese at the beginning comes from karate practice.  Also, please don't hit people in the face with beer bottles.  That's not very nice.  For the rerecording, I played the usual instruments and sang.  I think I played around with stereo recording on this one and a few others before I learned again that splitting the signal just makes the sound lower unless one doubles the tracks which kind of defeats the point of splitting the signal into stereo.  Later tracks on this album return to mono (look for about one track a week coming up until I'll collect it as my sophomore slump album).  The tinny metal percussion is me beating on a metal file folder holder, a homage to Youngstown's historical steel industry, some remnants of which remain, as well as to the local bands such as The Infidels whom I used to go see at Cedar's and The Penguin Pub.  The Pub is long gone, though it looks as if Cedar's is surviving in a different location.  One of the bands, As Big As Love (who actually were from Western PA if I remember correctly), used to bang on a pipe on stage for their "big song", the name of which escapes me now, so the metal on the track continues this literal metal (not just the heavy metal genre, as this is more industrial/punk, though that's cool as well) tradition.  I also had fun playing around with the Audacity effects on these tracks.  This one has a Skrillexesque bassdrop on it for fun (maybe that's not the exact term, but you'll know what I'm talking about when you hear it).  Anyway, as usual, revisiting this stuff on my own is fun.  If Machine Gun Kelly is ever hard up for material, this would be a good cover for him.

If you want to hear more music, then listen to the first Yeast? 7"!

And, speaking of Yeast?, here's some bonus Yeast? for you!

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