Peaceful Interference
Violent Soho are more at home than ever on Waco. The second album since returning to their roots sees the band continue their loyal relationship with producer Bryce Moorhead.
By Mark Davie
23 November 2016
Artist: Violent Soho
Album: Waco
Photos: Luke Henery
For a while there, Violent Soho was like a smartphone in the hands of a confused gorilla — Thurston Moore’s label Ecstatic Peace! to be precise. It could sense there was something valuable inside, but rather than deferring to the owner for the unlock code, it just kept smashing it on the floor.
Inevitably, things started to crack. Rather than producing a rare jewel, the extreme pressure precipitated a final collapse, after one too many beatings.
Before Ecstatic Peace! came on the scene, the Mansfield band’s first EP went down well. Locally produced by Bryce Moorhead, it netted them a number of strong support slots. A locally made album followed — this time produced by manager Dean Dirt, and recorded and mixed by Moorhead and Sloth — with songs strong enough to attract the attention of the Sonic Youth frontman.
When Ecstatic Peace! picked the band up, rather than trusting the band to keep growing, a hold was placed on Violent Soho’s discography. The label decided it would be prudent to re-record seven out of 10 songs with Gil Norton and rehash them as a self-titled debut.
After 18 months, the band were left with no money, and no label. Oddly, while the album didn’t do well enough Stateside, and despite it already having mostly been heard back home, the rehash still managed to get an ARIA nod. Go figure. It even surprised the band. Guitarist James Tidswell was on his way out of the door holding a Maccas application form when he got the call about it.
Looking back, it seemed like a misstep. Since returning to their Brisbane base, the band has released two more albums under the I Oh You label, Hungry Ghost and the new one, Waco, which climbed to No. 1. Both have been produced, recorded and mixed by Bryce Moorhead — picking up from where the band left off before the US adventure — and the band couldn’t be happier.
“It’s always kind of scared me to think of going anywhere else,” said singer and main songwriter Luke Boerdam about working with Moorhead. “I’ve been locked out of studios before for a ‘producers only’ mix session. ‘F**k you! Am I not part of the mixing process?’ Either we can do it together, or you can kick me out and we’ll send 400 emails back and forth. It’s stupid. I want to work with the engineer, I want to work with the producer. Bryce has an amazing amount of patience to listen to my bullshit for a few months and help mould it into something.”
ZERO INTERFERENCE
Exactly what makes a fruitful, long-lasting artist/producer relationship is hard to pin down. It seems to be as contingent on the producer’s understanding of how the band wants to work as it is on results. Boerdam put it this way: “We tried other studios but didn’t get that same dynamic. We still got results and made records I’m proud of, but the songs I’m most proud of are ones recorded with Bryce. There’s something natural about how he produces audio which just sits well with our band. We’ll just sit and chip away at finding the guitar sound that slots into the song, without needing any processing.
“Sometimes I make the ugliest vocal sound, but the way Bryce produces makes it fit in naturally. When we recorded with Gil Norton he put this monstrosity of a mic in front of me which some company had sent him for a demo. I’m used to singing into something basic but I said I’d give it a go. I hated it. I remember asking Gil if we could put up room mics; a bit of delay left and right is what Bryce does. He just said we’d add it later. He wanted me in a vocal booth, and I was saying, ‘Can’t we record in an open room with high ceilings?’ Again, he just said we’d add the reverb later. I know that’s not right, I’ve done this a million times before! We’ve tried so many different techniques and we know what works.” [See Room for Vocals sidebar].
Moorhead currently works out of The Shed studios, but he also used to engineer at a studio called Zero Interference, where the name doubled as a policy aspiration. Moorhead said it stemmed from being in a band where “the person recording you is telling you how your music is supposed to sound. I just wanted to be someone who was more of a facilitator and help translate their ideas into something that was listenable.”
He’d heard exactly that sort of negative interference when Violent Soho came to him with demos recorded by another engineer who “obviously thought Violent Soho was this really heavy, tough semi-metal sounding band,” said Moorhead. “It was all scooped guitars, whereas this band’s the antithesis of scooped guitars. Midrange is good for these guys. It’s got to have rough edges, the performance has to be a little bit ragged and a translation of what they’d be like live.”
Boerdam says rather than trying to put his stamp on a song’s direction, Moorhead tries to filter Boerdam’s “blubbering on” about song influences and visions into something meaningful. “He won’t interfere with you or the creative process,” said Boerdam. “You’ll be in the middle of coming up with a new idea or song, and he’ll just watch you. But when he hears something that’s really off, he’ll tell you it’s not working.”
Sometimes I make the ugliest vocal sound, but the way Bryce produces makes it fit in naturally. When we recorded with Gil Norton he put this monstrosity of a mic in front of me which some company had sent him for a demo. I hated it
WRITE TIME
Boerdam writes and demos all of Violent Soho’s songs at home. Hungry Ghost was mostly demoed in GarageBand, with an old Avid MBox plugged into a venerable Apple MacBook. In the last couple of years he’s upgraded the MacBook, and moved on from Garageband to Logic. The MBox has been replaced by an Apogee Duet interface, and he’s plumped for a Shure SM7B vocal mic.
“I usually plug guitars straight into the interface and program some s**t computer drums,” said Boerdam. “I use the EZ Drummer library, but always have the same four go-to rhythm patterns. The coolest part is you can just drag and drop parts and totally rearrange stuff.”
With Boerdam’s growing home studio, he admits he’s also gotten into the audio engineering side and dissecting how engineers and producers put colour into a band’s sound. He doesn’t have any desire to take over from Moorhead though. “I respect the dudes around me that have been doing this stuff for 20 to 30 years and recorded hundreds of bands,” he said. “Also, I’d rather be sitting in my room writing songs than tuning vocals for 14 hours in the studio.”
The band had toured some of the songs on Hungry Ghost for two years, whereas all of Waco’s tunes were fresh off Boerdam’s demos. “We usually find the longer we work on a song as a band, the better and easier it is to record. I never realised how beneficial touring was; having a year or two to mull it over, get an understanding of the song’s natural dynamics and have a vision for it. That said, as a songwriter I’ve learned what makes a Soho song. I’ll add certain elements and nuances that counterbalances not touring for a few years.”
That’s not to say he can necessarily churn out the hits on demand. Boerdam’s songwriting process has no fixed timeline. With the TV on in the background, he’ll riff on ideas, pulling old ones off the shelf and storing new ones away hoping one day they’ll find their companion pieces. “There’s no point rushing songwriting,” he said. “Writing to a due date does nothing but turn out horrible songs. It’s not a natural fit, it’s not the best a song can be. My one pet gripe is I can’t stand boring, long sections that have no purpose, yet go for ages.”
He bankrolled this hopeless bunch of kids and gave us the keys to a very expensive, well-kitted out studio, and told us to go for it
THE BEST VERSION OF YOU
The band spent two weeks in pre-production with Moorhead to finalise arrangements. “Unless we listen back and think that something’s not working,” said bass player, Luke Henery, “everything is normally sorted out in pre-production. Then it’s just about getting a good performance and making sure our tones are right.
“Bryce is known for bringing out the best version of a band. He gets you in the room, makes sure you’re tight, gets everything miked up and sounding awesome. Then he’ll make you keep playing it until you give him the best take. He’s got an amazing ear and he finds the little nuances in the way you’re playing, which sometimes get lost from demo to album. You played it exactly the same but for some reason it doesn’t have the same energy. Bryce finds out why and helps bring it out. It might be a little harmonic that you’re accidentally hitting because you’re holding your finger down on the G-string. It was a mistake, but he wants you to keep doing it.”
The band has figured out what works best for them in the studio, preferring to capture the bass and drums together, with Boerdam laying down a guitar guide track at the same time. They don’t record everything at once because they’ve found it’s usually “too hard to get proper isolation and to get the guitar tones the way we like it,” said Henery. “We’d always end up re-amping or something anyway. After tracking bass and drums it gives Luke time to sit there and work out his guitar parts. He really flourishes in the studio, like it’s what he was meant to do. We always give him space in the studio because typically something awesome happens.”
Moorhead concurred: “Luke Boerdam is the guy who’s got the vision for the song, so it’s important we have a lot of time for him to realise that vision.” Moorhead said early on they tried playing everything live, then overdubbing guitar parts again. These days, they prefer to cut to the chase. “The guys are so good at playing their instruments now that it’s just more efficient to get straight to it and get the drums and bass down, then have a lot more time to experiment with guitar parts and sounds.”
ANTHEM FOR A NEW SOUND
The first song released from Waco was the punky anthem Like Soda. Its pre-chorus build-up, I don’t mind/I don’t care/I’ll just say whatever, has shades of The Pixies and Blink 182 and instinctively feels like the lead up to a classic Drop-D chorus, balls deep in low-end extension. Instead, it crunches away in the midrange; all energy, less extension. It was a surprising choice to lead off with, even more so in retrospect, given the rest of the album is full of prototypical big Violent Soho choruses.
“Like Soda isn’t a full picture of what the record is like, especially from an audio engineering perspective,” said Boerdam. “But we’ve been a band for 10 years so we’d rather just drop music that we feel right about at the time. Rather than think about some larger marketing scheme or plan for the record.”
“That song was actually a bit of a nightmare to work out because of the tempo changes,” said Moorhead. “The demo tempo change was even greater and the guys were really attached to how it sounded, but it didn’t work. It just seemed like lots of little bits jumbled together. We tried heaps of things to get it to work while keeping the original intent of the song. There wasn’t any deliberate decision to change the way the bass sounded, it was just the puzzle the song presented. The verse was supposed to be the biggest, ballsiest part of the song.”
“We usually have a soft/loud dynamic where the pre-chorus cuts out then jumps to the chorus,” said Boerdam. “This feels more like it glides in. I struggled with that song from demos right through to mixing. There was a change of thinking required, like having to accept this chorus is more of a slow-paced chorus, not loud and abrasive with a bunch of ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ squeals. I realised it’s got some charm to it, when you hit that chorus it slows and makes sense. It doesn’t need that heavy Soho riff to drag it down, it just flows.”
It turned out to be an inspired decision, fans even going so far as to petition for it as a replacement national anthem. It also speaks to the place Violent Soho occupies — a full-time Australian band, with the backing of an independent label bent on trying to represent exactly who the band is. That is, they can release what they feel good about, not something that fits into a label’s marketing plan.
“When you’re younger and land your first record deal, you think things like that matter more than they actually do,” said Boerdam. “How much money the label is putting into marketing or whatever, especially back when the internet didn’t rule everything. Before you got to that stage, however, none of it mattered. The Golden Rule was to have good songs that are honest and people can connect with. The music always has to come first. It’s a lesson to keep learning again and again.”
DROPPING THE BIG CHORUS
Beyond Like Soda, Waco holds its fair share of powerful, low-end moments. The single Viceroy is deep and ballsy, Moorhead talks about how he keeps those moments powerful without losing punch. “In a lot of the heavy parts of their songs, there’ll be a really constant kick drum which can be quite tricky,” said Moorhead. “It’s trying to control the decay of that kick drum and make it punchy enough that it’s not just flapping around and taking away space from the bass guitar.
“I mix all in-the-box using UAD plug-ins. I usually send kick from an AKG D112 and Beyer M88 to a group that’s got the legacy UAD Fairchild plug-in on it. It has this little knob down the bottom you can turn that seems to affect the attack of it. I back that off a little bit and it just seems perfect for making each kick poke through. Getting that kick drum hitting the right place is important.
“I’ll also bus all the instruments to a group and have all the vocals going to the master bus, then I’ll put a parallel compressor on that instrument group. When it comes up to a heavy part of the song, I’ll automate the uncompressed bus down a little and push up the compressed bus so it jumps and starts pumping a bit, but the vocals don’t get modulated by the compressor.”
While Moorhead and Violent Soho know how to create powerful punk rock, as Like Soda shows, there are plenty of diverse moments on Waco that make it more than a couple of singles. Waco has already hit No. 1 on the ARIA album charts, numbers to support the feeling this is an Aussie album well worth listening to. “To be honest,” signed off Henery, “they’re songs I’ll always be proud of. Undoubtedly, I’ll end up playing house parties around Australia. Makes no difference to me man, as long as I can still turn my amp up!”
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