In fact, I like them so much that I wrote my own version for Beat Noir's first album, Ecotone. Beat Noir put out our second album, Sovereignties, just under a month ago. I am very proud of what we did as a band and feel fucking great having my name on this album.
I will take this opportunity to tell you that Sovereignties is available for free and it would mean a lot to me if you gave it a listen and/or download. You can find it here:
I decided to write a liner notes/history of the songs, similar to what I did with Ecotone. Check it out:
St. John the Baptist
The writing of Sovereignties formally began with Duff, Mark, and I show each other riffs on acoustic guitars in Mark’s old bedroom. The three songs that were started that night were “St. John the Baptist”, “Monkey Paw”, and “Alexandria”. Duff came up with the intro riff and then we worked out a rough idea of what the verse would sound like. We started to jam the songs not long after that. I remember trying to write basslines for this song that sounded like the ones on Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, which was one of the main influences sonically, at least for Duff and myself, on this album. As I usually do, I tried to put far too many riffs into this song and had to scale back what was going on. My original version of what I play in the verse was just awful.
This album was more directed by Duff than what we did previously. He took upon himself to work through the songs and change the parts that he didn’t think worked. This was for the better and made a much better final product. At one practice while we writing the album, Duff said “This part doesn’t sound right. There’s too much going on.” It turned out that I was just playing something not even close to what the part was and had a dramatically different idea of what was happening. Whoops.
This is the longest song we’ve ever written and while we were putting it together I had no idea that it would end up being the theme that is returned to throughout Sovereignties. We all agreed that it would be really cool if we brought back some parts throughout the album and I’m happy that we did it with the parts we did. I feel like the lyrics of this song kind of encapsulate the themes of the album.
Bold move opening with the longest song, right? Sure feels that way.
Owen McCourt
While writing this album, one thing we kept in mind was trying to write simpler songs. This may seem weird, but it can be hard to just leave a part and not put an extra riff or extra chords into something. The first time we played through this song, with almost the whole thing being just a C to an Am, it felt super weird and too cutesy. Too simple. It’s kind of like colourfield painting. Jack Bush said one time, about his abstract colourfield stuff “The first time I painted like that, just the thin colours, it scared the shit out of me!” I think that that is the best way to sum up what it was like writing this song. Having a song just move between two chords makes you feel lazy as a musician, but you have to fight that feeling, because it works out better in the end.
This song changed a lot from when we began writing it, but most of that comes with putting on the guitar and synth layers that we knew were going to be there, but could do with just the four of us at practice. The bass intro used to be on guitar too. There used to be a bunch of different bass stuff in here and though it was little bit of a kick in the stomach getting all of it taken out, it was for the better.
It’s funny that this song seemed simple at the beginning because it wound up being what I think is one of the bigger departures for us on this album. We ain’t never had a lead synth before.
In the words of Davis, who recorded the album, “That’s the fuckin’ single bud.”
Monkey Paw
I think that this is my favourite song on the album. It probably changed the most drastically from beginning to end. It began as a fast punk song that probably sounded the closest to Ecotone out of everything that we were working on at the time. I know that I talk about the bass playing a lot here, but it’s me writing, so what the fuck did you think would happen? This song used to have a fucking god-awful basslines that was once again me trying to do way too much. Just playing all over the fretboard and making the song sound messy as hell. As with “Muscle Memory” on the last album, we completely turned the song on it’s head, making it something completely different, and just like last time, it benefited a lot from that. Duff tabled the idea of playing it double-time, but slow and that was cool because we had never done that before. Mark said “Hey man, I have another idea that’s going to do that!” feigning outrage. That idea became “Itchicoo”. This was another song that seemed really simple while we writing, with most of it just going back and forth two simple chord progression. I scaled back what I was doing, but still got some riffs in there, because, y’know, you don’t hold back a primo fuckin’ talent like this.
The lyrics are très sad. I’ll leave it at that.
I had never heard the “final” version of this song the way that Duff planned it, with all of the extra guitars, but I love it. Can’t wait to play this one live because it’s a big-time jammer.
Leslie Bush
If you want to quibble, this is technically the first song we worked on for the album. Duff moved into the lower floor of the house that Mark, Colin, and I lived in on Canada Day 2013. We were really excited about the band all living together in the same house, with Big Dawg O’Neill, no less, because we knew that it would be fun and we could also do a lot of band stuff.
That night we thought we take a cue from Attack in Black and record a 5-song acoustic EP of songs we hadn’t written yet all in one night. Mark had an 8-track recorder and we set up shop in my room. We quickly scaled the idea back to just a 2-song EP and still only got through ½ of one song. We said that we would get right back to working on the songs and do one per night for the rest of the week, but uh……
Man, that was even before we recorded Ecotone!
I guess what we turned out that night was sweet though, as it stuck with Duff. He said that he wrote a vocal melody for the song that was really good, but it didn’t surface again until we brought the song back to work through it for the second album.
I think this song came together pretty easily. It flows well, has bangin’ lyrics and might be my finest hour on bass. The riff is big time and the first time we decided to reprise it after the second verse all of us were like “Uh, yeah.” I think the outro is low-key a big deal for us too. Lot’s of stuff happening there.
Corriveau
Is this weirdest song on the album? Yes. “Corriveau” is for sure the most out-of-character thing that Beat Noir has tried to do.
The song started with us thinking “hey, we still need a few more songs for the album” one day at practice and Duff saying “okay, here is a riff I’ve been working on”, which turned out to be the main riff of the song.
One the perpetually interesting things about being in a band is that member sees the song as something different. When I first heard the riff, I envisioned it as an emo song in the revival/shoegazey style that Run for Cover Records has popularized lately. The riff fit so snugly within that context to me. I guess that when we jammed the song at practice, it sorted of sounded that way too. I brought this up to Duff while we were recording and he thought it was funny, because the way the song ended up on Sovereignties, a slow, dirgey post-punk song, was exactly how he had envisioned it.
With certain songs, we left a few parts to finish and create in the studio. We would know we were going to put synth parts on songs and what we basically wanted out of them, but really it would all depend on what Carl played in the studio. We did this on Ecotone, leaving Carl to just write all of his stuff, but did this even more so on this album. We would jam the song at practice and then say “And then we’ll put synth and fake drums on it.” Wrote that shit in the studio. There are some sweet pictures of Duff, Colin, and Davis lying down and working through the drum pattern that we were going to use for the song. I also think there’s a lot of good instrumentation on this song. If one were to say that “Corriveau” is the “Collages” of Sovereignties, which I don’t think is too far off-base, then that comparison would show how much we’ve grown as a band since the last album. “Collages” sucks, “Corriveau” is a banger.
*Davis mimes the bass fill at the end and then throws up the horns*
Jubilee
All of the interlude songs on this album, those being “Jubilee”, “Gethsemane”, and “St. Michael the Archangel”, were completely Duff’s doing. He came up with the idea of revisiting the themes and this is the first time it comes up on the album.
Part way through the writing process for this album the way we were putting together the songs changed. Duff took initiative and started to demo and work on the songs by himself a lot. With the interlude songs, he basically just said “Don’t worry, I got this.” We knew that this song would use the chord progression from the chorus of “St. John”, but not much else.
In the studio the song was originally just guitar, with Duff saying that Carl would come in to play glockenspiel afterwards. While we were recording vocals, I forwarded the idea of me playing simple bassline on it and we used a break in recording to do that. Bud, a P Bass with the tone turned down, palm-muted into an acoustic head? Ya. The bass line led to a 60’s-style drum pattern and now the song is this short throwback pop song stuck in the middle of the album and I love it.
We wrote a significant part of this song in the studio, which is something that we hadn’t done as a band before. This is the result of us thinking on our feet and drawing from influences we hadn’t used in a song before. Real proud of this one.
Itchicoo
Itchicoo was one of the later songs we worked on in this process. Like I said above, Mark brought it in as a half-time rock song that had a Nada Surf vibe to it. It used to be a little busier, with minor stuff on bass and a longer outro, but, once again, Duff convinced everyone to cut it back and that worked for the better. I wish there was a cooler song behind this song’s composition but really all we did was take out an outro and trim some parts down.
The song sounds a lot heavier than it originally was and is the first time we’ve used drop D tuning. Even though I like to play a lot on songs and am always thinking about some dumb riff I can put in, sometimes it feels really good to just groove as a rhythm section and that’s what Colin and I do here. Mark plays a big-time guitar solo at the end of this. Is it his best ever lead on a Beat Noir song?
Fuckin’ probably, man.
When you’re a kid, you hear a lot of stories that, in retrospect, are larger than life, but seem so prescient that they have to be true at the time. I’m sure anybody can think of tons of stories like this from their childhood and, for me, this song brings up that feeling.
Gethsemane
While Duff was re-working the demos of songs we recorded, he said that he working on turning two of the songs into a “suite” with a connective interlude in between them. He sent us a 7ish minute song that was a re-worked Itchicoo, this song, and a re-worked Mount Hope. This thing is all Duffer. We never really jammed this song at practice, leaving it up to all of us just learning the demo, adding a ton of synth stuff, and working on electronic drums in the studio.
Sometimes a simple chord progression is all you need. Root, 5th, 4th and 6th. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. On the day I was recording bass, I was feeling pretty sick, having caught a cold from Mark in the studio. It came and left in one day, which was conveniently the day that I was recording bass. This song was the height of it and I felt so bad that I just handed the bass to Duff and told him to do this song, so the “rhythm bass” part is actually played by Duff.
I say “rhythm bass” because, like “Jubliee”, I thought of another part I wanted to add while Duff and Mark were working on vocals. That part is the chimey lead part that comes in at the end of the song. Since this song was heavy on synth and has a big post-punk vibe, I wanted to do some Peter Hook-style stuff to accentuate that even more. This one is a big departure for us too.
Mount Hope
This one started with the opening guitar riff, which Mark wrote. Then we added a few parts and I wrote a bassline that I thought was hot fire on an acoustic guitar during that jam. Then that bassline got cut! Sometimes you write something you think is sweet because it kind of goes all over the place, but then you look at it a few months later and don’t really care for it. The same thing happened with the bassline on “Nom de guerre” on Ecotone, which I now despise. This one wasn’t quite as bad, but it definitely did need to go. Everyone in the band was listening to a lot of Tigers Jaw when we started writing it, so I think that originally the song sounded a lot like Tigers Jaw.
We were deciding what to do with the outro of the song and throwing a bunch of lackluster ideas around. We agreed that we wanted some sort of guitar lead thing, but also knew that we had waded into that water a bunch of times already and didn’t want to just swim in the same damn place as a band. Personally, I was feeling like I had fallen into a shitty rut as a bass player and wanted to make more of a groove than just playing fills that showed I practiced scales. Duff suggested playing chords on the bass, which to me is akin to saying “Would you like to go to a Blue Jays game?” Colin and I worked on the structure of the outro pretty thoroughly and, if we’re being real, that is a musical composition that I look at and say “Damn Timmy, that is interesting.”
More so than any other song we had, Duff thought we had to totally rework this one, which Mark echoed. Duff took off by himself and totally reworked to whole song so that the only parts that stayed were the beginning and end. And now it works! I guess!
I do really like this song a lot and I think I’m the only member of the band who considers it one of his favourite jams. It came together well and everybody gets to riff a lot in it and it doesn’t even sound like Tigers Jaw anymore. The intro is heavy, there’s tons of bass riffs, cool chords and a spacey outro with a zany keyboard sound. Cool. Fucking. Beans.
Alexandria
If you were to approach me and ask “Timmy, name me a song off of your second album, Sovereignties.” I would reply “Why, how about the song ‘Alexandria’!” This is because “Alexandria” was the first song we finished for the record. It was started with “St. John the Baptist” and “Monkey Paw” when Mark, Duff, and I jammed ideas for new songs in Mark’s bedroom and flew out of us at practice. We wrote one version, decided it needed some fixing and then bam! Song done. And man it felt like we had done something way better and interesting than anything on Ecotone. The parts we came up with just flowed pretty naturally into the next thing and it wound up being a really fun jam to jam. It was written so long ago that we jammed it in Colin’s parents’ basement!
In Duff’s words, “I wish we could just keep writing songs like that.”
And we did!
The song is titled “Alexandria”, which references the old Greek city in Egypt, and Duff, who often second guesses his decisions song-wise, almost wanted to change the title. Fortunately, we did not, because I think it’s a great title.
You think that when you finish a song and then keep playing it at practice for like two fucking years that you would get tired of it, but I really haven’t. I still bang my head a little every time we start to intro because I love playing this damn song. This was also the first song that we started mixing into live shows as well, so it feels way more familiar than anything else on Sovereignties. For a while I kind of separated “Alexandria” from the rest of the Sovereignties songs because it was done while the others were still being tinkered with. But then when we recorded them it instantly fit so perfectly with all the others in their order. Honestly, I don’t think it is a stretch to say that this is the definitive Beat Noir song.
St. Michael the Archangel
I really appreciate it when a band puts recurring musical themes on an album that return to remind the listener that they are listening to a work of art. That might sound pompous, but I do believe it. Every album is created by the artist to be consumed as a body of work. They work on the track order, the album art, the cohesion of the lyrics, and many other factors to ensure that each track fortifies that other ones. I find that most people are very track-oriented in their listening today, and favour just listening to singles on Youtube, which I find incredibly stupid. More and more, people are just trying glean the bare bones content from things, whether it be listening to songs on Youtube or just scrolling though a long article to get the gist of it. Embrace length and depth. Enjoy the ride. Realize that “St. Michael the Archangel” completes the album and ties it back to Ecotone.
-Timmy
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