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No joke
The Lost City Angels deliver a message
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Some punk-rock bands can play only punk rock. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, ’cause punk rock can cure what ails ya. But the Lost City Angels could play anything they put their minds and muscles to.

That’s obvious not only from the intensity of their live performances, but from the musical smart bomb they were assembling last week at Camp Street Studio in Cambridge, with the help of respected producers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade. It’s aimed not only for spring release on Stay Gold Records, a new punk-rock imprint under the umbrella of major label Universal, but for blowing away the bad stuff — the lingering hard feelings that come hand in hand with living in America today. And the sadness that comes when you’re just in your 20s and some of your closest friends and fans have died — including one last year who, the Angels explain, had a fatal heart attack at T.T. the Bear’s Place just before the band went on stage.

They played that night anyway, because they live by the code. And the code runs deeper than "the show must go on." As the Lost City Angels understand music, it’s something you tear from your heart and spill across the stage and through the speakers until it connects with the hearts of everybody in the room or fades away trying. And to the Angels, it would have been disrespectful to their friend to walk away from the gig, because somehow his spirit was in that music, too.

"That was the hardest show we ever played," says drummer Adam Shaw. "I don’t even know how we did it, but we had to." His bandmates nod in assent as we sit and talk — like true New Englanders — around the kitchen table in the studio’s comfortable, apartment-like space.

Meanwhile, Kolderie and Slade are transferring some tracks from the two-inch 24-track tape on which the Angels have been recording, to a computer hard drive to make room for recording lead vocals on the tape.

"We’re trying to keep everything as analog as possible," Slade explains, "so everything goes down on tape first." That’s the best way to get big, warm sounds, and on playback the Lost City Angels’ recordings-in-progress sound gigantic. Raw, but with a mile-wide midrange that deposits each tune right in the listener’s belly.

Singer Ron Ragona steps into an isolation room to sing the verses of a tune called "Pretty War." You can guess from the title where it’s going.

"Sean, what’s my motivation?" Ragona asks through the microphone before the tape rolls.

"Grief and anger," Slade responds.

"Again," Ragona deadpans backs.

And then it’s rolling, and the song’s a ripping blast of guitars, bass, and kick and snare drums. Bassist Duggan D. and Shaw sound ironclad, and the six-strings of Nick Bacon and Drew Suxx absolutely kill. They lock into a pattern that seems frantic, but repeated listening reveals smartly connected riffs and chords that, if slowed down to early-’70s speed, have the kind of meat, detail, and hook orientation that’s the stuff of classic rock.

Earlier, hearing chunks of other songs with studio clarity, it became apparent these guitarists bring a lot to the game. Snatches of deft blues string-bending, smartly picked low-end melodic figures and brawny tones have all been incorporated into their own distinct hard ’n’ fast vocabulary. Without close listening, these fine points just sail by on the breeze of adrenaline, but they’re there and they are impressive. Nonetheless, it’s hard to focus on any of that when the break in the middle of "Pretty War," a screaming sonic collision of guitars, sprays out of the speakers in the control room. It’s a raw, arresting expressionist swirl of sound.

Back in front of the microphone, Ragona is shooting out the lyrics. But his rapid-fire delivery isn’t quite fast enough. That’s because the band have laid down their tracks at a merciless pace. If Ragona were to step it up any more, he’d lapse into breathlessness or such a rushed delivery that the words would be obscured.

Slade has an idea. As the tape is cued up for another go, he asks Ragona to sing the first and third lines of each verse on the first pass, and the second and fourth on the next. Not only does it work splendidly, but Ragona’s precise on-key delivery means he only has to do it once. And Slade and his assistant engineer have recorded each pass on a different track. On playback, they hard-pan each vocal track to the left and right speakers, so lines one and three come out of the left side and two and four from the right. It’s a small thing, yet it has a big impact on the tune, with each phrase demanding attention.

"The magic of stereo," Slade says, smiling.

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Issue Date: November 26 - December 2, 2004
Click here for the Cellars by Starlight archive
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