New Sounds: Late Night Old Man Jam BS

When I’m not holding down the fuzzed out, fucked up low send in The Loyalists, I have some occasional musical inclinations that lean toward something different.

I started work on this mellow little joint last year, and got lost along the way (not that there’s much to it to get lost in, but that’s just how life goes). I jumped back on it this weekend, and spit out this two-minute jam.

The drums are programmed — because I don’t have anything like an MPC right now to sample and chop sounds — but I played the bass and guitar, though an Ampeg V4B, and did the recording and mixing through a Presonus Firebox into GarageBand on an iPad Pro. The result is pretty rough, but the process was fun, and I think the tune is too...

The Loyalists, "Shamfrancisco"

I play the electric bass in The Loyalists, a noise rock band from Oakland, CA. We're a four-piece — bass, guitar, drums and cello (the cello player also plays guitar on some songs) — and we pride ourselves on making a pretty foul racket.

We've got a new album, our second — Ride The Trashheap of Sound — coming out in a couple months, and we've been playing the songs out at shows for a while, but this is the first recording from the album that we've let out of the box: "Shamfrancisco."

We're pretty excited to put this record out. We've been working on some of these songs since we recorded our first album, First of the Mohicans, back in 2013, so they've had some good time to marinate and mature. 

Our buddy Scott Evans (Antisleep Audio / Kowloon Walled City) engineered, recorded and mixed for us (again) because we love the guy, and we love his work.

I'll be crowing more about this when the album comes out (we're pressing up some 7" vinyl pieces too). In the meantime, this is just a taste.