Winter of our (dis)content.

The new album is progressing nicely.

We’ve had about a dozen sessions over these autumn months at Supernatural Sound. At this point, all that we have left are a few vocal overdubs and some odds & ends on bass & guitar. While we waited on Erin’s bass rig to come back from the shop, we’ve focused on layering in sound FX and spotting a few mellotron & Moog pieces. The production value of this album is much different and greater than CVB’s – owed to a bit more experience and a few new pieces of gear. Using Sabbath’s “Master of Reality” & “Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath” as production blueprints, we are going down a path of added layers of production tricks, only where it serves the tunes.

We’ve been posting rough mixes of the sessions to SoundCloud, so pop in over there every so often, and see what’s up.

Which brings me to the release of this beast. We’re eyeballing a Vinyl + Downloads release, and maybe a severely limited run of CDs. Limited because nobody is buying the albums in that format. If the label goes for this plan, we’re looking to have the album out by early spring 2012. Limiting the run means the album hits faster than usual.

What took so long to get to this point?

Preparing for Wacken ate up several months. We needed to get plenty of rehearsal in with Eric – Who, by the way, has fit very nicely into our kvlt. The whole trip and experience taught us a few lessons about being road-ready. Did we do alright over there? Some say “Yes”, some say “Not really.” If you were there, you made up your own mind. Me, I just watch the video of the show and see missed opportunities in some ways. I had fun, but we’ve played much better than that. Hopefully some people in the crowd saw what we’re about, and will give us another shot on this record.

We also needed time to adjust working with Jared’s tracks. It’s harder than we thought to listen to him playing, and not seeing him there in the control room. We’re still sticking to the parameter we’ve set for ourselves – we’re using only Jared’s drums on the recording, limitations and all. So far, so good. The tracks sound great. A secondary limitation is that we only have 7 completed songs. The remaining fragments will make their way into something.

We’re doing the album with no budget, and in our spare time. I’m not complaining here. This means we can take our time to make things the way we want them to be, because we aren’t paying for studio time. We’ve already discarded plenty of recordings and ideas. This means that the record will come out as intended, and not a moment before. On the other hand, we all have our normal lives that interfere with the recording process, and makes things take longer than necessary. If we were somehow magically able to devote a majority of our time to making the record, it would already be finished. Such is the life of an unknown band on a small label.

Plans are in the works for some touring next year, and some more videos. Once the album is released, we hope to really give it a bigger push than CVB had.

Until next time,

Fortunato