Hey,
Our second album ‘Lifeline’ is now available in Japan as a 2CD Special Edition (along with debut album ‘Another City, Another Sorry’). If you order it now, you also receive one of our dashing tote bags too!!!
For more information on the release, and to buy the package, please visit our Japanese home (and new friends) at FASTCUT RECORDS.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT FASTCUT RECORDS!!!
We hope to come and see you all again soon!
Lots of love,
The Answering Machine
Hey,
We are pleased to announce the full line-ups for both our Manchester and London shows. The bands have been hand-picked by us, because we love them so much. And I’m sure you will too! So, without further ado, I present to you:
THURSDAY 24TH MARCH – SOUND CONTROL, MANCHESTER:
THE ANSWERING MACHINE
LET’S BUY HAPPINESS (http://www.myspace.com/letsbuyhappinessuk)
THE KILL VAN KULLS (http://www.myspace.com/thekillvankulls)
MAGIC ARM (http://www.myspace.com/magicarm)
FRIDAY 25TH MARCH – BULL & GATE, LONDON:
THE ANSWERING MACHINE
THE KILL VAN KULLS (http://www.myspace.com/thekillvankulls)
SAFARI (http://www.myspace.com/thisissafari)
GRAB YOUR TICKETS NOW!!!
The Answering Machine x
Hi Everyone,
We”ve made an online version of Lifeline. It offers everyone the chance to explore the record, listen to the tracks in full, read the lyrics and has some exclusive animated artwork. Please feel free to share this with your friends.
Just click the link below…
(It will need a good internet connection and flash player. Hope your into it)
http://www.theansweringmachine.co.uk/lifeline_digital/
Ben
This was written at a time when we’d finished off a batch of songs and were waiting for the next wave of inspiration to arrive. We were all stood in our practise room waiting for each other to make the first move and come up with something. Pat and Martin had previously had a writing session and they had just been messing around and came up with this bizarre bass and guitar hook which they probably didn’t think anything of at the time. They started playing it to me and Ben and we both loved it. Ben put this broken beat to it and seeing as Martin had my bass in his hands I thought I’d pick up his mic and the verse melody came straight away. Usually when we write we’ll fully form the song before we record it but because this wasn’t our usual style of song so we decided to experiment and recorded Ben’s drum part and then looped it and did the same with Martin’s bass line. The song was then written from this, gradually adding guitar parts, working out how long the verses should be, how to make a chorus. A keyboard line was worked out and Martin decided to give it a go on the melodica and we ended up with the only melodica solo that I know of! I went off to work on the lyrics and a vocal melody for the chorus and left the boys to carry on adding synth lines and experimenting. We pretty much kept everything as it was on the demo for the album version but really beefed up the sounds so it almost has elements of a hip-hop crossover. I did come up with the spoken word part for the album, which I was really nervous about as it was so far removed from anything we’d done before and I was just worried it sounded stupid but the others convinced me to keep it in. Lyrically the song is entirely conceptual, it could be sung from a boy or girls perspective and is at its essence a break up song, about those break ups that you just don’t see coming.
Gemma
‘So Alive’ was the last song to be written for ‘Lifeline’ maybe even only two weeks before we were due to start recording. We were in practice one day and a song we’d just played hadn’t gone very well. Needless to say we were all a bit disappointed and the process of making it right was a long drawn out one which at the time I don’t think any of us could be bothered to deal with. We all messed around on our own instruments for a couple of minutes, then I looked up at Martin and he said something like ‘put something to this’ and he started to play the chords to what was to become ‘So Alive’. After 5mins of messing about I had the main riff, then we moved on to the pre-chorus and chorus in turn and all of us just wrote our parts there and then. It was really easy to write and so much fun to play that we ended up playing nothing but that for the rest of the day. We quickly demoed it there and then adding the glock notes that follow the main riff from a casio keyboard. The demo was really vibrant and exciting. I remember the lyrics were a little more difficult as Martin had already started them, I did a complete re-write and then Martin took the best parts of that and added the best parts of his until we arrived at the final outcome. The song itself is probably the most Shout Out Louds (Swedish indie band) inspired song we’ve ever written with it’s thumping drums and bitter-sweet melody. Lyrically it became a tale of love and loss played out through travel points, airports, docks, trains, boats, maps,
guide books and Sweden itself. To this day I can’t work out if it’s the tale of an actual relationship between two people or if it’s just about those girls that you fall in love with but never speak to for an hour or so at an airport, on a train, on a boat etc. I think there is a lot of romance in travel. When it came to recording the song for the album we lifted the main riff I’d recorded from the demo because other versions we tried just didn’t feel right. There was certainly a moment or a feeling tied up in that demo. I believe we also took the Casio’s glock sounds from the demo too. Ben’s drums, recorded in a studio in Stockport, sound incredible on this track and for ages after the session I had Gamma’s bass part to the chorus in my head. The wind at the end of the track was added by Martin using the Roland Juno synth and makes me think of travel, coast lines and our own time touring Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. ‘On Central European time… We felt so alive’
Pat
I remember when Martin and Pat played us the idea for this one. It started out quite fully formed already with guitar parts and melody in place and Martin had even come up with the drum part for the verses. This was a really cool thing because the beat is quite unconventional and not something you would neccessarilly come up with as a ‘trained’ drummer.
We then all worked on the song and it developed into the anthem for the analogue it is now.
The Parisian sounding organ you hear playing the main riff is an old electric Harmonium, something we found dumped at the end of a corridor in our practise rooms. We originally took it inside just because it looks cool, but with a change of plug it started working (to our amazement). It works almost like a giant harmonica, with an electric fan blowing through different reed chambers depending on what keys you press. This made it really hard to mic up as the sound comes out of different holes so I think we had to sample each note then edit them back together to get it sounding consistant. It adds a real quirky sound to the track, like an underdog fanfare.
The chorus of the song breaks down into a falsetto choral vocal part of muted guitar/ bass and spaced out organ. We are just starting to master this part in rehersals for upcoming gigs and is starting to sound good.
I personally think the lyrics are quite autobiographical on the band in an honest, self depricating way. Themes of the retro and analogue becoming ‘attic bound’ and having to ‘except the rejection’ echoing the way it can feel to be on a small indie label struggling to sell records while shining new acts around us are hyped and make it huge. This honesty resolves in a triumphant and carefree attitude, ‘reject the rules, cos i’ve had a skinfull’. (I might be totally wrong about this – until I read Gemmas post about Anything Anything I thought it was about going sking.)
When the song reaches the chorus for the second time it breaks down again and then builds. The glitchy, machine like beat you can hear in this build up is an old video camera of Pats that Martin sampled and cut up to make a beat. The organs are gradually reintroduced with a guitar line from Pat that follows the chorus melody then the song explodes with a messy drum fill that I tried to make sound like Keith Moon with random drums all over the place.
Gemmas vocal comes in on a cool telephone effect mic, repeating a mantra of verse lyrics and then the chorus melody comes back in with added guitar lines and a really cool ascending bass line. This bit is really everything but the kitchen sink, we wanted it as chaotic as possible. The song ends with a slowing tape effect that was added really late in the mixing process. At the time we were just planning a fade out but I think it was Dave Eringa (the guy who mixed the album) that had the idea to slow the ending down and we just tried it and stuck with it. I think it fits well with the themes of the song and gives a great transition into the next track.
Ben
Comments (0)