TIL DEATH DO US PART
DZ Deathrays kept things much the same when making their latest record, Bloody Lovely. They went back to the same studio, Grove Studios, with the same producer, Burke Reid. However, if they could avoid repeating just one mistake, it would be subjecting themselves to Reid’s “Nazi march music”.
They hadn’t quite nailed down tempos for their last album, Black Rat, before entering preproduction. Having partied all night, they rocked up to the studio in a haze to Reid’s metronome contraption. A drum machine app thumping out a kick and snare in tandem through an Orange Speaker and amp. “It was super military-sounding,” recalled vocalist/guitarist, Shane Parsons. “He just faced it at us, turned everything up to 10 and fell asleep on the couch.”
The importance of a couple of bpm isn’t lost on the pair though. “It was so painful,” said drummer Simon Ridley. “But sometimes slowing down or speeding up a song by two bpm can make the vocals sit so much better.”
It wasn’t just tempi, the process of weeding out mistakes and refining their recording process became contagious. Instead of corralling all the vocal takes into a couple of days like they have done, they staggered the sessions. “Doing all the guitars then doing all the vocals is a mistake,” said Parsons. “You just wear your voice out singing for five or six days straight. This time we’d do two songs in one day, guitars then vocals, which worked a lot better.”
SHELL OF A DRUMMER
Exemplified by nailing down the tempo to the exact bpm, that attention to detail extended to every other recording process, too. When they tracked the drums, Reid asked Ridley to record the cymbals in a different take to the
