ITS ALIVE!

Beat from what seems like a week of non stop insanity, I will try to recollect the past few days to the best of my abilities.

First off, SPIDERMAN 2 was nothing short of excellent. I don't think it's any secret that I love the first hour of the original film and hate the second hour of bad CGI, plot holes the size of mars, and bad pacing. For me, and as some of you know, comic book movies are my "thing", and I can find very little I didn't like about SPIDEY 2. Every huge problem I had with the first movie, some of which are listed about, was addressed and it seems Sony has lifted the shackles off of Mr. Raimi and have allowed him to make not just a great superhero movie, but a great Sam Raimi film. A lot of the the quirkiness of his earlier work shines through here, and don't even get me started on the awesome Bruce Campbell cameo. Anyway, see it. Repeatedly.

As planned, the entire crew got together Thursday night for a long listening/commentary session on the current status of EXIT STRATEGIES. Well, they got half of the record, really, but mostly the stuff that have made leaps and bounds in recent weeks. Of everything, OUR FAITH, received an overhwelming thumbs up from the group as did all of Charles' recent contributions. Thats not to say everything was peachy keen. Charles and Ash (and occasionally poor Robin, who I think was asleep most of the time) had a lot to say, and luckily in our grown up post-aggression drama years, their comments can be taken as how they are intended: to HELP improve the material. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean I agree with all of what they say, but these are the people who's opinions matter most and what they say WILL permeate my brain. It's nice working with people who don't have the ego's the size of continents and are trying to push you to be better at what you dol.

Anyhow, notes were taken, suggestions were addressed, and by the end of the night, we had Charles hard at work on re-recording Ash's basslines for MORNING AFTER THE LIFE BEFORE. Charles lent a whole new dynamic to the song, and wisely took the opportunity to play his parts in and out and around my various F-basslines (no longer Hook-basslines, ok?) to create some awesome dueling melodies and a sweeter chorus than the one we had written (and without making it sound like fucking Ned's Atomic Dustbin). Because of that, I edited a significant amount of my own bass out, which now makes those lines that much more dramatic when they enter the song. I'm psyched!

Well believe it or not, everyone had huge and I mean HUGE problems with the revamped 1956. At first, internally, I was a bit defensive about it, especially when Ash begged for it to be turned off (fucking drama queen), but once we got into a discussion about it and started to dissect the parts of the song, I began to understand the real problems of this song. The band really gave me the ability to stand back and look at this song, flaws and all. Along with Charles' new bass in MORNING, this was the most signficant thing that came out of the group meeting.

It was a fun night, and I got a ton of positive feedback from the aggression members on the artwork for the new remix album. I'm going to step away from it for a bit to gain some perspective and get back to it. Of course, during the evening, everyone stole each others IPODS and traded music. Ah, the modern age. So, much appreciation to Robin, Ash, and Charles for making some time for the Factor Corp. I would say 3/4 of what they suggested will be incorporated. the 1/4 is just artsy crap that they can do in their own band (j/k). Speaking of which, their material just improves by the second. I'm really feeling what they are doing...and you will too.

I think the group comments on 1956 effected Brandt as well as we spent a lot of Friday just talking about the song and what didn't work, etc. This led to Brandt and I meeting up early this morning to get to work on the next wave of this difficult song. Charles had called the song a musical "Franksentein" as it had lots of good parts, but nothing that tied them together. Also, everyone seemed to have issues with the fact that there were so many loops. The new intro that I busted my ass on last week went out the door and I went back to the quick bang immediate start of the track (like THE MOTIVE). Then, the next thing we did was strip the song to its bare essentials of guitar, bass, drums and strings. Taking Charles' advice, I grabbed my bass, and B busted out his 12-string and we went and wrote a new section of the song that would successfully bridge the verse and chorus. It took a LONG time, it was a lot of hard work, but once we did this, we knew we had this song in a million times better place than it was when we started. It totally made sense to us why this song, up until this point, hadn't worked right. Brandt really took this one and ran and did several melodic and rocky guitar tracks to flesh it all out. While he was working out his parts, I was able to go into the computer and do some cool sound design on the guitar line I played in the verses. I smoothed it out, made it a little bit otherworldly and it fits much better within the song. Brandt later went in and re-did some of his verse wah guitars while I tightened robin's drums up to make it much more dance, more Stone Roses-y, which you know I love.

Again, none of this was easy, but it was totally worth it. This new section works incredibly and we were able to change the big guitar solo towards then end to incorpoate this new section (believe it or not, the solo fit perfectly over it). With that, I went and created a new arrangement that has VERY few loops (maybe some one bar loop flourishes every now and then) and can easily be played by a rock band live.

I got some Wanton Garden to go straight outta Chinatown as well as some DVDS (including the new BETTER TOMORROW remastered box set, which everyone should own instead of renting PAYCHECK). I checked out the new Andy Lau movie JIANG HU (also starring Irene's favourite Cantopop idol Edison Chen), but the movie was a bit lacking. Great idea, poor execution. Nice DVD package though.

10 bucks to anyone who can figure out what the hell happened to the release of the new Die Warzau album! It's killing me!

F