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The Wrens share instrumental demo from new LP (listen); Charles Bissell playing Union Hall w/ Antietam, Palomar & more

For those looking for even the thinnest of silver linings to this week, The Wrens have just shared a new demo for a song called “At Irish Exit,” a song destined to be on the band’s long-awaited new album. In an accompanying update, main man Charles Bissell (whose cancer is in remission) reveals he decided to share this instrumental demo after this “quite a poop week,” adding “The upshot, if there is one, of an instrumental v., is it’ll let you hear all the parts that I’m sure, w/ my limited engineering skill-set, will be completely obliterated by the lead vocal. I hate vocals (esp. my own).” Listen below.

Charles will playing live at Brooklyn’s Union Hall on December 3 with old friends Antietam, Palomar, and My Teenage Stride. Tickets for that show are on sale now.

Sooo…quite a poop week (after quite an ‘interesting’ year or so), a week in which I found myself thinking that many things don’t matter or not in the way I thought, or that they used to, or at least music, or at least being overly precious & perfectionist about music (maybe that’s it, actually).

Which led me in some post-election despair-y fog to say, “what the heck, I’ll post a song” but really, that’s not fair to the label folks who have very, VERY cool & patiently waited for me to eternally wrap my shit up.
So with an eye towards the ideal politics of the hopefully-not-distant future (i.e. as a compromise), this is an instrumental version of the song I happen to be working on right now, it’s the last one still under construction and yes, that means the album is only finishing now.

There a bunch of reasons for that (the work itself, health, working at night like lots of folks, that sort of thing) but I just can’t bear to hear myself go into them all, esp. this week. I’ll post something about all that later.

Meanwhile, the finish line lies right beyond this: I’ll check the vocal version tomorrow and then create a new version w/ parallel limiting/compression to make the parts sorta squeeze out around the vocal; then it goes off to mastering as well (this is the fourth official round of mastering, all due my shortcomings, not the mastering engineer who is a sonic guru).

The upshot, if there is one, of an instrumental v., is it’ll let you hear all the parts that I’m sure, w/ my limited engineering skill-set, will be completely obliterated by the lead vocal. I hate vocals (esp. my own). They ruin everything.