There were high hopes for the debut album from Cashier No 9, but for Richie Egan, Niall Byrne and Angela Dorgan the quality and talent of the Belfast band with 'megawatt potential' gets lost in poor production and reverb overkill. DARAGH DOWNESis the MC for the ninth Album Club
IMAGINE A BOOK club where nearly all the talk is of the publisher’s dodgy choice of font. Or an art appreciation group where everyone is saying they would have liked the painting if only the frame had been a bit thicker. Or an album club where a bunch of top notch songs is given a general thumbs-down on the basis of poor “production”.
Ridiculous, right? Wrong – at least in case number three. A piece of recorded music is only as good as it sounds. This simple fact turns record-making into a scarily complicated business. No matter how brilliant the songwriting or how impeccable the studio performances, the record just won’t come off if bad calls are made at tracking, producing, mixing or mastering stages. Get any of these wrong, and it all risks being a botch.
And this, according to our three September Album Clubbers, is the unhappy story told by To The Death of Fun. For all the songs' undeniable quality, and the band's obvious talent, the record just doesn't sound as good as it is.
LUSH BUT LACKING
Niall Byrne first came across Cashier No 9 three or four years ago. He fell in love with their T-Rex-inflected single 42 West Avenue.
"It was a catchy, upbeat pop folk number," he recalls, "and it had a really catchy riff on acoustic guitar." A subsequent single, When Jackie Shone, only piqued his interest further. So it was with high hopes that he downloaded the band's debut album on iTunes. But something unfortunate happened on his first listen: the older tracks started playing straight after the album, with the result that the latter's deficiencies were shown up all too starkly.
“My initial reaction to the album was: what am I listening to here? It’s all one big mush of sounds. They’ve kind of normalised all of their songs a bit compared to what I’d heard before. The early songs had a lot of straightforward rock rhythms. But there’s not really a lot of that on this album at all, which is a little bit disappointing because some of it kind of washes over me.”
Byrne is at pains to point out that the weakness lies more in the sonics than the songs themselves. “A lot of it maybe has to do with the production. There’s no dynamic range on it at all, so the songs all sound very similar. None of those early songs that appeared on the singles or whatever appear on this and they maybe would have needed something like that just to break up the tone.”
Just to be sure he wasn’t hearing things, Byrne went to the trouble of loading the tracks on to Sound Forge and having a quick look at the shape of the waveform. What he saw confirmed what he had been hearing.
“The whole thing was very compressed, to the point where there was a lot of stuff going on but I couldn’t really pick anything out. There is nuance in the album, you just can’t hear it. The whole thing’s all very lush but it lacks a bit of bite.”
A REAL HEARTBREAKER
Around the same time that Cashier No 9 were first coming on to Byrne’s radar, Angela Dorgan became aware of them through an application the Belfast band sent in for the Hard Working Class Heroes festival. Pretty soon she was featuring one of their songs on a showcase Music From Ireland CD.
To The Death Of Funhas, alas, been a bit of a letdown for her. Songs that "should have grabbed you by the throat" and "gotten into your stomach almost like rollercoasting" somehow never quite delivered.
“The way I consume my music is very emotional. The music I like, I believe. I have two categories. It’s not indie or rock, it’s not any of that. It’s I believe them or I don’t believe them. I was really interested in these songs but there was no emotional connection in them.” She feels the production is what has given the new songs their weirdly anaesthetic feel. “It’s like someone on valium. It’s like they wrote the songs off valium but then at production stage all the invention and colour got washed out.
"There are some beautiful moments and harmonies. There's the throat singing at the end of Good Bye Friend.There's layers in there. There's heart and soul. It just didn't come out." Dorgan wishes it were otherwise. "The three of us, with our jobs, we know how hard people work to get from in their bedrooms and the idea of the song to getting people like us to listen to it. It's hard work, it's heartbreaking, it'll take the soul out of your chest. So I found myself wanting to find something I liked about it and then I did. Some of the songwriting is too good for the whole album to be dismissed as bland.
“Whether it’s the label or the fatigue or the mastering suite, I don’t really care. It just didn’t get to demonstrate itself, and I think that’s such a heartbreaker for the band, I really do. But there’s more to come from them, I think.”
SOMETHING BALLSY?
Alone of our three guests, Richie Egan came to To The Death Of Funa complete Cashier No 9 virgin. He agrees with Dorgan that the band have megawatt potential. But they have been let down badly by a very specific production mistake: reverb overkill.
"Reverb is beautiful but it's on everything here. Reverb is supposed to give things space but this just has one big space. It's a big wash and it feels like there's stuff happening underneath the reverb that should be heard. One song where it works is Oh Pitywhere the vocals jump out a bit more, they're not as reverby. And that's my favourite tune on the record. When the vocals come in, they're much drier. It works much better."
The band were clearly going for a Spectoresque Wall Of Sound. "But Phil Spector always had something ballsy. And I miss that here. It's like a big wave. It's like looking at a crystal. There's nothing to drag you in."
Much press attention has focused on the fact that David Holmes produced the album. So why on earth would a man of his experience go and soak perfectly good music in what, to Egan’s ears, is “a cheap reverb, a software reverb”?
Well, maybe he didn’t. Egan points out that the mixing credits on the sleeve notes go to persons other than Holmes. This is significant because “mixing is where you add your reverb”.
Either way, Egan is convinced that “the next record this band makes is going to be fucking amazing. I reckon they’re going to learn from this.
“I reckon they have to hear what we’re all hearing, with the production and that. And I would say they’re going, ‘Fuck man, we should have stood our ground.’”
Watch this sonic space, folks.
THE ALBUM To the Death of Fun- Cashier No 9
MEET THE CLUBBERS
Niall Byrneruns the internationally acclaimed music blog Nialler9
Angela Dorganof First Music Contact is director of the Hard Working Class Heroes festival which runs from October 6th-8th
Richie Eganmakes music under the name of Jape.
