We had a pretty long, and fairly intense, recording session today, getting drums, bass and lead vocals completed for all the remaining album tracks. Since we’ve done most of these in practices for over a year now it was not a case of learning things anew, but rather laying down the definitive takes. After a slightly creaky start we got well under way, with Sean adjusting to playing along with a click track on some songs – not something we’ve ever done before, but a necessary evil of doing the initial base tracks that I’ve been working on over the last couple of months.

We got some good recordings for the three ‘big numbers’; “Performance Evolution” where we managed to navigate through several time signature changes and vocal styles, “Fairytale Propaganda” which we’ve tended to play too fast in the past, but settled on a more laid back tempo today, with a long building introduction partly inspired by Pink Floyd’s “Shine on you Crazy Diamond” and the new song “Freeman” which came together quite naturally and took on a new life with bass and drums.

The two atmospheric spoken-work songs, “PKD Dum Dum” and “The Bell Curve” had a few layers of percussion and vocals added, which I’ll be editing down to fit into the style of the music. “The Parallel Curve” also started life as a slow spoken-word thing, but we’ve tried a number of approaches to it over the last year without success. Today Sean started singing the lyrics at a much faster tempo and it fit well, so we quickly pulled together a rhythm part for him to sing along with and we finally had a recording of the song that actually works.

With all that put together, I have some further overdubs to add, then work can begin on mixing, so I’ll probably not be reporting back on here until I have some completed songs to comment on (i.e. Hype!)

There will also be some lead-up PR work being done over the next few weeks to let people know what’s coming from The Board, including the cover for the album, which is now complete and agreed and the ability to pre-order the album with a special incentive!