Looks like Babyshambles basher Adam Ficek has got himself a side project called Roses, Kings, Castles. There are a couple acoustic tracks up on the band’s Myspace page (all instruments and vocals apparently performed by Ficek himself), and they have a kind of undeniable, degenerate charm.
But probably not enough charm to bed a Kate Moss.
Here’s what the Quiet Riot drummer had to say about the man who helped make metal mainstream in the ’80s:
I’m at a loss for words. I’ve just lost my best friend….Out of respect for both Kevin and his family, I won’t comment further. There’s going to be a lot of speculation out there, and I won’t add to that. I love him too much.
Very sweet.
Check out the complete CNN article for an unimpassioned Quiet Riot primer. You know where to go for the good stuff.
At least for a few hours. The former Scorpions drummer is taking a turn at platter spinning on this Greek radio station tonight, but fuck all if we can find the link to listen in. If anyone figures it out, leave a comment.
A shit load of rumors were popping up on the Net last week about Barker’s demise. A day before his 32nd birthday, so the story goes, Barker was found dead in his garage. A record company spokesman, however, has since confirmed that Trav is still alive and stomping.
…Of course, that is what the Man said about Paul McCartney too.
And does this mean we have to stop listening to rumors about Blink-182 getting back together?
…but we don’t know what the bloody hell it is, because the interview is in Portuguese.
Oh wait, scroll down a bit and there’s a translation.
[reading….reading….still reading….]
Hmmm, we liked it better when it was in Portuguese.
A maxim: good journalists do research, but great journalists steal from the competition.
That’s why we are happy to report that Drummerzone has reported that Ray Luzier is sitting on the throne for Korn on the group’s 2008 European tour. As you certainly remember (because you’re all a bunch of drum nuts), Korn has had quite the game of musical drum chairs lately. Luzier will be taking over for the studio-bound Joey Jordison who took over for the fired Terry Bozzio who took over for the hiatusing David Silveria.
So who will be on the hot seat once the tour is over? Maybe one of you fuckers. Just be sure to give us an interview when you’re famous.
Now this is fuckin’ cool. Albanian artist Anri Sala‘s newest exhibit combines the two things we love most: drums and James Joyce. Oh, and Franz Ferdinand of course. Three things, then.
When you enter Sala’s exhibit, called Ulysses after Joyce’s great novel, you’ll hear the melody of a new song by Franz Ferdinand, also cleverly called Ulysses. Visitors are then led downstairs, given a “score” (i.e., a set of verbal instructions like “bootless” and “lickitup” and”rolywholyover”), and invited to sit at a kit and create the tune’s drum part. The catch is that you have to remember the song’s melody…and follow that verbal score for hints. Every visitor’s effort is recorded, and if you’re lucky, you’ll end up on a CD release of the project that’s scheduled to drop before the Glasgow lads’ official disc.
Finally. A place for performance-art, Franz-fanatic, Joycean drummers to call their own. The world is complete.
Ani DiFranco, the little punk-folkster that could, is adding more dates to her 2007-2008 tour, and she’s taking Allison Miller along for the ride. If you’ve spent any time in jazz clubs in New York, then you’ve probably heard Miller doing her swing thing…and you might be a little shocked to find that she can also lay down a heavy backbeat. But hey, how did you think she got all those muscles anyway? I saw her backing Ani earlier this year in San Francisco, and getting a chance to hear her live was definitely worth suffering that dude in front of me who was off-key-singing and arm-pit-reeking all show long. Check out Miller’s website.
Get your sticks in shape, mutherfuckers, ’cause it’s time again for Guitar Center’s annual Drum-Off. The regional finals take place in just over a week, November 14, 2007. Go here for store locations and contact info. We can’t, unfortunately, give you God’s number if you need to beg for better chops: she’s busy finding us money to help pay for this blog.
The finals will be held in Hollywood on January 5, 2008. The always-entertaining Stephen Perkins is slated to play host, and we’re hoping that also-billed bashers Brooks Wackerman, Adrian Young, and ?uestlove will get to do some actual drum playing of their own.
Death metal got a whole lot deader this past Friday (November 2). Witold “Vitek” Kieltyka, skin slayer for the Polish band Decapitated, died from injuries sustained to (ironically enough) his head when the group’s tour bus crashed. Dude was only 23 years old. Rumors are circulating that the band’s bus driver was at fault.
Apparent moral of the story: employ mutherfucking drivers who can mutherfucking drive.
Blabbermouth has an exclamatory eulogy from Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake:
The metal community has lost one of the most talented and skillful drummers of our time! I remember when I first heard DECAPITATED‘s ‘Organic Hallucinosis’ and it just blew me away! What a band and WHAT A DRUMMER!!! Vitek was a true talent and drummer genius and his passing is just so very, very wrong! The future will be a sadder place without your drumming!!! Our thoughts go out to the band and to their families in this sad, sad moment. Rest in peace, Vitek.
And no, we’re not talking about his playing (which is pretty solid in that rock-n-roll-sloppy kind of way). Adam Ficek, basher for the Brit band Babyshambles, says that Kate Moss had a negative effect on his group’s music. He’s referring, of course, to Moss’ relationship with Babyshambles’ lead singer and lead degenerate, Pete Doherty. The two have spent most of the last couple of years keeping England’s dealers in gold teeth and matching Jaguars, and it was difficult for Doherty to get any quality work done–what with all the court hearings, rehab stays, and the inevitable (and much photographed) drug binges. That is a legitimate complaint. But Ficek just sounds like he’s upset that it was yet again a lead singer who managed to get all squelchy with a supermodel:
“Kate was detrimental to the band. It was all about the lead singer and his girlfriend, not about the rest of the band.”
Oh well. If all we got to bang was our kit, we’d probably be jealous too.
There’s no shame in it. Lots of drummers deliver pizza before getting their big break—you know, the one that includes a record deal, world tour, and enough cash to stop once and for all having to haul around extra-large slices of pepperoni and cheese. But in mid-2004, Andols “Andy” Herrick did the unthinkable, the downright crazy-nuts. He quit his thick-muscled, increasingly popular metalcore band Chimaira and actually went back to delivering pizza. “Yes,” he says, “I just wanted to work and be normal for a little bit.”
Ask him again, though, and the story of why he left the band gets a little more complicated, a little darker. “It was mainly because at the time my playing was really kind of falling apart,” Herrick explains, “and I was having bad shows every night. Eventually I was at the point where I was just miserable going on stage. And I didn’t want to be on the road anymore. So those two things combined, and it was going on for a long time, building up, building up. The other guys [in the band], they’d always try to be supportive, telling me, ‘Stop worrying about it, everything sounds fine,’ but I would listen to audio of the shows, and just be totally embarrassed. It really came down to my left foot. It was having a total melt down. I would do a double bass run, and I’d come to the end, and it would just fall apart. Stuff that I had recorded in one take, I couldn’t play live anymore. And that’s pretty much what drove me to my breaking point. Finally, I just thought, ‘I need to get out.’”
So he did. And in retrospect, that two-year, self-imposed exile couldn’t have been a more painful decision for someone who had grown up—and had lived—in music. Herrick took to the sticks almost two decades ago, influenced by his older brother, who played drums before turning to the piano. (Both his parents played instruments as well, and one of his other brothers eventually earned a master’s degree from Julliard.) Music was in his blood, and by the time he was 13, when Metallica and Anthrax and Slayer entered the scene, his blood was boiling. The new-born thrasher first started slamming with bands in the ninth grade, eventually meeting guitarist Rob Arnold, who a few years later brought him into Chimaira. At the time, Herrick was all of 19, though already with fast feet, sophisticated hands, and an aggressive groove that would be put to pummeling good use on the band’s first two albums, Pass Out of Existence and The Impossibility of Reason, both underground metalcore sensations. And it wasn’t long before Herrick began doing what all real musicians have to do: living and honing his craft on the road. This, then, is the guy who took himself off the stage. It must have been hard.
“Yes,” he agrees, “it didn’t take that long afterwards when I thought, ‘That was a bad move.’ It felt right at the time, at the very first, when I kind of felt relieved and thought I did the right thing. But it probably wasn’t more than six months before I got the itch again. When I was away, I didn’t really play at all for a year, and it wasn’t until the beginning of 2005 that I started teaching drum lessons a little bit, so I had my own practice room, and that gave me a chance to practice here and there. I would set up my drums and start playing those patterns that killed me live at the end of being in the band, and I would suddenly just be able to play them all again. It must have been a mental block, or it could have been some sort of burn out in that respect.”
With his drumming confidence firmly hammered back in place, and with his left foot now free to fly, Herrick jumped on the hot seat for Roadrunner United’s All-Star Sessions, where he thumped alongside Joey Jordison and Dave Chavarri, and where, more importantly, he was reunited with former Chimaira bandmates Matt DeVries [guitarist] and Mark Hunter [vocals]. From the first note struck, the musical connection was still there. “It felt totally natural,” Herrick says. “It felt great, comfortable right from the get go. I kind of realized, ‘Oh, man. I really miss this.’”
And apparently he wasn’t the only one. A few weeks after the session, his phone rang.
“When I got the call,” he remembers, “that the guys were interested in bringing me back, that was the catalyst for busting my ass, for me to get down [to the studio] every day and practice. I kind of had to make some serious improvements in a short amount of time. But the guys definitely didn’t have to convince me to rejoin the band, because I was ready to throw down again.”
But there was one ever-so-slight hurdle. While Herrick was doing deliveries and teaching lessons, Chimaira had charged on, playing for a short time with Richard Evensand on the skins, and then with shred-master Kevin Tally, who tracked the band’s self-titled disc in 2005. Tally’s ferocious whacking is not the easiest bunch of drumming to get under the sticks, so Herrick, ever the perfectionist, carefully worked out his colleague’s beats, whipped them into jamming shape, and eventually joined the band on the road. “We toured from the end of March to the end of May this year,” he says, “and we did a lot of those songs. We spent a lot of time making sure I could do the parts—all the fills and stuff like that—as closely to what Kevin played as possible because I think what he did is excellent. People expect to hear [the songs] sound that way, so out of respect for what he did, I didn’t try to put much of myself in anything.”
That was all right, because Herrick finally got to flex his own ripped drumming muscles on Chimaira’s new disc, the aptly titled Resurrection. As usual, he perfected his patterns in preproduction and managed to lay down in a take or two some of the meatiest metal drumming that’s ever ripped apart your iPod. In particular, check out the complicated bridge pattern on “No Reason To Live,” an exhausting barrage of drums and cymbals. “I heard the guitar part,” he explains, “and thought it needed something other than a standard drum beat with hat/kick/snare, so I sat down and started doing all this stuff between two rides and basically using the entire kit for the beat. Even though it’s only eight measures, it took me a long time to get the muscle memory to throw my hands all over the place and hit everything I wanted to hit. It’s kind of crazy, but I basically try and do what’s called for in the song, while making it as creative as possible. I just tried to make it the best I can.”
And as you slick-kick enthusiasts already know, Herrick’s “best” usually has a lot to do with his feet. Though a master of manic pedal work, he tends to double kick with a purpose, tastefully integrating and weaving licks into the rhythmic structure of songs, like on “Empire” and “Six” off the new record (or, for the old-school fans, “Stigmurder” from The Impossibility of Reason). “I don’t try to ram notes just for the sake of ramming notes,” he says. “And as far as patterns go, it happens to be that guitar riffs are a certain way and it kind of needs to match that, so it ends up not being a typical bass drum part, but a little more syncopated, a little more intricate.”
But if you’re thinking about doubling down and tackling some of his own intricate, syncopated, speedy tunes (we know you are), Herrick recommends treading carefully—at least at first. And remember: The guy speaks from experience. “In the beginning,” he says, “obviously your left foot has to go from doing nothing except occasionally hitting the hi-hat pedal to actually trying to keep up with your right foot. I made the mistake early on of basically trying to play along to these fast double bass parts without really ever developing control on the left foot. I’m actually thinking I’m still kind of paying for that today, where my left foot independently doesn’t work as well as my right, so I do a lot stuff where I play single parts on my left foot and try to make it stronger like my right.”
Oh, man. Herrick worrying again about a weaker left foot? Sounds a bit like that thing that drove him down the lonely road to Dominos two years ago. Does he ever worry that he might have to pack it in once more? That his foot might freeze up? That playing might produce more pain than pleasure?
“No,” he says, laughing, and then stopping, and then saying again, seriously this time, “No.”
It’s just a word, of course. A small one at that. But his tone means everything: No. No more not playing drums. And definitely, without a doubt, no more goddamn pizza deliveries.
Every month(ish), we recommend the most seriously awesome albums and tracks we had on repeat.
Music: At first blush (or maybe pimple), the Boys were probably a regular bunch of brash Bostonian popsters. But after slathering on some emo-earnest vocals, sprinkling on some slyly sophisticated electronic bleeps, and packing on a bit of hard rock muscle, the energetic four-piece sounds about as great as any young band ever has. And if that description doesn’t grab you, the group’s catchy melodies surely will. Just try to escape “Heels Over Head.”
Drumming: John Keefe’s shred-grooving swings all kinds of ways. First check out his punchy kick drum sound on 2-and-4 whackers like “On Top of the World.” Next listen as he spices things up a little with the hi-hat sloops on “Hero/Heroine.” And then take notes on how he subtly combines acoustic patterns with electronic rhythms on “Me, You, and My Medication.” Excellent work.
The Straight Poop: All smart boys and girls like Boys Like Girls. You’re not dumb, are you?
Music: Josh Dion and company are old-school cool in the very best way: they’re real musicians playing real songs on real instruments. And they’re doing it real damn good, particularly on this live release. Juggling duties as leader and lead vocalist, Dion belts out the band’s jam-thick tunes with a rich voice that proves white guys might just have soul after all. And that’s not even the coolest part. Dion, you see, not only sings…
Drumming: …He plays all the drums too. And dude is appropriately funky and skilled, a born pocket player with plenty of slick licks that keep a beat bouncy and interesting, like on the intro of “Boogie on Reggae Woman” with its infectious sixteenth-note rim-clicks. Fast-forward to the 16-minute-plus “Birdwalker” for a dash of Dion’s chops.
The Straight Poop: A drummer-led, soul-soaked jam band that isn’t afraid to work up a sweat. Or sling it around. Bring a towel.
No, Not Me, Never
Music: Billed as dance-punk phenoms straight out of sky-high Denver, Photo Atlas does indeed get the feet moving and the head flailing. The band’s tunes are appropriately and appealingly schizo, a combination of angst-pained vocals (Alan Andrews doesn’t so much sing as exorcise demons) and up-tempo happy-tapping rhythms. And after mixing in plenty of those angular, math-rocky guitar parts made popular by Brit-hip Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys, the Photo foursome forge a sound that’s not at all pretty, but is certainly seductive. And dangerous. Two minutes in, you’ll wonder whether to dance or to break stuff.
Drumming: Devon Shirley, taking charge of both drums and sampling, hits with tendon-snapping abandon. Give a listen to the big-ass kick bombs on “Little Tiny Explosions.” The guy means business.
The Straight Poop: No, Not Me, Never—an essential purchase for real music fans? Yes, you, always. Go grab a copy.
Every month(ish), we recommend the most seriously awesome albums and tracks we had on repeat. We also watched an instructional vid and worked through some books. Goddamn, we are good drum fanatics.
Music: Unbelievable. Here again is a group of Canadians colonizing the once-mighty shores of American rock. We’re not insecure or anything: It’s just that our northerly neighbors aren’t supposed to be this good, aren’t supposed to pop this hard. And the really painful part? Lead singer Jacob Hoggard—he of the envy-inducing pipes and electric stage presence—was actually a finalist on Canadian Idol (before, that is, he sobered up and asked to be voted off). Our American Idols are good only for bad Christmas albums. Okay, now we’re feeling insecure.
Drumming: Chris Crippin plays punky pop beats that are adamantium solid but with plenty of satisfyingly jagged edges. Go get cut on the ride cymbal accents in “321.”
The Straight Poop: I’ve said it before about other Canuck bands, but this time I really mean it: Hedley is better than Pamela Anderson wearing nothing but a hockey jersey and french kissing a beer bottle.
Music: Despite that telltale letter u in the band’s name, The Colour is mercifully not from Canada. In fact, the fivesome hail from our very own Los Angeles—perennial site of numerous musical crimes and atrocities. These Colour fellows, though, are guilty only of cranking out excellent and inviting dirty-rock tunes. Not dirty sleazy, mind you. More like dirty mellow-sexy. Give a two-second listen to the seductive sounds of Wyatt Hull’s vocals, and you’ll see what I mean.
Drumming: Nathan Warkentin’s grooves are deep and dark, and it sounds like he’s playing something warm and vintage, an ancient Gretsch kit with beat-up heads and muddied cymbals. Beautiful. And dig on the perfect jangle banging in “Can’t You Hear It Call.”
The Straight Poop: Between you and me, Between Earth & Sky is one of the best discs of the New Year. So please don’t tell any of those aging hipsters at Blender. They’ll just take all the credit.
Clinical Indifference (the Psychology of Breathing)
Music: My ears have begun bleeding. And I might be dying. But it’s a right of passage, a privilege really to experience Infradig’s mangle of acoustic and electronic instrumentals. There’s even something sonically voyeuristic about the whole affair. It’s kind of turning me on.
Drumming: Joshua Caleb Green, a subtly stupendous shredding machine, manages to wrest rich drum sounds from what could have been a bunch of hermetic, hostile songs. First check out the buzzing beat and solo breaks in the title track, and then fast-forward to the tight double strokes in “Muttering/Shrapnel.” Drumming (and listening) on the edge, this is. And I’m not sure what will happen if you lose your balance.
The Straight Poop: Don’t read too much into the disc’s title, because there’s nothing at all indifferent about the tunes—just 56.3 minutes of electro-rock guaranteed to shock even the most musically brain addled out of a boy-band coma.
You’ve never been in better hands. Jeff Queen is a four-time world snare drum champion (as well as a former member of the esteemed Bluecoats and Velvet Knights drum corps), and in this must-have DVD he guides you through nearly four hours of essential playing techniques and slick stick tricks. That alone is pretty damn cool, of course. But the great part about Playing is that Queen is truly an excellent instructor, with the kind of soft voice and considerate demeanor you’d want and expect from perhaps a…umm…world-class proctologist (you know, someone who’s gentle with the hard stuff). Just a sample of what Queen crams in: proper grip and setup, sound production fundamentals, the Moeller stroke, the velocity stroke, polyrhythms, buzz control, hybrid diddles, backsticking, stick tosses, and solo composition. And before you start practicing, be sure to poke around the DVD’s extra features for extended solo examples and written-out exercises. [Update 2022: you can now download this vid directly from Hudson for only $3.99. Click the link above.]
Understanding Groove for Drum Set: Bridging the Gap Between Physical and Auditory Awareness
It’s no secret that finding the groove is an ongoing, oftentimes frustrating journey, so let Nucleo Vega show your sticks the way. A thorough analysis of the entire concept of what it actually means “to groove,” his book essentially attempts to improve the consistency and deepen the feel of your playing. Chapters include exercises on beat placement and displacement, groove interpretation through language and shape (be sure to check out the handy diagrams), beat vocalizations (with a syllabic system derived from Indian tabla drumming), polytempo independence, and the role of the Moeller technique. 80 pages. Also includes a DVD and an 86-track CD.
Great Rock Drummers of the Sixties: Revised Edition
If you can’t seem to get ’60s drummers out of your system, or if you just want to read more about what made those yesteryear powerhouses pound so good, then this is your book. First published almost 17 years ago, the revised edition includes all the players you’d expect (Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, Mitch Mitchell), all the players you’d want (Ginger Baker, Carmine Appice, Hal Blaine), and a whole bunch of players you might not have thought about in years (Dave Clark, Mickey Jones, Dennis Thompson). Yep, the kids might be older now, but they’re still all right. 223 pages. [Update 2022: click the link above for a 26-page preview in Google books.]
Blues Drum Method: An Essential Study of Blues Drums for the Beginning to Advanced
This book opens with a short historical overview of the blues, provides a few suggestions about getting the best sound from your instrument, and includes a brief guide to notation as well as a glossary of musical and drumming terms. As expected, though, most of the pages are devoted to bunches and bunches of traditional and modern blues beats—shuffles, ballads, swing feels, even some Latin-tinged varieties. The final chapter introduces build-ups and fills. Comes with a 47-track CD. And if you really get bitten by the blues bug, pick up the companion piece, Blues Drums Play-Along Trax, for more song-based practice. 56 pages.
Aaron Harris doesn’t go around looking for ghosts. He isn’t a medium or a seer or a soothsayer or even—as he puts it—a “weird spiritual person.” But when he walked into the drum room of Bomb Shelter Studios, a converted 100-year-old soap factory, he knew something was in there.
“It’s a really beautiful, really amazing studio,” Harris recalls, “and the drum room is huge—all-brick walls, high ceilings, concrete floors. I remember checking it out, and I just got this really weird feeling. I turned to the assistant who was kind of giving us a tour, and I was like, ‘Is this place haunted or anything?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s really funny you ask that because some weird stuff happens in here at night.’ And I thought, ‘All right, perfect. We’re recording here. This is definitely where we’ve got to do it.’ I don’t know what it was, but something definitely told me that that was the studio. It had this almost creepy feeling that felt really perfect for the vibe of the record.”
The almost-creepy-feeling record is In the Absence of Truth, the latest full-length from Harris’ post-rock, experi-metal band Isis. And if that vibe alone isn’t recommendation enough for you to check it out, well, let us be the first to smack you upside the head with this pronouncement: Absence is, sticks down, one of the year’s best discs, with over an hour of sophisticated, instrument-dense tunes that combine heavy guitars, trance atmospherics, clean and death-growl vocals, and tricky time signatures—all expertly born on the muscular back of Harris’ superb, tribal tom beats. These Isis dudes, to put it plain, can really, really play.
A little surprisingly, then, Harris himself has never had any formal instruction. “And I couldn’t even tell you honestly what some of the timings are in some of the stuff I’ve done over the years,” he says, apparently gifted with a strong internal clock and a knack for untangling twisted tunes. Harris in fact picked up most of his stick skills the old-fashioned way—by whacking the hell out of a drum set. Around age 12, he discovered his dad’s kit in the basement and started jamming along to Chad Smith and Bonham, eventually tackling songs by Soundgarden, Fugazi, Helmet, and the Melvins in high school cover bands. And when he was 18, after he had moved from Maine to Boston, and after his first serious band, Loga, had fizzled out, Harris’ penchant for progressive playing proved just what vocalist Aaron Turner and the rest of the Isis guys were looking for to forge a new sound. “We were all interested in forming a band,” Harris says, pausing for a second before adding a sentence that makes all the difference: “We had the same musical vision.”
Pay particular attention to that word vision, because unlike your typical chops-out-the-yin-yang group, just shredding tune after senseless tune, Isis specializes in composing unified high-concept albums. From 2000’s Celestial (with its critique of tower imagery in Western culture) to 2002’s Oceanic (whose main character explores the idea of community) to 2004’s Panopticon (again a take on the tower, this time by way of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and French cultural theorist Michael Foucault), the band weaves thoughtful themes throughout its work, and the new album is no exception. Don’t get your Google fingers warmed up just yet, though, because you’re not going to find a quick, ready-to-digest summary of Absence. For this one, the band is holding back the crib sheets and the Cliff’s Notes.
“This time around,” Harris explains, “we just all decided that with [the previous albums] we kind of hand fed the information to everybody. The whole point of doing these kinds of concept records is to get something to the listener to kind of get involved with, to make the record a little more personal. And when we throw [information] out there—here’s what this means, here’s what it is—it kind of defeats the purpose. So this time we wanted to leave a little more mystery for the listener to make your own ideas or concept or relationship with the record.” But Harris does offer one tantalizing hint, gleaned easily enough from the album title itself. “It’s based loosely on perception,” he says, “on personal perception of anything really, and what’s true and what’s not true.”
It’s all heady stuff to be sure. But, mercifully, you don’t need a Ph.D. in comparative philological postmodernist philosophy to just sit back and enjoy Harris’ pounding. And this time, there’s a whole lot more pounding to enjoy. “I always had a less-is-more approach to my drumming,” Harris says, describing the repetitive, trance-inducing rhythms that have anchored the band’s sound on the last three releases. “But this time going into the record, I just felt kind of lost as far as direction and what I wanted to do, like I exhausted the approach I had on the past records. And I just didn’t want to dumb things down. I was interested in trying to do something kind of unconventional, where it didn’t have to be a kick/snare/hi-hat beat, you know? It could be a tom beat or whatever I felt fit. I just wanted to try some new things.”
So Harris let himself bang out more complex beats, still repetitive and trance inducing, but heavy on the toms for a rich tribal sound. He also added to his (get ready for this) minimal 4-piece kit a double pedal, which you can hear put to stomping good use on the album’s closer, “Garden of Light.” And for the first time, he even got plugged in, hooking up a Roland SPD-10 and a couple of Madala pads (the kind Danny Carey uses) for triggering organ and tabla sounds on songs like “One Thousand Shards” and “Not in Rivers, But in Drops.” He did all of this, mind you, while still effortlessly navigating the band through the usual number of tripping and treacherous time signatures.
Did all that extra effort have anything to with the ghost? “No,” Harris laughs, “it was just that one day that I felt something. When I went back to do the record, it didn’t feel like that at all to me.” Maybe that’s because the supernatural got spooked by all the super sweaty drumming.
“It was a lot of hard work,” Harris admits. “[The album] put everybody in a position where they were trying and playing things that we’ve never done before, and just really pushing ourselves. So I can very comfortably say that I think this is our best work, and as a drummer, definitely my best work. I’m really, really psyched on it.”
