Tom Emlyn returns with his distinctive psychogeographical storytelling style, for 'Rehearsal For The Rain', the second volume in his Scaredycat series of albums.
Promo video:
Double-Crossed: youtu.be/7bwP4y2H8uw
1. Fire On Fairwood Common
If you travel from Swansea along Gower Road, through Uplands, Sketty and Killay, Fairwood Common is the first part of the Gower Peninsula you'll encounter - a rugged, wind-swept heath dotted with gorse and abandoned airstrips. This is the oldest song on this album. Originally I wrote it when I went away to university. It was meant to be a song about leaving home and the way that things shift and change while you're away. A coming-of-age kind of song. I came back home for a visit and the Swansea Evening Post were reporting a huge fire on the common, although I don't think they knew whether it was an accident or intentional. Probably some bored teenagers messing around. It seemed a destructive and uncanny image that was fitting for the changes I was going through.
The recording originally dates from 2016, a time when I was playing in a more prog rock style, which is explains the mellotron and the bouncy Jethro Tull-esque middle section. I added heavier, darker fuzzed and flange guitars and the chaotic Korg Monotron synth much more recently. When I originally wrote the song, there were many more lyrics painting the picture of domestic change, but it served the song to strip them away and just have the direct simplicity of 'there's a fire on fairwood common / gorse bushes burning in the dark / there's a fire on fairwood common / and I'm not home.'
The original lyrics were just too on the nose, I think. Here's a sample; 'I've been home for a day, and things are changing / petrol shortages and mortgages / my pets are all dead, buried at midnight / childhood pets, adult silhouettes.' It works better as a more abstract, open song, allowing the sweeping warble of the synth to take the lead. This stripping-away of weaker lyrics is something I did a few times on this album.
2. Hall of Mirrors
Another song with a long history. The recording dates back to 2017, but I added some heavier guitars doubling what I played on the bass when I tried to record it originally, which gave it the grounding it was missing for a while. I envisioned the song originally as "sci-fi skiffle", whatever that is, although it's got a heavier feel to it now. I wanted to write something carnivalesque, a song that deals with the ways we can be reflected in the internet and social media, like a grotesque funhouse attraction. We're all reflected in the screens of our black mirrors, but they reflect and distort back onto us as well.
There are some interesting sounds in the recording, including saxophone on the outro and flute by Swansea musician Felix Subway. The Korg Monotron synth makes another appearance, and there are some bleeps and swooshing noises which were made by a smartphone app that created glitchy electronic sounds. The percussion was added recently. We recorded it all in our flat in Riverside, Cardiff. Instead of using a drumkit, we just added every percussion instrument we had to hand - djembe, triangle, bongo, kick drum, cajon, snare, cabasa, vibraslap, claps. It added a lot of weight to the track.
There's a mention in the lyrics of a certain Swansea music venue which was just an incidental throwaway at the time. However the venue has more recently gone down the misinformation/ antivax/ right wing rabbit hole. An interesting incidence of a lyric becoming more apposite with the passing of time, and more appropriate to the theme of the song, funnily enough.
3. Kafka
The recording of this was all done last year, but the song has been around for much longer. A fairly standard blues affair, I've come back to the lyric many times but always given it a new arrangement, appropriate for the circular nature of the words. This final version is a satisfying garage-rock vamp; I'm really happy with the super-distorted lo-fi harmonica, recorded with a Bullet mic, and the overall gritty, angular production. It's got a poppy structure that just feels right. I layered two drum takes over each other to make it extra chaotic, and Evan played a funky bassline. I also used the Bullet harmonica mic on vocals all over the album. At the end of Kafka, you can just about hear a radio broadcast coming through my guitar pickups as the song fades out.
4. Rehearsal For The Rain
Another song which originally had more lyrics. Here's a sample; 'time is a waitress / and my table is served last / but after all it's just a reminder / the guitar is still in the garden / swollen and warped, the keys won't turn'. I think it works a lot better with a very spare and sparse approach. It's almost an instrumental now, with only four words - 'rehearsal for the rain'. I think it was called 'rehearsing for the rain' at some point, but it didn't really sing as well. I don't know what it means. Performing for nobody, or your audience only being the natural world, or something. Maybe the rain itself is just a rehearsal for some future cataclysmic flood.
I put a bit of phaser on the cymbals for a nice washy effect. The track overall has a really cinematic feel. I think it takes you on a dreamlike journey, moving through 4 different sections that feel melancholy and celebratory at the same time. The warbly Casio synth in the middle is really nice. We overlaid cymbals in the middle and used timpani sticks. The electric guitar tones were done with a tiny solid state Vox amp.
5. Chemical Road
This tune is from the same 2017 sessions as Hall of Mirrors. I originally wrote this when I was sitting on a bus going through Morriston in Swansea. I saw a street sign that said 'Chemical Road' and it made me contemplate how strange and toxic-sounding a name that was for a place for human beings to live. I started thinking about post-industrialism and decay, and it turned into this kind of dreamlike, fragmentary kitchen-sink drama about two romantically-entangled characters separated by the mundanity of their surroundings. I like the image of 'an orange river flowed', which is really something from my childhood memories.
All the chords in the verse are 9th chords, which gives it a lovely open jazzy feel. At one point there was a sax solo in the middle, which has been deleted.
While I was recording the song in the YMCA in Swansea, some children were playing outside. We stuck a microphone next to the window and recorded the sound of their laughter. At some point, though, the file was lost.
There's no proper drumkit on the song, only toms.
6. Llangennith (intermission)
An ambient instrumental based around guitar harmonics with different delays applied. I did think it was quite long, but cutting it down would take away from the meditative repetition of it all. There's some interesting sounds including some keyboard chords placed in a random order. My ex-girlfriend built me a diddly-bow, which is like a primitive one-string slide guitar. It created some interesting textural effects with a bit of processing, sounding almost like a windchime at some points. Llangennith is a beach in North Gower where I used to work in a beach cafe for several summers - the same subject as my short story Phosphorescence which I'm releasing along with the album. I thought it would be nice to have an intermission on the record, a bit like the intermission in Monty Python and the Holy Grail or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another cinematic touch. A chance for listeners to go and grab a coffee or beer in-between the more fleshed-out tracks. It's fitting that the track is named after a period that was an intermission in my life, in a way.
7. I Don't Want To Be A Rockstar
This lyric was based on my memory of my school leaving assembly. The teachers made a cheesy leaving video in which they all mimed to the song 'Rockstar' by Nickleback. It's an exploration of that - rejecting the general prescribed idea of success and more specifically of musical ambition. This song was originally called Rockstar as well, but I thought it was a bit bland. The new title 'I Don't Want To Be A Rockstar' might sound a bit negative, but if you listen to the lyrics, the other half of the title is 'I Just Want To Play My Guitar', so really it's a rejection of the rockstar image and mythos in favour of just being a musician and a craftsman, playing music rather than pursuing a self-destructive myth. Although I probably still do want to be a rockstar, admittedly. It's a self-deprecating and ironic title.
Recorded in lockdown, we added drums more recently. My drummer Jack said the song sounds like a band being forced to play a song. We ended up deleting all the drums except the ridiculous Nirvana-esque heavy middle section, which comes out of nowhere. I think he played it like that originally as a joke, but it made the song much better.
8. It Came Back To Me
Inspired by the Kinks, this was another lockdown project. Musically a bit complex - every section is in a different key, following on from the section before, which took a while to figure out structurally. It's an abstract Southwalian drama, inspired by looking out across derelict rooftops and tenement buildings, imagining the dreams and interior lives of the people that live in them. Lyrically, it deals with maintaining the fragility of your innocence in a decaying world.
9. Double-Crossed
Written in lockdown, this was a Velvet Underground-esque groove. The lyrics were sparked by realising I'd never walked down a cul-de-sac near where I grew up, even though it was just over the road. It made me wonder about the people that lived there, and their internal lives. So close, yet so far away. This, combined with some of my thoughts about the isolation of lockdown, became a brooding, thoughtful, poetic tune. It's a song about betraying yourself - there's a double meaning there. Betraying yourself in the sense of stabbing yourself in the back, but also giving too much of yourself away or exposing yourself. The song is a confessional, epic ballad with some glam rock undertones.
10. Somewhere There's A Dry Shore
This was meant to be a proper song with lyrics, but the only words I ever wrote were 'walking down the M4 / when the sky begins to pour'. I couldn't get any further than that for some reason, so rather than force it, I decided it worked best as an instrumental. It was inspired by the chords of 'Hesitation Blues' by Dave Van Ronk. Originally recorded by Dave Milsom for Death Monkey records, it's a fitting end to the album. Like the closing credits of a film.
Phosphorescence
The boiling tide sweeps the beach down the plughole, sandgrains and stones, smears of ketchup and fire-blackened wood, colouring pencils forgotten on the varnished tables, shells down the drain and the bones picked clean. Long hours at the sink, working but achieving very little, another summer attempting unsuccessfully to escape from something I couldn't name. Last night I wrote a song in my owl-black tent, listening to the waves pounding relentlessly on the Llangennith tideline, thinking of the black wreck of the Helvetia, dark jagged ribs protruding from the sand, slowly falling apart for hundreds of years. This morning, my words are useless again in the face of all this washing up, the second-hand affairs of hundreds of strangers.
I try not to look at the clock, and eventually the sun's almost down. It gets late so early now. An orange glow hangs over the campsite in the windows of the empty cafe. The chairs are up on the tables. Ffion is sweeping up the detritus of the day - pennies, stray peas, empty sugar packets, coffee cup lids, ice cream tubs, tiny foothills of sand. I nod to her as I pass. She's not someone I've managed to get to know.
"There's a few of us going down for a swim in a bit if you want to come along" says Sam as I pass with a stack of teetering dishes. He's one of the teenagers that works front-of-house, camping with his family for the summer, from Somerset or Devon or somewhere. Restless and hyperactive, Sam would be irritating if his enthusiasm wasn't so endearing. "Apparently the phosphorescence has come again!" he yells after me as I trudge back to the sink and the endlessness of mugs and saucepans. Sometimes I'm not in the mood at the end of a long shift to go for a swim or a drink, or talk to my co-workers. Sometimes I'm filled with exhaustion and a shyness that could be mistaken for unfriendliness or arrogance. Today, though, the bank holiday heat, seared for hours into my muscles, fills me with the madness of the season as I slop a greasy, soapy mop across the kitchen, imagining the sparkling phosphorescence glinting on the damp floor or pouring out of the tap. Sometimes I am in the mood, sometimes there's a hunger I can hardly even conceal or express, a thirst to feel alive after staring at my submerged hands all day, running over the same old frustrated and hopeful thoughts, washed down the drain for better or for worse.
So I do go down the beach after that, after dusk, walking down with the boys, past the distant shouts from camper vans, smells of fag smoke and barbeques, flashing torches from tents and the boots of cars. Feeling the warm breeze coming around the peninsula as we walk through the dunes, seeing tiny points of light, bonfires in the distance. I'm glad I did, in the end, stepping into the freezing water, feeling the vast, deep darkness around me and seeing the blue-green phosphorescence encircling my hand like the sparklers I can vaguely remember holding at the rugby pitch years ago on bonfire night, like sparks from a lighter, an uncharted constellation in an alien sea. Feeling the fragility of this evening that's just one more unimaginably brief moment in a series of barely-remembered summers. Afterwards, I try to find my can of lager, half-buried somewhere on the black-after-dark beach, but it's gone.
