The strikingly prolific young men of the Madison, WI based band Post Social are continuing to work at their lightning fast pace as their third album, officially entitled "Casablanca," is set for release in late July, a mere nine months after the release of their second album "Young Randolphs" (released October 3, 2015).
Miraculously balancing college, jobs and all other areas of their post-high school lives with writing, recording and performing, guitarist/vocalist Mitch Deitz, bassist Sam Galligan, drummer Brendan Manley (who performs double duty in the band Dash Hounds, also readying their debut EP) and guitarist/vocalist Shannon Connor have expanded their sound and recording process with another self-produced effort that will hopefully attract new audiences while continuing to enthrall their loyal fan base.
Reaching out to Shannon Connor, I spoke to him briefly about "Casablanca" for the scoop!
Now that
“Casablanca” is finished and almost ready to be released to the world, how is the
band feeling about the album?
We still haven't sat down to
listen to the album all the way through or determine the order of the songs,
but I think we're just relieved that we're getting it out there. There were
times when it felt overwhelming to be at the helm of a big project by ourselves
without a producer or any other extra help, so it's nice to know that we pulled
through. I'm definitely really pleased with the ground that this album covers,
and I'm excited for people to hear it.
What do
you think listeners might be able to expect?
I would say this album is
different in that it doesn't stick to a dominant theme or style. It's just more
of a party favor grab bag vibe. We tried to switch up the song structure and go
out of our comfort zone more. It's less "punk" or "garage
rock"/whatever than the last album, but there's still some of that for
good measure. There's moments where it sounds kind of like our first album
even. There's another song that has a drum machine on it. There are some
ambient "soundscapes,” especially on the song with 40+ tracks, and on another
song there's a sample of a You Tube video, which we haven't done before, so
hopefully we don't get sued. I liked the name "Casablanca" for this
group of songs because it didn't have anything to do with the music.
How do you think that the band has grown over the
course of the three albums, from “Post Social” to “Young Randolphs” to “Casablanca”?
For both our first album and “Young
Randolphs,” we started recording the album in the late spring and finished in
the late summer. The process was pretty painless. “Casablanca” took six months
and we indulged more in the recording process than ever. A lot of that has to
do with trying to get a hi-fi sound and laboring over the way we recorded our
instruments, especially drums. Compared to “Young Randolphs,” where we just
recorded with two or three mics at a time and bounced everything down to a four
track cassette tape, there was a lot more effort in the mixing stage this time
around. Since everything was done digitally this time, and we weren't paying
for a studio, we took advantage of that situation. We have a song on the album
that has over 40 different tracks, and that just wasn't possible before. So, to
me, that's one way that we've grown. I think this album is also our broadest as
far as the sounds we went for, so there's a lot more diversity than the last
two albums. To me this album was reflective of our first year in college/out of
high school in an emotional way. I don't know if that necessarily comes through
in the music but I think that's the way I'll remember it.
Do you tend to write more than you actually
record or did you record a large amount of material and then whittle it down?
Our writing process usually
involves weeding out songs that aren't working before we record them, so we
don't normally have anything to whittle down after recording an album. This
time around, we did record a song, “Poster
Boy,” and release it as a b-side to the “Guac Bomb” single because we didn't think it fit right with the
rest of the tracks on the album. This was pretty much because we recorded the
song without Sam. In the future, I think we'll try to record more songs fully
before we decide to scrap them. When we get together to rehearse songs
leading up to recording an album, we generally record a video with my iphone.
The audio quality is terrible but we're going to throw out the recordings for
free online at some point, with some other recordings that we used our real
studio equipment for. There's a couple songs that had alternate takes we aren't
using, so I guess that qualifies as recorded material we whittled down.
What was the toughest song to record?
The toughest song to record
was either the song "Full Stop,”
(which may or may not be re-titled "Heat"
on the album) or our giant million-track song called "Eyes Closed.” The latter obviously had a lot of time put into
it, because there are over 40 tracks on it. (I should find out the exact
number). There is a large break in the middle of the song that I wanted to have
some ambient noise in, and Brendan and I spent an afternoon recording weird
sounds from a synth and other things run through pedals.
After that, I still wanted more so I got my history teacher from senior year, Bill Gibson, to record some of the many synths and weird instruments he has at his house. I packed up all of the recording equipment that we had set up in my bedroom and drove to his house and set it up in his basement where he keeps his synths, and then I recorded him messing around. While that song was hard to piece together, “Full Stop/Heat” was also difficult because we did a couple attempts and weren't satisfied with the way the song sounded. We were initially trying a bit too hard to get the drums to sound crispy and tight and we ended up doing a recording that used a drum machine, which just sounded too fake for the vibe we were going for. After a while, we recorded a version we were satisfied with. We'll put that drum machine version out with the rest of the demos.
When people finally get the chance to hear “Casablanca,”
what do you hope that listeners take away from the experience?
I hope that listeners can
enjoy the album front to back and not get sick of it. I think there's a lot of
depth to this album so I hope people can get into as much as we did.
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