For those who don’t know, I’m in a band called ‘The Limited’. It’s pretty fun.
In 2023 we released our debut album, “The Coffin or the Suitcase” which pretty much compiled everything we’ve worked on up to that point (minus a few songs we’d prefer to forget). It’s been a year since that came out so I figured it’d be a nice revisit to go through what sorta led up to that point, and the proper album recording experience!
By the point the album was a “yeah ok let’s do this already” we already knew all the songs back to front, upside down, in the bath, front to back, in Esperanto, Pig Latin, and that clicking language from “The Gods Must be Crazy. We would have been gigging with only the EP to shill for a couple of years at this point, which we recorded for about $500 in the studio we were rehearsing in at the time.
By the time we were talking about finally making the album, Jomz (former drummer) had left the band, and Landon was officially ‘in’, complete with a dorky “welcome to the band” video on YouTube (and quite frankly the band has never been the same since). Sean (singer, The Owen Guns) was hounding us to release something already and the EP was definitely showing it’s age compared to how the songs were played now, so it was definitely high time we threw a proper album together.
We tracked the drums and bass at Studio Woodford (conveniently placed right near Herschel’s house, so he could just walk there, the bastard), and also recorded a scratch track for the vocals and guitars. It felt pretty much like doing the EP except we had to wear headphones. Kitty’s bass had it’s own little compartment to be recorded in and Herschel and I were plugged into the DI.
Once that was all tracked, we headed to Songcave (about 5 mins from Herschel’s house, so he had to drive this time, just not as far as the rest of us, so he’s still a bastard) and worked on the guitars and vocals with Eliot Boyd Reynolds, whose body of work is frankly amazing, and current member of Sideshow Annie.
And this is where it kinda got a bit pear shaped, so consider this your first word of warning: If you wanna be in a band with other living, breathing humans all with ego’s and their own ideas and their own mini-goals working towards your common goal, and you wanna record something that doesn’t sound like trash: Fucking communicate with your bandmates. Communicate lots, especially when it comes to the music side of things. Too much is never enough.
I say “it got pear shaped”, I’m catastrophizing a little, admittedly. I was recording solo vocals where it could have easily been gang vocals (not that takes are _really_ an issue aside from wasted time, everything’s digital now), Landon was coming up with all these ideas for tracks without telling us (it seemed, anyway. Could have been a spur of the moment thing and he went ‘fuckit, we’re doing it’), “Bodycount” was tracked way too fast and there wasn’t enough caffeine in my system to nail that in one take, that was really it. a few miscommunications and different ideas. Sorry to like, clickbait or anything.
The amount of trickery involved in the album was cool, too. We had Landon on a totally different mic for his vocals in “Coffin”, Eliot put this weird rotary phaser thing over my noodly bits (I refuse to call them solos, that would imply I could solo and frankly, I really can’t. I just know octaves and the Pentatonic/Blues scale) in “Tikkun Olam”, the only real issue was getting us all to fit comfortably in the vocal booth for gang vocals. Four of us, with headphones, screaming into the one mic? chaos. Fun chaos, and it was all very silly, but still chaos.
Because Herschel lived like, five minutes away, he did the bulk of the work with Eliot in mixing and editing the tracks and we all did a final listen. Few months later? we had an album. Bam, done. We released it digitally and then shipped the masters off to Replicat to do the physical release later on. It was a huge, monstrous expense for the band (as Herschel will tell you in between songs, by the way, come to our gigs), but it was totally worthwhile and a learning experience for all of us.
The album art took some time. A lot of the artwork was done by Jade Gallogly, with additional photos by Zak Campbell (both went on to do the video for “Coffin or the Suitcase”). We pretty much all just discussed our favourite album art as a band and put together a mood board from there to send through. Landon and Herschel took liner note duties and DIY’d it, matching the style to suit. The animal caricatures (why am I a bird? I don’t know. I did vocals on a cover of an Eels song so I’m ‘the bird guy’ now) were also done by Jade specifically for the album, but if I recall, we managed to get a few social media posts out of how ridiculous they were.
It’s weird. Seeing your name, your face, and knowing you played those parts on something that exists, you know? We did the EP of course, and I release things under Pigeonrat, obviously, (and sometimes it hits me then too), but for some reason “Coffin or the Suitcase” hit different. A sort of self-deprecating dissociation of “that can’t be me/us/, it sounds too good” for a brief moment, then the realization sets in that it was you, and you did sound good. It’s good weird, but still weird.
I can’t speak on behalf of the band, but would I, personally have done anything different? Yeah, absolutely. There’s a few bits in “Bodycount”, “Animal” and “Tikkun” that could have done with a tweak (when I suggested we re-re-re-record a few bits while the album was being mixed to Herschel he almost drove down from his mountain compound and murdered me in the face), I’m sure the others would tell a very similar story. Ultimately though, I’m very proud of what we put together and hope the next one (yes there’s more stuff coming, promise) tops it.
Going into the next chapter of The Limited, what would I want to bring to the table? Hard to answer, really. As a band I’d like to see more collaboration between all of us on what we’d like to try and what we could probably drop, definitely having all the songs as completed and finalized as possible, and absolutely bringing something new to the studio so we’re not just re-releasing “Coffin II: Electric Boogaloo”.
Personally? There’s definitely places where I want to build on the work I did on ‘Coffin’ and do more than just “play a bunch of power chords really fast” (though there’s gonna be way more songs like that. We’re a punk band, after all), and I guess try new and weird ways to ruin Herschel’s songs as much as possible before he yells at me.
Till next time…
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