So they knew that they needed to find someone who would be able to capture their sound accurately to tape without comprising any of their live energy. So after much deliberation the band eventually settled on one Mr. Steve Albini; legendary Shellac and Big Black member and an engineer who’s worked with the likes of Nirvana, The Pixies, PJ Harvey and Joanna Newsom. According to drummer and percussionist Joe Gould, once the band had packed their bags, boarded a flight and made their way over to chilly Chicago to Albini’s Electric Audio recording studio they knew they had their man. “Yeah it was great” he confirms, “We’ve been aiming a couple of times to get a recoding that does justice to our live sound and the raw sort of atmosphere of the band.”
Albini had definitely been on the bands radar for some time, with the group believing that he could be the man capable of capturing their sound most accurately. “Albini has been an influence of mine since I fell in love with the raw impact of Nirvana’s In Utero,” explains Gould. “And we chose him because he has experience in that raw rock sound plus warm acoustics like Joanna Newsom’s Ys. Despite a reputation for being difficult to work with, we found it a great experience – Albini’s philosophy, and the studio, is focused around capturing exactly what the band sounds like. We had a strong vision for this album to be a balance of in-your-face live energy and rich acoustic sounds, and I think we got it. It was snowing outside; so much of our downtime was spent playing cards, Albini’s a poker fiend, or watching Blues Brothers to soak in the Chicago heritage.”
Although the legendary engineer managed to successfully capture the band’s sound far more accurately then on any of the band’s previous attempts, when it came to the music itself, he was more than happy to simply let the band do their thing. “The biggest impact he had was to not try to influence our decisions,” Gould admits. “He’d offer opinions when pushed, but trusted our vision for the sound and the tunes, viewing his job as capturing accurately what we were playing. Recording to tape, without computers, the way he does, also had an impact – it was much more about playing well and aiming for great takes than the old ‘fix it in the mix’ cliché.”
When listening to The Crooked Fiddle Band its quite hard to figure out just how they manage to write the way they do, with such a mixture of musical styles and such a clash of unorthodox musical instruments. You could forgive them if they admitted to sometimes getting a little lost or confused in the rehearsal studio. But according to Gould the band has no such problems. Their unique sound is one that the band has slowly built on and established since their inception and one that is now so organic and natural that it’s become completely normal. “To us, the multitude of styles isn’t a conscious thing – we’re just putting together influences that make musical sense to us, like accompanying a blistering violin melody with an equally intense thrashy rhythm section. But writing instrumental music can pose some problems – it can feel like the possibilities are endless, which is how the Overgrown Tales title fits in. Each tune has a scene set by the title – some are narrative, like the hillbillies abducting alien’s storyline in All These Pitchforks Make Me Nervous, and others are more setting the scene, like the epic closing track What the Thunder Said. The common thread is that they’re all tales of a sort, and overgrown, like a folk tale found wild and evolved of its own accord.”
Now that The Crooked Fiddle Band have returned from their long recording and touring jaunt overseas, they have their sights set firmly on their upcoming Australian tour which will be rolling around the country starting in October and finishing up in early November. Gould and his band mates are certainly eager and excited to get out there and play shows to their home crowd again, especially considering how long it’s been since their last tour here. “We’ve been, you know recording overseas and touring overseas for the last twelve months so we haven’t really had a chance to do a proper run around Australia for a while now and so yeah we’re really looking forward to showing off what we’ve been doing. We’ll be having fun showing our new album off at these launch parties, and then playing some summer festivals,” adds Gould. “Then it’s time to dust off the whiteboards and write up the arrangements for the next album.”
