Lantern | Photo by Ryan Collerd | ryancollerd.com | courtesy of the artist
Ruthless Recording: Lantern embraces limitations on its new Black Highways LP
Two days after Philadelphia got buried in nearly two feet of snow in late January, Zachary Devereux Fairbrother, guitarist and singer of Lantern, is dressed for the weather. He walks into a Point Breeze coffee shop suited in a scarf, shin-height galoshes and his hood pulled atop his head. The cold is visibly lingering on him as he peels away the layers of clothing around his face. Emily Robb, Lantern’s bass player and singer, walks in shortly thereafter and performs the same peeling routine.
Lucky for them, neither were hindered much by the blizzard at their west and south Philly homes, respectively.
The snowfall came a little less than a month before the release of their second full-length album, Black Highways and Green Garden Roads. It’s an album recorded in 22 non-sequential days at The Bottle Garden in Montreal, Canada, over a year and a half. Lantern, a blues rock-leaning proto-punk three-piece, made a conscious decision to record the new album a bit differently than they had for 2013’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Rorschach — strictly to analog tape.
“We were working with only eight tracks,” says Fairbrother. “That sort of put an inherent structure on how we would go on with the arrangements and mixing.”
Robb adds as if finishing Fairbrother’s thought, “It kind of locks you in a little more. Working with tape really informs the process because it’s not limitless. If you’re working with Pro Tools you can have as many tracks as you want.”
Recording in this nature forced the band to be more, “ruthless,” as Fairbrother puts it, in what takes they decided would make it onto the album. He likens it to the “paradox of choice” theory, a line of thinking coined by Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz, in which consumers experience less anxiety when there are fewer choices while shopping.
“In a way it’s more constructive to have [fewer options] because you’re not hung up on choice,” he says. “It makes you commit to decisions. It’s a bit more wabi-sabi in that there are mistakes and you let those things be the charm of what it is you’re making.”
Maybe it’s fair to say Black Highways and Green Garden Roads is a warts-and-all effort. However, any imperfections are essentially only audible to the band; hidden by the live feel of the album as a whole, a vibe that comes from Fairbrother, Robb and drummer Christian Simmons, just jamming in the studio until they’d get the best take. And that may sound gutsy to some, since recording straight to tape means a limited amount of physical tape to record onto. But Lantern embraced that sort of spontaneity.
“They were open to rolling the dice,” says Peter Woodford, engineer of the album, over the phone from his hometown of Montreal just days after traveling to the Philly area to buy a tape machine. With Woodford’s recording experience, Lantern employed some unconventional techniques to capture certain overdubs. One included Robb and Simmons each spinning a microphone in opposite directions in front of the amp that Fairbrother shredded through the guitar solo on “BLK HWYS.”
“It’s kind of physically panning,” Woodford says. “It kind of creates the effect of a Leslie speaker. But there will be random moments where the microphones are in front of the speakers at the same time. It doesn’t sound like a (phaser) pedal, it’s different every time.”
Woodford found that method in an old book about recording. He’s also responsible for supplying the two reels of tape they’d recorded onto, which were from the early 1970s. And despite having a little more hiss than modern tape, it wasn’t problematic for Lantern.
Given the amount of old-school approaches they’d taken for Black Highways and Green Garden Roads, the 14-song LP ultimately vibes that way, eyeing bluesy neo-psych more than anything they’d released prior. Fairbrother and Robb say that Simmons had packed their iPod with loads of British invasion and 60s era pop after touring in support of Rorschach. The time period’s influence is clear and groove-fully executed on the flower power psych of “He Is a Pinball.” They can see for miles down “Another Turn,” and “Black & Green” rests on top of a surrealistic pillow. The snake charming and whirly “Dervish,” could’ve easily stomped its way right out of Bron-Yr-Aur. Black Highways and Green Garden Roads isn’t a period piece though. Lantern returns to form more on the muddy “Green Garden Road,” and rail-riding “Gravel.”
Vocals are a major part of the album. The band intentionally wanted to challenge themselves by recording all background harmonies as a group singing into one mic. Their take on the Solomon Burke classic, “Cry to Me,” dips a toe in doo-wop as Lantern altered its time signature from the soulful four beats per measure to a heartstring-tugging 6/8 time, highlighting Robb’s passionate singing.
Fairbrother says they wanted to challenge themselves by stepping up their singing efforts. That’s the obvious difference on the album, but the tape loops found throughout the album are really what add nuance to each song individually. And some of them took a little extra ingenuity to accomplish.
“We made an incredibly long tape loop on the song ‘Happy,’” Robb says while gesturing to make a room-sized example with her hands. “It was running through the tape machine and it was so long that we set up a mic stand [for it to run through and into the machine] … and we were live mixing it in so we would just use the fader.”
Fairbrother goes on to explain another tape-related story for “Dervish” where they flipped the tape over so it’d be backwards and played it at half speed. Then when he recorded his guitar part at the normal speed it actually sounds really sped up.
Both he and Woodford share the same sentiment toward working with the tape and its labor of love effort it requires. Woodford says it’s the things like taking a razor blade to the tape for splicing that keeps detailed recording like this from being more played out. And Fairbrother enjoys that aspect of it.
“What’s cool about tape is that you can physically do these things as opposed to just clicking a button,” Fairbrother says. “It’s very malleable, you have to do something with your hands.”
But perhaps it goes beyond bearing the fruits of their labor and considering that maybe there was something that struck a chord in the band while working in The Bottle Garden studio. And interestingly enough, a heartbroken vibe can be picked up after a few spins through Black Highways and Green Garden Roads when you consider the lyrics of “Wait, Wait,” “Don’t Worry Baby (It Won’t be Long)” and the aforementioned song they covered.
When asked about working with Lantern on the album, Woodford sounds like he was able to see it clearly from an outsider’s perspective.
“I thought they were pretty inspired when they were recording,” he says.
Lantern’s Black Highways and Green Garden Roads is out this Friday, February 19th, on Fixture Records and Sophomore Lounge. Listen to the entire album stream here, via Noisey.