Electrified

Released : July 2004

 

Personnel

Peter Nuttall - Music/Lyrics/Vocals
Douglas Hunter - Lyrics/Vocals
Richie Schulz - Music

We obtained an utterly gorgeous Yamaha Tyros Workstation which almost wrote this album on its own.  The opening synth earworm on 'New Emotion' is what the Tyros could do and turned me into Gary Numan over night.  That song was written in under an hour and the drums were played 'live' by assigning a different drum sound to a key on the piano.  It sounds a bit off but it allowed expression and took us away from that staid programmed drum rhythm or auto rhythms we'd relied on in the continued absence of a drummer.

'The spirit of trees' is another 'Forbidden Fruit' sound-a-like with a nice guitar solo, which I was getting better at until I stopped using the guitar for ages and lost whatever ability I'd developed throughout 2003-2005.  The pinacle I think came with 2005's 'Feel' which was maily rock guitar.  I slipped quite quickly back into synth when Richie Schulz joined the band in 2004.  His influence can be heard on 'Time and Me' and on 'Poison Moon' on Electrified's sister-album 'Skin like China'.

'Blue Star' was jangly and bright - all Tyros - and a tribute to a night out in Newcastle - something to which we were no strangers at the time.  2004 was full of uncertainty for me personally so the songs 'Different from yesterday', 'Electrified', 'Unconnected' and 'Apart-Together' were all quite negative with juxtapositioned musical intones.  'Different from Yesterday' is all about someone you thought you knew and liked until you found out who they really were.  'Electrified' similarly, explores the feelings of love and fear simultaneously - feeling like you're being loved but 'lost' at the same time.  'Unconnected' is just about general distance from someone you're supposed to be close to and 'Apart-together' you can probably guess.

'When you love' is a basic love song, nothing too exciting and 'Leave' is another Tyros inspired lush synth track.

The interesting songs come in 'Selling and souls' (which was a song about being careful where you aim, what you wish for, what you want - and what you'll do to get there because when you do, is it really all you thought?) and 'Time and Me'.   The latter was written in the same session as 'Poison Moon' which is by far the better song. I'm not sure why it got shunted to the 'B-Side' album 'Skin like China' in favour of this.  They were both written with Richie our new guitarist and their mellow, harmonic spiced melancholia is really brought to the surface.

This was us warming up for our best album thus far - 'Six String' which was our only album without a stinker on it.  We were getting closer to being able to record something of releasable quality and the technology to actually get it out into the public arena.  With Six String, we'd actually sell some albums too!

- Peter