Home-Made In Sunderland

Relapse

Relapse
Tracklist:
  1. Subways
  2. Good Life
  3. Friday Night
  4. Ballad Of An Anarchist
  5. Orbital Paths
  6. Let Blood Flow
  7. No Fun
  8. This Town Is Dead
  9. Sunday Morning
  10. In The End
Possibly written between March and July 2005
All tracks written, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Neil O'Brien.
Cover art by Neil O'Brien.

I've got quite mixed feelings about this album. I think conceptually it's a pretty strong record but the execution was quite badly flawed. Certainly I was trying to do something new for me: there's several tracks that are drawing more on punk and hip-hop and indie rock stuff in addition to the rave / electronica stuff my work had always previously been rooted in. My musical ambitions definitely outstripped my abilities though, and there's a whole range of problems, from weird unintentional dissonance, super-lo-fi vocal recordings and truly fucking awful synth guitars that spoil it. But I still sense that there's a decent album buried in there somewhere, even if it would require a pretty substantial remake to bring it out.

Thematically, it's obviously another record about depression, which I suspect I was going through another bout of at the time (honestly, my memories of the 2000s are pretty hazy so it's difficult to be sure). This had been a near-constant theme of my music from the late 90s through to maybe 2002. As I recall, I had a few years more or less clear of it before, well.... this Relapse. The dates are uncertain: the old Rude Corps website said this album was made between March - July 2005, but evidently it had a re-mix around Jan 2006 and that's when the song files were overwritten, except "Orbital Paths" which had a third version made in 2008 with re-recorded vocals and the melody line cleaned up to remove the dissonance. Also, the lyrics for "Good Life" were pretty old at this point: I'm sure they were written around 1998/99, which now makes them sound bleakly amusing to me in a "Jesus, how jaded and melodramatic was I at the age of 18?" sort of way. (Should also note here the obvious sample from Oasis' "Champagne Supernova" on this track.) There were also a couple of other tracks that were intended to have vocals: "Ballad Of An Anarchist" and "No Fun". The former, I'm not sure if any lyrics were actually written; the latter does have lyrics but for some reason I never recorded them.