Brooklyn-based surf-y garage rock band Obits return with Bed & Bugs, their third album for Sub Pop next Tuesday (September 10), but you can already stream the album in full over here on Exclaim.ca. While you listen, though, you can gain some insight about every song from singer/guitarist Sohrab Habibion.
Obits made this album in an apartment in Arlington, VA, which served as a mellow place for them to record then working in a sterile studio. When Exclaim! last caught up with the band in April, Habibion mentioned that this LP might prove to be a bit different for Obits and that influences like the Byrds, Chrome, Can, Dr. Feelgood, Ethiopiques, JJ Cale and the Ruts were creeping in.
"At our relative ages, as people who've been listening to music, all of those bands are ones we've ingested for 10 to 15 years," he now says in a new interview. "It all comes out in the wash for sure, but we don't consciously say, 'Hey, let's work on this Ruts part.' It's more that, as we're working on something and it's in this nascent stage, some times we'll try to figure out, which direction to go in. So I might say, 'It'd be fun to do this Vibrators thing,' but it's just our pedestrian way of saying, 'Let's do it like this band did it,' and we all know what we're going for.
"But in the end, it has to have our own voice or it's not worth doing."
Habibion says that, overall, the new LP contains obvious departures for the band but also extensions that could exist on any of their previous releases. Obits, which have also long featured bassist Greg Simpson and vocalist/guitarist Rick Froberg, has a new drummer in Alexis Fleisig (of Girls Against Boys), and on his first album with the band, he gives them a bit more power and finesse when such things are called for.
Click to the next page for Habibion's track-by-track guide Obits' Bed & Bugs.
1. "Taste The Diff"
"We all work in graphic design and a couple of us have worked in advertising. So, we, in a really nerdy way, are really obsessed with fonts and slogans and logos, and when we're goofing around at practice, we come up with cornball slogans that are essentially a play-by-play of our practice. 'Taste the Diff' came from that where we were having a beer at practice and ran out of the one kind and someone offered another and somebody said, 'Mmm, you can really taste the diff!'"
2. "Spun Out"
"The basic nuts and bolts of it were kicking around for a long time, and it was just one of those songs that kept eluding us. It seemed cool at the time and then we'd listen to practice recordings and something about it was just not working. So, we actually let it go for a couple of years and then, as we were going through song options, it came up and we were like, 'Yeah, it's pretty good.' So, Greg kind of tightened his bass line up a bit, I did a harmonizing part with it, and I really loved the rockabilly, twang-y chords that Rick came up with there. Once we did that, it felt like we had something. In the chorus, Greg's bass line is actually in ¾ so, as the guitar chords change, his pattern actually lands in a different spot every time and it gives it this ovoid shape, as opposed to circular, which I really like. Then we re-vamped that for the outro. And Rick's vocal melody on 'Spun Out' is one of my favourites on the record; it's very sing-y."
3. "It's Sick"
"This one started out as kind of a Vibrators thing and ended up being 'Do we go the Ruts route, the ZZ Top route, or the Dr. Feelgood route?' and ended up like none of those. It sounds most like a Chrome song, which is why I think Rick sings the way he does. He kind of takes on a character in his vocals, which I thought was really cool. He hadn't done that before and, honestly, when he first did it we were like, 'Whoa! What's he doing?' But, because it gives it this menacing quality, it really works for the lyrics. I like how it goes from these very, tight staccato verses into these bigger, broader choruses and the cheese rock outro with the guitars wangling their way down."
4. "This Must Be Done"
"That song is actually the first one on the record that really established the variants of the sound palette of the record. It's something that we'd actually recorded in our practice space and it was just Greg and Rick and me — I was playing tambourine with my foot just to keep time. We really liked the simplicity of it in the practice room recording. We took it to our friend's recording studio, dumped it down onto his 8-track and Alexis overdubbed his drums, Greg doubled his bass, [we] added acoustic guitar, which is a first for one of our records, and I accentuated one of my guitar parts. I thought it was a nice way for us to break away from the traditional 'band-in-the-room' approach, which I really like and works for us but it was cool to make a record to take, for us, what might be chances and break away from the documentarian side of things."
5. "Pet Trust"
"To me, it's a really sweet-sounding song. Rick's first line is 'Make sure you care for your love / And provide for your friends' — that's a really sweet line. That's like romantic poetry man. This was definitely a hard one to work on because the guitar playing on it is different than most of our guitar parts for other songs. I hesitate to say it veers on 'funky' but it was just trying to make sure we were erring on the side of the Minutemen or Big Star even, and not falling into that weird Chili Peppers ditch. It's not our ditch. It was a fun one to work on though."
6. "Besetchet"
"I think this is on the Ethiopiques 5 compilation and we all really liked these Ethiopian compilations a lot. This song, if you listen to the original, you will hear the same melody but it's actually played on some kind of flute or out of tune wind instrument. I don't know if it was Rick or Greg who suggested it but we were playing it in practice for a while. This was when Scott [Gursky] was still in the band and we did a bunch of recordings of it in practice, thinking we'd take an idea from it and write something of our own from it. When we were making this record, we stumbled upon one of those practice recordings and I think that it works and goes with the spirit of the song. We like to have at least one instrumental song on each record, just to take a breather or have a palette cleanser."
7. "Operation Bikini"
"Rick brought a couple of harmonicas and was gonna see if something worked. Right at the top, it was a nice jarring sound to have, particularly to start the second side of the record. This is the other song with the 'funky' guitar playing and we tried really hard to stay within certain boundaries. Being super into the Ethiopian stuff and all these great compilations of funk and rock from Ghana from the late '60s and '70s, there's been this really, really great stuff. So, with this tune, we were trying to find some space in that early '70s Zamrock, African psych thing without venturing into some weird Paul Simon territory."
8. "Malpractice"
"I can relay what Rick told us about it, which is that, I guess he was at a point where he was riding the subway a lot and was just bombarded with ads for these shyster, 'Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald' lawyers and malpractice lawsuits and just the horror of people taking advantage of other people's misfortune. So I guess he just wrote the lyrics as this straight story of a difficult birth and so you get words like 'vaginal delivery' and 'fundus.' In his voice, words which, if you just read them on paper don't seem like they'd be lyrics at all, seem to work, which is really cool."
9. "This Girls Opinion"
"That was another one that we'd been working on for a long time. I think my guitar part was the one that was most problematic and we were working on a version that was much slower. Rick had the idea to just speed it up and I switched my guitar part so that it was higher up and more pronounced and uglier. It just seemed to work much better."
10. "Receptor"
"It's probably as close to a conventional rock'n'roll-sounding song that we've done. The most sort of, Rolling Stones-like or Crazy Horse — it strays to elements that are more immediately familiar in the rock canon or whatever. [The multi-tracked vocals] were by chance. Rick wasn't sure how he was gonna sing it, so he tried it two different ways and then our friend Jeff who was mixing it had both tracks up at the same time. He said, 'Y'know this actually sounds pretty cool together; do you guys mind if I mix them in?' and we listened to it and said, 'Yup, sounds good.' So, lucky accident there."
11. "I'm Closing In"
"That's one where I think the main riff was something that Greg had come up with. I think while Rick was away doing Hot Snakes stuff, Alexis, Greg, and I started jamming on the main part. We tried to do something that, to us, felt like the Yardbirds or something — like a 12-bar blues but in like a scrappy, Australian punk way or something. Then Rick came back and we were messing around it and said, 'Y'know, I'm not gonna bother to come up with another guitar part for the verse; I'll just come in on the chorus,' and I think that gave it some nice push and pull between the two parts, dynamically."
12. "Machines"
"This one was one I was working on at home. It's basically what you hear; I did that at my house. The idea was to take that into the band and see what we would do with it. We listened to it and everybody was kinda just into it the way it was, which again was something we'd never really done before. So, we just took it and dumped it on to the tape machine and, while Rick was away, we'd worked on a band version of it that sounded pretty different but we decided to keep their bass and drum part and have it come in halfway through to give it a dynamic change. I thought it was an interesting combination of the home recording mixed with the rhythm section, live in the studio. Overall the mood of it is different than the rest of the record, which, again, is hopefully an interesting change for somebody who's listening to the record, as a whole."
13. "Double Jeopardy (For The Third Time)"
"One of the things about our songs is that, the closer they approach what we consider to be pretty standard rock'n'roll or rhythm and blues elements, it's seeing how close we can get to that without really being that. In this case, it really does have that bar band, bar & grill feel. The key for us is to see how comfortable we can skirt around that. It's something that, in none of our previous bands, we would have done. I like how we toy with that, where one of us is playing something that is conventional but the bass line will upset it or there's something ugly about the other guitar part that you wouldn't expect to hear in the context of that other riff. So, this song falls into that category — the most bar-band but there's something not quite right about it."
Listen to this entire conversation with Sohrab Habibion on the Kreative Kontrol with Vish Khanna podcast.
As previously reported, Obits are hitting up Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on their North American tour this fall, and you can check out the gig info over here.
Obits made this album in an apartment in Arlington, VA, which served as a mellow place for them to record then working in a sterile studio. When Exclaim! last caught up with the band in April, Habibion mentioned that this LP might prove to be a bit different for Obits and that influences like the Byrds, Chrome, Can, Dr. Feelgood, Ethiopiques, JJ Cale and the Ruts were creeping in.
"At our relative ages, as people who've been listening to music, all of those bands are ones we've ingested for 10 to 15 years," he now says in a new interview. "It all comes out in the wash for sure, but we don't consciously say, 'Hey, let's work on this Ruts part.' It's more that, as we're working on something and it's in this nascent stage, some times we'll try to figure out, which direction to go in. So I might say, 'It'd be fun to do this Vibrators thing,' but it's just our pedestrian way of saying, 'Let's do it like this band did it,' and we all know what we're going for.
"But in the end, it has to have our own voice or it's not worth doing."
Habibion says that, overall, the new LP contains obvious departures for the band but also extensions that could exist on any of their previous releases. Obits, which have also long featured bassist Greg Simpson and vocalist/guitarist Rick Froberg, has a new drummer in Alexis Fleisig (of Girls Against Boys), and on his first album with the band, he gives them a bit more power and finesse when such things are called for.
Click to the next page for Habibion's track-by-track guide Obits' Bed & Bugs.
1. "Taste The Diff"
"We all work in graphic design and a couple of us have worked in advertising. So, we, in a really nerdy way, are really obsessed with fonts and slogans and logos, and when we're goofing around at practice, we come up with cornball slogans that are essentially a play-by-play of our practice. 'Taste the Diff' came from that where we were having a beer at practice and ran out of the one kind and someone offered another and somebody said, 'Mmm, you can really taste the diff!'"
2. "Spun Out"
"The basic nuts and bolts of it were kicking around for a long time, and it was just one of those songs that kept eluding us. It seemed cool at the time and then we'd listen to practice recordings and something about it was just not working. So, we actually let it go for a couple of years and then, as we were going through song options, it came up and we were like, 'Yeah, it's pretty good.' So, Greg kind of tightened his bass line up a bit, I did a harmonizing part with it, and I really loved the rockabilly, twang-y chords that Rick came up with there. Once we did that, it felt like we had something. In the chorus, Greg's bass line is actually in ¾ so, as the guitar chords change, his pattern actually lands in a different spot every time and it gives it this ovoid shape, as opposed to circular, which I really like. Then we re-vamped that for the outro. And Rick's vocal melody on 'Spun Out' is one of my favourites on the record; it's very sing-y."
3. "It's Sick"
"This one started out as kind of a Vibrators thing and ended up being 'Do we go the Ruts route, the ZZ Top route, or the Dr. Feelgood route?' and ended up like none of those. It sounds most like a Chrome song, which is why I think Rick sings the way he does. He kind of takes on a character in his vocals, which I thought was really cool. He hadn't done that before and, honestly, when he first did it we were like, 'Whoa! What's he doing?' But, because it gives it this menacing quality, it really works for the lyrics. I like how it goes from these very, tight staccato verses into these bigger, broader choruses and the cheese rock outro with the guitars wangling their way down."
4. "This Must Be Done"
"That song is actually the first one on the record that really established the variants of the sound palette of the record. It's something that we'd actually recorded in our practice space and it was just Greg and Rick and me — I was playing tambourine with my foot just to keep time. We really liked the simplicity of it in the practice room recording. We took it to our friend's recording studio, dumped it down onto his 8-track and Alexis overdubbed his drums, Greg doubled his bass, [we] added acoustic guitar, which is a first for one of our records, and I accentuated one of my guitar parts. I thought it was a nice way for us to break away from the traditional 'band-in-the-room' approach, which I really like and works for us but it was cool to make a record to take, for us, what might be chances and break away from the documentarian side of things."
5. "Pet Trust"
"To me, it's a really sweet-sounding song. Rick's first line is 'Make sure you care for your love / And provide for your friends' — that's a really sweet line. That's like romantic poetry man. This was definitely a hard one to work on because the guitar playing on it is different than most of our guitar parts for other songs. I hesitate to say it veers on 'funky' but it was just trying to make sure we were erring on the side of the Minutemen or Big Star even, and not falling into that weird Chili Peppers ditch. It's not our ditch. It was a fun one to work on though."
6. "Besetchet"
"I think this is on the Ethiopiques 5 compilation and we all really liked these Ethiopian compilations a lot. This song, if you listen to the original, you will hear the same melody but it's actually played on some kind of flute or out of tune wind instrument. I don't know if it was Rick or Greg who suggested it but we were playing it in practice for a while. This was when Scott [Gursky] was still in the band and we did a bunch of recordings of it in practice, thinking we'd take an idea from it and write something of our own from it. When we were making this record, we stumbled upon one of those practice recordings and I think that it works and goes with the spirit of the song. We like to have at least one instrumental song on each record, just to take a breather or have a palette cleanser."
7. "Operation Bikini"
"Rick brought a couple of harmonicas and was gonna see if something worked. Right at the top, it was a nice jarring sound to have, particularly to start the second side of the record. This is the other song with the 'funky' guitar playing and we tried really hard to stay within certain boundaries. Being super into the Ethiopian stuff and all these great compilations of funk and rock from Ghana from the late '60s and '70s, there's been this really, really great stuff. So, with this tune, we were trying to find some space in that early '70s Zamrock, African psych thing without venturing into some weird Paul Simon territory."
8. "Malpractice"
"I can relay what Rick told us about it, which is that, I guess he was at a point where he was riding the subway a lot and was just bombarded with ads for these shyster, 'Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald' lawyers and malpractice lawsuits and just the horror of people taking advantage of other people's misfortune. So I guess he just wrote the lyrics as this straight story of a difficult birth and so you get words like 'vaginal delivery' and 'fundus.' In his voice, words which, if you just read them on paper don't seem like they'd be lyrics at all, seem to work, which is really cool."
9. "This Girls Opinion"
"That was another one that we'd been working on for a long time. I think my guitar part was the one that was most problematic and we were working on a version that was much slower. Rick had the idea to just speed it up and I switched my guitar part so that it was higher up and more pronounced and uglier. It just seemed to work much better."
10. "Receptor"
"It's probably as close to a conventional rock'n'roll-sounding song that we've done. The most sort of, Rolling Stones-like or Crazy Horse — it strays to elements that are more immediately familiar in the rock canon or whatever. [The multi-tracked vocals] were by chance. Rick wasn't sure how he was gonna sing it, so he tried it two different ways and then our friend Jeff who was mixing it had both tracks up at the same time. He said, 'Y'know this actually sounds pretty cool together; do you guys mind if I mix them in?' and we listened to it and said, 'Yup, sounds good.' So, lucky accident there."
11. "I'm Closing In"
"That's one where I think the main riff was something that Greg had come up with. I think while Rick was away doing Hot Snakes stuff, Alexis, Greg, and I started jamming on the main part. We tried to do something that, to us, felt like the Yardbirds or something — like a 12-bar blues but in like a scrappy, Australian punk way or something. Then Rick came back and we were messing around it and said, 'Y'know, I'm not gonna bother to come up with another guitar part for the verse; I'll just come in on the chorus,' and I think that gave it some nice push and pull between the two parts, dynamically."
12. "Machines"
"This one was one I was working on at home. It's basically what you hear; I did that at my house. The idea was to take that into the band and see what we would do with it. We listened to it and everybody was kinda just into it the way it was, which again was something we'd never really done before. So, we just took it and dumped it on to the tape machine and, while Rick was away, we'd worked on a band version of it that sounded pretty different but we decided to keep their bass and drum part and have it come in halfway through to give it a dynamic change. I thought it was an interesting combination of the home recording mixed with the rhythm section, live in the studio. Overall the mood of it is different than the rest of the record, which, again, is hopefully an interesting change for somebody who's listening to the record, as a whole."
13. "Double Jeopardy (For The Third Time)"
"One of the things about our songs is that, the closer they approach what we consider to be pretty standard rock'n'roll or rhythm and blues elements, it's seeing how close we can get to that without really being that. In this case, it really does have that bar band, bar & grill feel. The key for us is to see how comfortable we can skirt around that. It's something that, in none of our previous bands, we would have done. I like how we toy with that, where one of us is playing something that is conventional but the bass line will upset it or there's something ugly about the other guitar part that you wouldn't expect to hear in the context of that other riff. So, this song falls into that category — the most bar-band but there's something not quite right about it."
Listen to this entire conversation with Sohrab Habibion on the Kreative Kontrol with Vish Khanna podcast.
As previously reported, Obits are hitting up Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on their North American tour this fall, and you can check out the gig info over here.