A couple of months ago we won the Demo of the month prize in Nightshift the free music and live mag in Oxford. It was huge surprise to us since it's a pretty indie centred mag from what I've seen, but it was cool to see somebody there adding some diversity.
DEMO OF THE MONTH PISTOL KIXX “There is nothing clever about our music”, state Pistol Kixx bluntly, and they’re not wrong. But let’s be honest, which would you rather sit through, a three-hour lecture on quantum physics or a sci-fi blockbuster packed with heavily-armed spaceships, exploding cyborgs and scantily-clad futuristic freedom fighters? If you go for the first option, you’re reading the wrong bloody magazine. Anyway, Pistol Kixx: they cite New York Dolls, Ramones and Nashville Pussy as primary influences and have a guitarist called Sober Dave who is also the singer in local hardcore monsters Thirty Two and who is doubtless ironically named. Musically each of the four tracks here are pretty much interchangeable: straight-downthe-line rockaboogie thrash that sounds like Motörhead in Mid-West trucker mode. Roadhouse blues gets a hairy metal makeover and it’s down with that bottle of JD and off down the freeway til dawn. `Wild West’ would make a decent soundtrack to a saloon bar brawl, while `Rock’n’roll Trash Queen’ is so unreconstructed you can almost hear it scraping its knuckles along the ground. It doesn’t matter much that the whole thing is a living, breathing cliché. “Hopefully it’s as much fun to drink to as it is to play,” continues the accompanying scrawled letter. Absolutely. We’re off to the spirits cupboard right now.
Nightshift issue 152 March 2008
Our prize for this was a free day in the studio. Which we finally claimed a couple of weekends ago. It was a bit of a surprise when we got there because the engineer wanted to try and record with as live a vibe as possible. Not what we were expecting, but hey, it was free... and we were up for trying something new, so we all jumped in playing at he same time.
It did all end up being a bit more scary than it needed to be because we were trying to record two very new songs, "Triple-X" and "Backdoor Beauty," and by new I guess I mean, couldn't quite play properly yet! We could have got them down I think laying parts individually, but in the end we only did one new track BDB and an old track "City Sniff"
It was an odd experience recording the solos live, ie. rather than recording the rhythm guitars then just dropping in to do leads, I recorded my rhythm parts and solos in one take, so all my parts are one track. It was an interesting experience, and something that helps you look very closely at how you sound live. With hindsight I think I would have preferred to drop in, but it was cool to give it a go like that.
It came out ok in the end, and you can here the results on the player in the corner of the blog.
We have a few more tracks on the drawing board to demo before we sort out an EP, but it is all going very well!
Rob