Category Archives: Music

I’m digging back into “Dancing For Patriotism” for today’s song. Because I was channeling my inner Dillinger Escape Plan for the album, odd meters and time changes were very abundant throughout the whole proceedings. This tune is a good example of that – the opening riff alternates between 6 and 5 and the sung sections’ riff goes back and forth between 5 and 6. Oddly enough, I found the melody line more difficult to record than the drums in those parts…

Drums recorded by Rich Wattie in Montage Music Hall, Rochester, NY. Everything else recorded at home by me. All instruments, mixing, lead vocals by me. Additional vocals by Adam Donnelly.

The Usual Riots

To “celebrate” Monday, I give you one of the strangest songs I’ve ever written. I kept hearing this “‘Bring me your cellulite and I will’ *metal*” idea in my head, so I had to use it. As the glorious song title and the first lyric line might detail, this song is about a somewhat emotionally disturbed liposuction doctor… who, for some odd reason, runs his practice in a mall. In true strange song and prog-metal fashion, not a single measure of 4/4 time is to be had here. Enjoy!

Drums recorded by Mike Huurman at The Dank Pit (r.i.p.), everything else recorded by me at home. All instruments, mixing by me.

Paging Dr. Hoover

In honor of the wild card teams going 1-3 over the weekend, here’s a song I wrote about that phenomenon back in January of 2007. I was recording a small Football Project at the time. The statistics in the second round of the playoffs heavily favor the home teams, so I figured why not write a song about it? Incidentally, the “Watch out for Tigger!” towards the end of the track is a reference to news of a Disney World employee in the Tigger costume punching a 13-year-old boy in the face. Production, mixing, all instruments by me.

Plight Of The Wild Card Teams (You’re Just Gonna Lose Next Week)

Here’s another track from 2007’s “Dancing For Patriotism”, and one of my favorites from that album. One of the things I tried to do with this song – and I’d like to think I succeeded – is to be patient with some musical ideas, but not to an extent where the song drags on and loses its punch. Lyrically, we can put this in the pantheon of “Ed’s Songs That Sound Serious But Don’t Actually Make Any Sense” (though the title probably gives that away). Structure-wise, it’s one of the longest intros I’ve ever done. Enjoy!

Drums recorded by Rich Wattie in Montage Music Hall, Rochester, NY. Everything else recorded at home by me. All instruments, mixing by me.

The Voices Tell Us to Burn Things

Here’s another track from the album “Bowling Is Metal”. This song will also be on the set list when …Of Doom! starts to play shows. Blame my cousin Jason for the bad pun in the first line of the first verse. The worse pun in the song’s title, though, is completely my fault.

Drums recorded by Mike Huurman, everything else recorded by me. All instruments and mixing by me.

None Shall Be Spared

Here is what happens when you throw a serious curveball or two into what is otherwise a fairly simple pop-type song. This song was written in July 2007 for the album “Dancing For Patriotism” (the entire album except for the hidden track was written at that time). I arranged this to fit in the disc’s overall musical picture a la the song “Unretrofied” on Dillinger Escape Plan’s “Miss Machine” record. I was on a big Dillinger Escape Plam kick throughout the writing process for “Dancing For Patriotism”, which lent itself to creating some “where’s the calculator?” parts like the one found in the bridge to this song.

Drums recorded by Rich Wattie at Montage Music Hall in Rochester, NY. Everything else recorded by me at home. All instruments and mixing by me.

Ow! My Dignity!

Happy Friday! Today, we celebrate with a quick tune from my power pop band Smock’s back catalog. This tune is a quick little number written in February of 2003 by guitarist Dan and myself. If memory serves me correctly, we finished and demoed it in his dormitory the day after we staged a gig in its common area (Dan was an RA at the time, so the gig was legit). The version heard here is the most recent recording of the song, made in July 2007. Easiest recording ever – two microphones placed overhead in a stereo pair and that’s it. This is as natural as it gets.

Credits: Written by Dan Bell and Ed Klingenberger. Dan Bell – Lead vocal, guitar. Pete Johnson – guitar. Adam Donnelly – vocals. Ed Klingenberger – percussion, vocals, recording engineer

Tonight

What better way to follow up a quick uptempo ditty than with a track longer than the entirety of “Christmas In 5 Minutes (And 16 Seconds)”? The following is the title cut – and by far my favorite song – from the lone album credited to Ith. Recorded in 2005, this was an album that made fun of nü-metal* but still contained an inordinate number of prog-type flourishes (you’ll hear that through all the time changes in this track). But, on a larger scale, the project set the stage for a lot of material I’ve written since then and, ultimately, the foundation of …Of Doom!. Production, mixing, all instruments: Me.

Ackib Bittik Gadib part III: This Time It’s Personal

*Here’s how the lyric writing process worked for this album: If I wrote a line and laughed at it, I kept it.