4. "Hold Me Mother (12" Mix)" by Freur

Freur is famous for two things: the new wave single "Doot-Doot" and becoming Underworld. Now, once upon a very in-between-tech time, you could use the internet to find out about bands and recordings, but not easily procure them. So in the process of uncovering the backstory of a great artist like Underworld, you would often as not have to purchase whatever you could find, so I felt I needed to have this, particularly as "Doot-Doot" didn't seem to be easily found on any anthologies at the time. It's okay. You can hear snatches of what would make Underworld great, but only really with the benefit of hindsight. Underworld is subtle and slinky; Freur was a bit more... erm... flamboyant.

I didn't really know this song before The Machine selected it for me, but my first instinct was to make it sound a little bit more like Underworld would record it. Which is pretty much what I did. Lyrics are very approximate; I accidentally reversed the "push" and the "stop" and at one point it sounds like I say "Stop Bush!", but I don't. As a side note, this marks the first recording I've ever released on which I play no guitar (except for the bass); those gnarled power chords are provided by my stepdaughter Eden, best known as the singer/songwriter/guitarist for her own very fine band Wye. This is also my debut on keyboards, outside of very very private demo recordings.

Peronnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything except...

Eden Hain ~ Guitar and chorus vocals

"Hold Me Mother (12" Version) performed by Freur

"Hold Me Mother (12" Version) performed by Rex Broome and Eden Hain

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POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

Although there are all kinds of problems with the relative levels in the mix of this one, it's really pretty good for my first shot at a multileveled electronic-style track. There are parts in there which sound like sequenced synth parts, but I had yet to figure out how to use MIDI in any way; however, I couldn't call them "live" keyboard playing, either. I did play a rough, off-time version of the keyboard parts on the only keyboard I have lying around (which can be found somewhere here along with brief notes on almost every other instrument used throughout the project), but I then edited then down to more precise, on-the-beat versions of the figures I was going for that I could copy and paste at will. It got the job done.

Eden was in the car with me a few days ago when I was listening to the newly minted discs of the entire project for the first time. It took a minute, but she did remember recording it, and listening back to it, back when the blog was novel enough that everybody around me generally acknowledged each post. We both thought it held up pretty well for an early effort. The sketchy mixing seemed forgivable, and really would be but for the fact that it didn't improve much on subsequent similar tracks.

Maybe most importantly, for the second time here I post a flat-out tribute/parody of the album artwork, mostly because it was easy and I just happened to have a backlit, fog-saturated picture of myself from a live show which mirrored the original art design rather well. Somehow I missed the obvious tactic of mirroring the overlapping double capital O's in "Doot-Doot" for my own "Broome", but no matter... a dangerous precedent was set.