Powerful UK rock crew and former Band of the Day Pearl Handled Revolver are poised to drop their engulfing new album, Tales You Lose, on Friday. The darkly rockers pool from many areas and with the band charging onwards, we checked in and asked them to give us an exclusive track by track breakdown of the album:
Black Rock
The album opener was actually the final song the band recorded for the album. As with most Pearl Handled Revolver songs, this started from a jam. Opening with a drums, haunting echoing Farfisa organ with ambient effects from synthesiser filtered white noise and ever driving bass guitar through tape delay and copious amounts of spring reverb; building and developing around the lyrics to heavy crescendo choruses. The basis of the song was recorded live and evolved to become an instrumental exploratory journey of psychedelic reverse delayed Wurlitzer electric piano, Hammond organ and harmonica ages, building towards the grand finale. The very end play out of “Black Rock” is the only part of the album featuring acoustic guitar.
Heart of Gold
A song of two halves, based around an idea from Simon Rinaldo and Lucas Rinaldo, the main song is played in 13/8 timing. We don’t quite know why we make things so hard for ourselves, but this is what we do. We tried to simplify it but it changed the feel too much, so we were determined to lock it in together. Once we had all mastered the groove, we knew that it would work very well as it is. The spareness of the first half is the perfect backdrop for Lee Vernon’s lyrics and vocal performance. The second half builds in intensity around another more complex time signature, heavy tom work over the layer of guitar, bass and organ.
Gilding The Lily
This song started out as a riff Simon had been playing around with for at least a year before he presented it to the band. The first carnation of the song was based on the main riff played very differently on a Rhodes piano. It took many sessions for the guitars and drums to find their way with this one. It didn’t fully come together until Lee Vernon introduced his lyrics, where, through endless jamming and experimenting it became a high intensity song, driven by a dirty percussive Hammond Organ and an incredibly complicated to master rhythm from Chris Thatcher. The song was tested on an audience for the first time some months before Lucas Rinaldo had been recruited on bass, with the bass originally being played on keyboards. Lucas mimicked and then elaborated on the existing bass lines to form the song in its completed form.
Lightning
The initial idea behind the instrumentation of “Lightning” was written and recorded by Simon Rinaldo during the lock-down. The structurally less complex instrumental was eventually presented to the band as a potential song for the album. Lee Vernon wrote the beautifully haunting lyrics and titled the song “Lightning”. Together the band created the chorus chord patterns. On the day of recording the song Andy Paris played a simply perfect solo, we thought it was almost reminiscent of Peter Green. For us it’s Lucas Rinaldo’s superbly performed bass line that fully tied the song together, he developed a very unique technique to achieve that bass line in the studio… We won’t reveal how he did it… but needless to say we were very impressed and love the result.
Courageous
The song starts with delayed “wha” guitar from Lucas Rinaldo with Chris Thatcher’s drums, allowing a build in emotion and intensity. Bass on this song comes from Simon Rinaldo’s deep analogue synth swell married with jazz infused Rhodes piano stabs and arpeggios alongside Andy Paris’s trademark guitar hooks, leading to dramatic crescendo chorus and a late introduction to Lee Vernon’s vocals. This song was all about getting the dynamics right and leaving space for the lyrics to be a focus in the verses.
Space Invader
The album needed a shorter explosive track, we hadn’t necessarily planned it out that way though. Andy Paris is good at hitting the band with a riff to get things started and this is how “Space Invader” started. The song was pretty much written in a single session and recorded live in another session.
Stabs of guitar augmented by heavily overdriven Hammond organ formed the basis of the verses, with hooky choruses around Lee Vernon’s lyric about how he observed people invading space (nothing at all to do with 80s arcade games). Lucas Rinaldo provided a heavy bass line, all those spacey effects were actually performed live from the bass guitar through electronic wizardry.
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Hammer
One of the first songs written and recorded for this album. We actually thought we’d start making an album that is more reminiscent of the bands earlier blues beginnings… It just didn’t entirely work out that way but it doesn’t hurt to take a peek at some of our past creations for inspiration now and again.
Based around Lee Vernon’s reflectional lyrics including the poetic line “When you’re a hammer… All your problems look like nails”. The woody Hammond organ drives alongside the rhythm section for a blues workout with a difference. Recorded live, we felt that “Hammer” had a swagger that simply had to be included on Tales You Lose.
Junkies
Derived from jams, riffs and poetry, “Junkies” almost came together by chance. The structure seemed to evolve naturally, and the band were completely in tune with each other. Sometimes, when this happens, we just decide to record the song live while it is still fresh, if only just to see what might happen. The added pressure makes you feel a little ‘on the edge’…. performing in the moment is good for the soul. If we had spent more time planning a structure it would have never come out sounding like this… for which we are very grateful. Not to say there wasn’t a great deal of work that went into the production of this song, but we had a special performance to work with. The song required minimal overdubs but was crying out for a feature recording of an intense thunderstorm, captured by Lee and Simon decades previously and originally used on an early track that you could say was the start of this journey. The powerful build up and intensity lead us to a natural finale. We knew “Junkies” had to be the album closer.
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