Squire doesn’t have a problem with the emo tag. “People have called it all sorts of things,” he says over the phone from Santa Monica, where he’s currently producing another Fueled by Ramen find, the Cab. “To me, it’s just new alternative — new young rock music. But ‘emo’ is not a word I fear. There have always been genres. And those genres usually define a particular vocal style. The grunge era was based on a vocal sound that was pioneered by Kurt Cobain and Mudhoney and Soundgarden. And emo is no different. It’s born out of Green Day and Blink-182: they had this certain vocal style that has now evolved into what is accepted and what is hip. If you look at the evolution of rock music, there’s always been an element of that.”
For Squire, vocals — the passion and intensity conveyed by a singer — rank high in what he looks for in an artist. Like a lot of producers, he subscribes to “the acoustic guitar test”: as he puts it, “if a song rules with just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, then you can do almost anything with it. The rest is just style.”
It’s an ethos he may have picked up in the year and a half he spent working with Kolderie, who, with Sean Slade, produced breakthrough classics for Radiohead (PabloHoney) and Hole (Live Through This), as well as discs by dozens of other alt-rock notables: Throwing Muses, Dinosaur Jr., Lemonheads, and Mighty Mighty Bosstones, to name just four.
Squire’s unique in that he tends to introduce electronic touches not usually associated with pop-punk to his best productions. He got his feet wet in production during high school, in a band called Ashes. “We had a studio in my mom’s basement where we recorded our own stuff,” he explains. “That’s kind of how we cut our teeth and that’s how I fell into the production thing. I’m a song guy, not a technical guy. But nobody had enough money to pay for me and an engineer. So I learned the technical part of it. That’s been essential — not only because I could do lower-budget stuff and bands could take chances on me even if they didn’t have a lot of money, but also from the perspective that, if I understand everything that’s going on, I have a better ability to craft that song. Having that working technical knowledge is a real integral part of production these days.”
— Matt Ashare
Steve Albini |
Steve Albini
Landmark work Pixies, Surfer Rosa; Nirvana, In Utero
Ass-kicking recent release Scout Niblett, This Fool Can Die Now
Wrestling name The Atomizer!
Steve Albini? How about Steve Almeanie? His verdict on Pixies’ full-length debut, 1988’s Surfer Rosa: “A patchwork pinch loaf from a band who, at their top-dollar best, are blandly entertaining college rock.” And he produced the damn thing. But if Albini is wont to badmouth his clients from time to time — don’t even get him started on Urge Overkill — one must also give him this: the man knows how to record a drum set. Albini disputes that he’s got a “sound.” But he does. Its roots are in the scabrous, precise noise of his own bands, beginning with Big Black and later finding its apotheosis with Shellac. Hallmarks: loud, crisp guitars; bass and drums interlocking in spare, scrupulous singularity; relatively unobtrusive vocals; a hint of echo. At his Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, Albini eschews multi-tracking in favor of live recording: the ambience of the room caught just so, thanks to his meticulous arranging and rearranging of microphones. But while his signature recordings share a certain rough-cut robustness, he’s worked with an astounding variety of artists, including Cheap Trick, Gogol Bordello, Plant and Page, Joanna Newsom, Palace Music, and Magnolia Electric Co., among scores of others. And he doesn’t take royalties — to do so would be “an insult to the band” — instead charging either a flat fee or a sliding-scale rate based on an artist’s ability to pay. So, maybe he’s not so mean after all.
— Mike Miliard
