So much of bad luck is perception. So much of the gravitas that doubles as the aftermath of bad luck can be exaggerated or diminished depending on the tones the recipient of the trashing wants to play. Somehow the bad luck, long, lonely open roads, the endless treadmilling of working struggle, the parade of all the wrong ones, the nights and people who got away and the realities that were maybe more smoke than anything in the songs of Southern California band Limbeck never feels overly bummered. It’s more like the downtrodden melancholy of a Fountains of Wayne song – about the depressed office employees and the peach of a girl mindlessly dating a biker with crumbs in his beard instead of the nerd who would treat her like the princess she is – or the protagonists that always seem to be in the process of bouncing back, rather than staying in the same forsaken pit. As lead singer Robb MacLean, a quiet, rosy-cheeked young man wearing a Weakerthans tee-shirt when he was here this day in early September, mentions in his notes to this first song of the session, that the band is perpetually in a state of being broke and has been since it started working together in 1999. The things that you can learn when your means are overshadowed by the demands are staggering. These aren’t just the tiny bits of personal information that someone lost in a struggle discerns about themselves – what turns the inner clock and what makes the heart beat faster or slower – but the crisp awareness a hunger (figurative or literal) can give a person is worth its weight in gold. It gives all that’s around a detailed, fine-point line for a border and almost levitates the consciousness, not just to see the certainties in a personal life with more acute clarity, but to witness and observe the discrepancies that just wander around all over the place from dusk until dawn. The Avett Brothers released one of the most insanely good albums of the year in Emotionalism and Limbeck put out a kid brother version of that record – not junior in quality – but in the frame of reference. There’s a lot more younger problems happening on the eponymous record – rather than the beleaguered and beat up sobriety of the lessons learned by those Cash and Haggard minds of the Avett Brothers. Limbeck is getting to that point, but there’s still too much optimism going on in the recounting of Limbeck to put them in the same roll. They find comfort in a dream about taking a girl to the Thai restaurant that they went to just days earlier. There are missions to penny-pinch and then comes the breakdown, where the sweet coos of the bar come slipping in through the cracks. The songs on Limbeck swoon to the delicacy of living modestly – and being forced to live modestly – which, if done right, can be sort of intoxicating if it matters more to make albums that behave like friendly waves, Wilco’s Being There and still lifes come to life.

Limbeck Official Site
Doghouse Records

First song
Big Drag (Limbeck) [2.86MB] [2269 downloads]


– original version appears on Limbeck
Unfortunately, this song is about a state that we frequently find ourselves in – being broke. Before we made the record that this song was on, we took a while off to regroup. Verse by verse, this is basically how we were living: trying to stay around the house without spending money. I like the lyrics to this one cuz they remind me of an awkward Beach Boys song from the 70’s called “Busy Doin’ Nothin’”. On the record, this song has quite a bit going on, but for this session it’s down to the basics, plus our friend Ryan Kennedy from a band called Reuben’s Accomplice is on organ.

Second song
Sin City (Limbeck) [4.73MB] [2313 downloads]


– original version appears on Limbeck
We usually say this song is about “fast women, fast cars, and gambling,” but in reality, it ain’t. We were able to run Patrick’s guitar through a nice old Leslie speaker that came with an organ, and it came out sounding real nice. We started doing this ‘live fade-out’ idea as a fluke a while back when we were playing a show in Columbia, Missouri, and we’ve stuck with it since. We have a recurring theme in our songs of appreciating things/people/places for what they are, and this song definitely carries that idea.

Third song
Names for Dogs (Limbeck) [2.18MB] [2200 downloads]


– original version appears on Let Me Come Home
We took a new approach on this song, versus the version on the record. We originally recorded it live with two acoustic guitars around a couple of mics, but here we livened it up a bit,
taking it on as a 5-piece. This song is about a conversation that we constantly have in our van… as times change and we grow up, are we gonna be as proud of our generation as we should be?
We look back at the 60’s and 70’s as such important times for music and politics and everything really. Even the 90’s look good… ordering records through the mail, going to record stores and asking people what’s good and new, zines, and the need to actually go to a show to keep yourself in the loop of everything. These days it seems as if person-to-person interaction is a dying breed. At one time we thought we’d “save the world” by ditching our cell phones and only releasing records on vinyl. This song isn’t trying to save the world or anything, it’s just tryin’ to make you think about it.

Fourth song
Reading the Street Signs (Limbeck) [2.73MB] [2206 downloads]


– original version appears on Limbeck
This one’s about looking at people while I ride the bus and wondering where they are going and what they’re going to do when they get there, but mainly it’s about this lady who was bawling her eyes out from the time she got on till the time she got off. It was just weird how nobody bothered to ask her what was wrong, or even seemed to notice, but it’s a fair assumption that people were pretending not to notice because they thought that she might be kind of loopy and then they’d be stuck talking to her until one of them had to get off. It’s sad, and I was guilty too. but in my defense, it was route 60. I’ve gotten into a lot of crazy conversations on route 60 that just never end. The idea in the studio was to put a trumpet on the part’s that go “ba,” but when we got to trumpeting it sounded kind of dumb and the scratch vocal track that just said “ba ba ba ba ba” beat out the trumpet in the final mix, and for the rest of eternity, including this Daytrotter session’s version. Pat, who engineered our session, chipped in a good idea for all five of us to do the “ba” parts, which ended up as a nice little team effort.