Behind the Kit on Bellows' "Next of Kin"

Breaking down the drums on 8 tracks from the new Bellows record

Last Wednesday Bellows released Next of Kin on Topshelf Records. The album’s material dates back to at least 2019, was recorded in 2020-2021, and was finished by late spring 2021. This isn’t the first Bellows album that I’ve contributed to, I played drums on a number of songs on The Rose Gardener and even did some gang vocals on As If To Say I Hate The Daylight waaaay back in the day, but this is the Bellows album that I’ve lived with the longest before its public release. Back in 2019 Oliver, Jack, and I tried our hands at a Song-a-Day challenge for the month of September. As a way of keeping each other motivated and accountable we’d always send each other whatever we’d cooked up on each day. A number of the songs on Next of Kin started off as demos that I first heard that September.

Shortly thereafter a lot of things happened.

It wasn’t until the next fall that Oliver, Jack, Frank and I started to bring these songs out of the DAW and into meatspace, first as preparation for a live-streamed set “at” Baby’s All Right, and then for a self-recording session to make the album proper. Ancillary to these more overtly productive goals was a personal need on all of our parts to get outside of our apartments and do something other than solitarily stew on our mass-collective misery. With no opportunity to pursue the usual professionalized avenues of musicianship, the four of us returned to the simple pleasure of cracking a cold one and rocking out with the boys. We did this for enough consecutive weeks that by the time we holed up in Woodstock in January 2021 we knew these songs front to back, top to bottom. I finished my tracking in the first day, Frank took care of his piano parts by the end of the second day, and we still had enough time left to try out group harmonies, bow some cymbals for ambient noise, and drink the single most heinous craft beer I’ve ever tasted while watching Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.

That was the easy part. Then came mixing, which I guess was easy for me because I mostly spent it Rick Rubin-ed up on Oliver’s couch playing with Frankie (the dog) while he (Oliver), Jack, and Frank (the man) worked over minute details of the record for, no joke, months. We drove up to Woodstock just after the D.C. riot and I arrived at the final mixing session after getting the second dose of the COVID vaccine in May. Point being, we’d all spent a lot of time with each of these songs long before they became available for the rest of the world to hear. It feels great to bring everyone else into a musical world that we occupied mostly on our lonesome for so long.

So welcome to Next of Kin, make yourself at home! In fact, let me take you on a little tour of the album by examining the songs that I played drums on. The songs on the record that I did not play drums on, either because my esteemed colleague Julian Fader provided the drums or because Oliver programmed his own digital drums instead, are also worth your time and attention. However I like to speak from a place of authority in this newsletter when I can, so the songs that I directly contributed to will have to do for now. Maybe we can revisit the rest after we’ve gotten them tour tight.

Oh! Speaking of which, Bellows is going on tour in April. If you like these songs enough to want to hear them in the flesh, consider attending one of the following dates:

4/2 - Kingston, NY @ Tubby’s

4/13 - Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s

4/14 - Brooklyn, NY @ TV EYE

4/15 - Rochester, NY @ Bug Jar

4/16 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr Roboto Project

4/18 - Chicago, IL @ Golden Dagger

4/19 - Nashville, TN @ DRKMTTR

4/20 - Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade

4/21 -Asheville, NC @ Static Age

4/22 - Durham, NC @ Pinhook

4/23 - Washington, DC @ DC9

And with that out of the way, let’s dive into my behind-the-kit perspective on Next of Kin.

But first, a sales pitch!

Remember how I mentioned a long gap between the end of the recording process and Next of Kin’s release? If you, like me, would prefer to hear new music pipping hot out of the oven, consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack. As a paid subscriber you’ll get every Lamniformes song as soon as it is finished, potentially months if not years ahead of its public release. You’ll also get the satisfaction of knowing that your dollars make those very songs, as well as this newsletter, possible.

Now, for real, onto the tunes.

Track 1: “Marijuana Grow”

Next of Kin starts with one of songs that took us the longest to figure out on drums. Oliver’s original demo had a stiff programmed shuffle that he wasn’t happy with. First we tried copying the shuffle as originally written, with the hi-hat cranking out each subdivision and hoping that a human touch would solve the stiffness issue. It didn’t fit, all of those subdivisions being clearly delineated worked against the loose and laidback feeling that Oliver was going for. So, with our first instinct flustered, I recalled an old drum lesson that I took with Peter Davenport where he showed me a bunch of shuffle variations that I could whip out if I ever found myself on a blues gig. We tried running through the verse with each of these variations until we settled on the version you hear in the link above. The solution had to imply as much of the shuffle as possible while still leaving room for all of the vocals, strings and slide guitar that Oliver planned to fill the song with. Thanks for the tips, Peter!

Track 2: “No One Wants to Be Without A Person To Love”

This tune was a much easier solve compared to “Marijuana Grow”. The part included on the demo was pretty much exactly right from the jump. All I needed to do was spice it up with a few fills between sections and call it a day. Of course I found a way to make it difficult for myself anyway. For a few practices I got really hung up on making sure that the harmonized vocals that sing the title lined up precisely with the drums. This turned out to be a real headache because, uh, they don’t and shouldn’t line up. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a drummer or because I had access to a quantize button at a young age, but this simple truth took a while to make it through my thick skull. After enough attempts to shove the circle peg into the triangular hole I threw my hands up and decided to focus on the drums by themselves. Surprise! After I took my hands off the wheel the drive got much smoother. As long as the drums were consistent with themselves everything else hovered over the groove and, instead of feeling disjointed as I feared, provided a pleasing push-and-pull.

To establish that groove, I tried to fuse the feel of two disparate sources. On one hand, I wanted to draw from the heavy-limbed and laid back feel of British rock drummers (I always picture an especially jowly English Bulldog behind the kit anytime I listen to say, Pink Floyd) and on the other hand, the snap and syncopation of a DJ Premier production. In the end, this became one of my favorite songs on the album to play.

Track 4: “Rancher’s Pride”

This was one of the songs that Oliver wrote during the Song-A-Day project in 2019. At the time, I got the sense that he thought it was a bit of a castoff, not worth finalizing for an album. Jack and I, on the other hand, lost our minds about how good it was. Eventually Oliver came over to our side and we started working it out in his basement. For the minute I heard this track I knew I wanted to try my best Phil Selway impression. Selway’s drumming is probably the single most overlooked part of Radiohead’s sound¹, but his light touch is crucial to the band’s success. If I could emulate that understated approach, I knew this tune would soar.

This is probably my favorite song to play from the album. It’s fast, but not loud. Keeping up that quick pace without getting too excited and overpowering the rest of the instruments is a fun balancing act. I also love how the drum part makes subtle changes to the groove in each section. Even if it’s a short song, it’s filled with details that keep the ear entertained even if the listener doesn’t realize it.

Track 5: “Death of Dog”

This was another song that had the drum part already pretty much locked in from the demo, so I don’t remember any real trouble with translating it to the kit. My only major contribution was the driving, “snare-on-every-quarter-note” groove and then switching to the ride for the open rock beat in the final chorus. One of the most satisfying breakthroughs that we made during the mixing process was cutting down the vocals to just Alenni Davis’s harmony in the final pre-chorus. It gets me hyped every time I hear it.

Honestly, I’m having a hard time writing about this tune because one of my lasting memories of Montana before she died was at a Bellows practice where we were feeling especially good about how we sounded while playing this song. I remember looking up from the drum kit and seeing everyone swaying in time to the beat and smiling at each other like we knew we were killing it. Because we were. Every time we’ve played the song since I’ve had that image cross my mind, if even for a second. It hurts, but I guess it needs to because I’d prefer the pang of memory to the void of forgetting.

Track 8: “Biggest Deposit of White Quartz”

The big bad epic rocker of the record. “Biggest Deposit” is built on a three section cycle that repeats six times. In order to make the song work, we had to make sure that each of those cycles felt distinct and helped move Oliver’s lyrics forward. The song is practically a personal essay in musical form, tracing the way a seemingly ridiculous new age idea of the white quartz beneath Asheville, North Carolina activating might provide an explanation, an order, a meaning, to personal tragedies, pop culture chaos, and political turmoil. I know that Oliver does not share my love for Pynchon, but this tune is the closest he’s gotten to writing his own The Crying of Lot 49.

Needless to say, I was psyched to pull this one off. What we settled on was a palindromic structure, where the first and last cycles would be Oliver solo, the 2nd and 5th would be restrained and tense, while the middle two cycles would be loud and aggressive. This format sussed out, the next step was making sure that each half of each pair felt just distinct enough to not wear out the listener. Cycle 2 is more sturdy than the stop-start style on cycle 5, for example. For cycle 3 we went with cymbal chokes and huge fills in between each hit. When we recorded the song Jack asked me from the control room to try as many different fills as I could think of. He didn’t have to ask twice. We then stitched together our favorites for each phrase on the final recording, I’m particularly proud of the Ben Koller-esque one that leads back into B section of the cycle. Finally for cycle 4 I went with a post-punk style tom groove. When we play this part live, Jack slides his bass part up and octave in a way that reminds me of our time in the trio version of Small Wonder in Chicago, IYKYK.

Track 11: “In A Ballet”

During practice I loved to tease Oliver about how this was his version of a Bond theme. I don’t know, something about this song just screams “European intrigue” to me. This might be the only Bellows song that I’ve indirectly contributed a lyric to, as “did dontuomo on the family” is a reference to an inside joke from the 2019 Bellows/Gabby’s World US tour that is waaaay too convoluted, and scene-politically volatile, to explain in this newsletter. Well, considering that the title “Deep Despair In Covington, KY” is a verbatim Oliver Kalb quote, I guess we’ll call it even.

This song is a great example of, when faced with two options, choosing to do both. Oliver’s original demo featured a tight, straight 8ths groove that threw in its snare and bass drum hits in the odd manner typical of drum parts written by guitarists. When Oliver brought the song into practice, he never showed us the original demo, so instead I came up with a completely different drum part using brushes. For the final recording, I played through the song both ways and we layered both on top of each other. Despite having no intention of the two parts working together, they compliment each other in really interesting ways. It helps of course that they’re played on two slightly different mediums. Drummers, do not ignore the brushes!

Track 12: “Admiration”

This is another song that remained pretty much the same from Oliver’s demos to the live arrangement. The cross stick accents that he programmed were not something that I’d ever think to do on my own, but they ended up being the defining feature of the song’s drum part. Let that be a lesson, even if we drummers can shake our head at the weird choices non-drummers make when writing parts for us, those same parts can help break us out of our routines and come up with new ideas.

I could say this about all of the songs mentioned in this letter, but it’s especially true of this one: I am way better at playing this song now than I was when I recorded it. I think my final take on “Admiration” was comparatively timid, like I was worried that I’d knock something over if I played a fill. If you catch Bellows live at any of the shows listed above, you will hear a more fleshed out version of the drum part. I guess this kind of Monday morning QB-ing is inevitable when you spend over a year playing with a piece of music after you’ve recorded it. Oh well!

Track 13: “Thumb in the Dam”

When “Thumb in the Dam” dropped a few weeks ago I mentioned being particularly proud of a precise moment on the track without being specific about which moment I was talking about. Time to spill the beans: I was referring to the transition from the bridge after the first chorus back into the verse groove. Time to spill further beans: that snappy transition was the product of two different takes stitched together. Turns out that I have no reason to be proud of that moment at all lol.

Luckily there’s plenty of other cool stuff going on this track. The very bridge whose exit-transition I was unearnedly feeling myself over sports the lone appearance of mallets on the record. Something about that instrumental bridge felt grand and orchestral in a Beatles-y way, so I busted out the mallets and gave it my best Ringo Starr. I also really like how the hi-hats only play quarter notes for the most part. Playing fewer notes at slow tempos and still groovin’ feels good in a way that perfectly balances out the joy of playing a lot of notes very quickly. Speaking of lots of notes, to build up to the song’s climax I tried my hand at a messy, off-the-grid, pseudo-jazz approach that I’m not sure if I nailed but fits the emotional tenor of the tune. This is another drum part that’s gotten better since the release of the album and will be better live.

That concludes our tour of my drum parts on Next of Kin. See you on the road, or next week for the next entry of Drumming Upstream.

1. I once read a blog post from former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy where he described Selway as Radiohead’s weakest link. Look, I’m probably more sympathetic to Dream Theater’s sound than most, but if you ever wanted a concise explanation for everything wrong with that band, Portnoy’s outright dismissal of Selway’s restrain on the kit probably works as well as any.