“Musically and lyrically, I think it’s the most complete thing we’ve done,” says Danny Young, as the guitar-slinging frontman assesses Dois Padres’ new glam-fuzz delinquent ditty album, ‘Swamp Jams’, in an exclusive track-by-track rundown for The Lutonian.
Drummer George Cowan agrees, saying: “We’ve done some good records in the past. I listened to ‘The Grind’ (the band’s second album) the other day and thought, ‘this is an underrated masterpiece’.
“But with this record it just fits together so well. It doesn’t feel not enough, or too much, it just feels bang on. And now it feels more exciting than back when we started because it really sound like us.”
Released today on new hometown record label VBAH Records – from the team behind the town’s only music and arts ‘zine, Vandalism Begins at Home – ‘Swamp Jams‘ has already punctuated a pandemic with three big party-rocking singles, taken from the eight-track album.
Released to rave reviews, lead-off belter ‘Know Better’, is pegged as “a swaggering sweat-soaked anthem for devil-may-care lunatics”.
Swamp Jams’ sophomore single, ‘The Hustle,’ steams in as a gas-guzzling, stick ‘em up song that “handbrake skids straight out of a 70s cop car chase intro a Reservoir Dogs boogie”.
And then, last month, the glam-punk fuzz-noir nothin’-but-trouble night-time stomper of ‘The City Never Sleeps’ teed up today’s exclusive release on Bandcamp, before a full blow-out on all your favourite streaming services from March 12.
Remarkably, the entire self-produced stomper was written in three days, practised only a handful of times and then recorded in a whirlwind six hours, to reinforce the Padres’ reputation as a telepathic twosome and “the biggest, brashest, most untouchable hombres around.”
And anyone that has witnessed these raucous live shows will know the ferocious energy that has seen them described as having “neat adrenaline for blood”.
All of that has been superbly captured and bottled on this album record that takes in influences from The Stooges, Led Zeppelin, The White Stripes, The Black Keys and Queens of the Stone Age, plus many more surprising twists and turns. Here, Young and Cowan talk about how they did it. But first, what of that album title, ‘Swamp Jams’?
“I remember after first playing ‘Ghost in the Midnight Hour’ (the album closer) we turned to each other and said, ‘Woah this sounds really swampy’,” said Young, adding: “There is swamp blues and swamp rock, but this album is not that sort of music, but we just started referring to all of the tracks as swamp jams.”
Cowan adds: “I think where it came together was Danny had a few beers and said, ‘we should get (Luton sign-writer and artist) Jorge Jacobs to do some artwork of a frog’. And that set the tone.”
DOIS PADRES’ ‘SWAMP JAMS’ – TRACK BY TRACK
- KNOW BETTER
George: It was the first song we wrote for this album and I think it’s the best that Danny’s ever written. Off the bat, I was so in on it. It was also the first song we recorded. I remember when Danny first played the riff I knew it was going to be brilliant. It’s just super catchy. It’s my alarm on my phone and it gets me out of bed every time.
Danny: It was very obvious that this would be the lead track and everything else had to come up to this mark. It did definitely influence everything else on ‘Swamp Jams’. Sometimes, if I’ve got a little riff, I’ll play it and try to get it into George’s subconscious. I had that one for a fair while but once he’d got the groove it was one of those songs where all the words just fell into place. We played it maybe three times through and we had it.
George: Are you going to tell me, we’ve had this song since we started the band and it’s taken this long to sink in?
Danny: Exactamundo! But there was a King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard song called ‘Mr Beat’, or I was listening to their ‘Gumboot Soup’ album it gave me the idea of ‘standing on the street’, doing something a bit shady and all of us dirty Dois Padres lot and all our dirty fans can relate to doing something a bit mischievous, and they know they should know better, but maybe it’s just fun to do anyway and get raucous.
George hitting the tubs behind it gave it a real badass feel and it didn’t really feel like writing a song, it was more like learning a song, like someone had given it to us. I think they imagery of standing on street corners and dying in the gutter is quite similar to ‘The Hustle’. I’m not sure where the delinquency vibe came from. I think that’s just me and George.
Most of the lyrics were written in about three days so I guess you get that bleed over of ideas, so I wouldn’t say ‘Swamp Jams’ is a concept album, but you definitely feel like there’s something that ties together, which I don’t think was an intentional thing. But all of the songs were so easily to write for, and fun. It was all so instinctive. There was no second guessing. Maybe there was something in the water or the phase of the moon!
George: It’s not a concept album in that there’s not an obvious theme, but somehow it feels like a book, when you go chapter to chapter and it evolves, but it’s all still linked up with the same characters.
2. SHALLOW GRAVE
Danny: That riff is years old and I remember sitting down with a bass in my living room and recording on my phone. I think a part of every song was on that recording. There was The Fratellis’ ‘Chelsea Dagger’ and it sounds like it’s from that era. It’s also a very Jack White-inspired song because he’s very riff heavy, but it’s got this punk ethos of cutting off the fat.
George: And it’s so catchy, you can’t help but move and that’s always a sign of a good song. I think Danny might have brought it in sounding a little bit punky, but I can never play the drums straight, in time, so it’s always swung a bit.
3. THE HUSTLE
Danny: I had the riff from playing on a bass, a freak thing that I’d made from spare parts. And then the drum beat we named-dropped Gene Krupa, this American jazz drummer.
George: “Yeah, ‘Sing, Sing Sing’. I listen to way too much jazz to be a rock drummer and I’m always nicking parts from drum tracks. This is one of the biggest rip-offs of that song that I’ve done. But we just jammed this out and came up with on the spot.
Danny: Yeah, we were fucking cookin’ and, like ‘Shallow Grave’ it doesn’t need much more than that. Grand Funk Railroad was an influence on me for this. There’s a wicked Youtube live of ‘Inside Looking Out’ from the late 60s.
It’s a ten-minute video and it’s one of those names I’d heard for ages, so I checked him out one night to see what everyone’s been talking about for decades. I’ve not heard or seen anything else which is as impressive as that live. Something about the energy of that song and the stabs on ‘The Hustle’ are very much influenced from that vibe.
4. COLD DEAD HANDS
George: My influence on this came from ‘Fool in the Rain’ by Led Zeppelin. Ever since I first heard that I’ve been amazed at how they can do this weird blues shuffle and then just stick a random samba section in the middle. I’ve just been obsessed with that song, it’s haunted me since I first heard it.
I’ve used half of it on ‘Dracula’s Tea Party’ (a single from previous Dois Padres album ‘The Grind’), but this is what’s going on underneath that. And I’m just ripping off this (Zeppelin drummer) John Bonham beat for the whole song.
There’s also this weird karate shout halfway through and we just left that in, even though it was me just trying to goof around and put Danny off on the first take. But it sounded good so it stayed in.
Danny: It’s a weird song, well, it’s two songs mashed together, which is a thing I like.
Zeppelin was a big push on this for me too, but there was a White Stripes influence as well, though more a live White Stripes influence. On the record, Jack and Meg can play one song in the same tempo, but live there were some songs that, all of a sudden, Meg’s dropped ten beats per minute. I don’t know what the tempo change is. It’s just total feel.
The chorus goes back to this fun, swaggering delinquency with the lyrics, that are like ‘The Hustle’. It’s just about a grifter, a con man on the run, always living out of his suitcase and getting washed in service stations, which is something I’m familiar with from hanging out in Baldock Service Station, drinking coffee and talking to people before I met George.
5. THE CITY NEVER SLEEPS
George: Danny was talking about The Stooges as an influence to this, but I went in for a more Dave Grohl, earlier Foo Fighters mode, where he was a bit angrier and better. It was another one, where we went all guns blazing. It didn’t initially stand out as a single, but as soon as I listened back, it worked. It’s a great single.
Danny: Yeah, it was that Dave Grohl/Queens of the Stone Age era. It’s motorcycle-punching-someone-in-face music.
6. NOT ENOUGH
George: It sounds like being stuck in a twister under the sea. It’s got a real Dead Weather vibe, with some strange section changes in it, compared to the rest of the album.
Danny: We wrote that on the day of recording. I know George likes Muse and it’s not that I dislike them. I like the big singles but I’ve never done a deep dive to be a huge fan. I remember stumbling across the riff and thinking that it had a Muse ‘Uprising’ feel. Also, I was listening to a lot of earlier Clutch and the Dead Weather.
I play a little Casio keyboard towards the end and that was a Dead Weather ‘Sea of Cowards’ era influence. It’s a spooky horror movie sound and it’s quite a sinister song. In terms of recording it, it just sounded huge at the time. I tried putting other instruments on it and nothing worked other than that keyboard. So, we kept it simple with bass and drums.
7. HURTIN’
Danny: This was a good example of just knowing when it’s good. For us, it’s a long song, and there’s a guitar solo towards the end and that was just George and I doing the telekinetic eye contact thing, that said, ’something’s going to happen now.’ I listen back to it and it just cuts through. There’s so much feedback at the end, but I remember finishing it and knowing that was the one. That was the take.
George: There’s a point on there, that I know I’ve fucked up and just stopped playing for a beat, but with Danny’s guitar solo, I was able to come back in and it worked. You can’t tell. No-one else will know.
Danny: I always thought that was absolute genius.
George: Thanks. But it’s a bit of an outlier, this song. ‘Not Enough’ and this one takes you out of your comfort zone a bit. But it was one take. And Danny was playing this plinky plonky thing.
Danny: It was knives and I was hitting them with a little hickory hammer, trying to get the Soundgarden ‘Spoonman’ aesthetic. The riff was like ’Sleep’ by Dragonaught. I remember hearing that for the first time and it just made me want to fight, it was just so heavy and sludgy. Once in a while we do that because we played a lot of gigs with Black Atlas, this great stoner, doom band.
They inspired us in upping the ante and spurring us on. But the other bands that influenced me there were Down, Corrosion of Conformity and Soundgarden. There’s an old Buddy Guy album too. He’s a blues guitarist and he’s got an album called ‘Sweet Tea’ and it has a song called ‘Baby Please Don’t Leave Me’. If you listen to ‘Hurtin’ you’ll realise that’s the vibe. Just a big old stanky blues number.
8. GHOST IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR
Danny: That is about me being nocturnal and developing a bad sleeping pattern. When the title came into my head I googled it and none of the results where anything that I’d usually listen to, watch or read. But I was up to 2am or 3am and I had all this energy but everyone else was asleep, so it was like I didn’t exist. I was the ghost and it was the midnight hour. It also sounds like it could be our radio show – ‘welcome to the Ghost in the Midnight Hour, with Dois Padres’.
George: This was another first take that we jammed out on the day of the recording session. I quite like the more delicate parts on this and, for me, it’s a great ending. The whole album is an absolute rager and this calms you down nicely enough so you can get on with your day. If people want to rage out constantly, that’s fine but it’s probably bad for their health.
In the past we’ve been really good at live stuff but it hasn’t necessary translated through to what we’ve recorded. The records have sounded great but they didn’t feel like the live stuff. But on this, we’ve nailed it.
Danny: Putting it as the album closer was a bit of a Black Keys feel, like ‘Gotta Get Away’ on ‘Turn Blue’ and, also, the last track on the latest album, ‘Let’s Rock’. For this album though, it’s so unexpected, the way it just falls away quite delicately and unravels. It’s a great ending.
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