Tigers and Robots

The video that we made for our first studio version of this song ensured that we would be “the Tigers and Robots Guys” for years to come and that we would never make anything intelligent, artistic or challenging. This new version of the song proves that we are still “The Tigers and Robots Guys.” How’s that for challenging?

Of course, this was a precedent that was set back in 2005.

Barbarian

This song is KMX’s white whale. It has been covered more times than any Beatles song, even though it has only been covered by him. It actually can’t be called a “cover” because KMX wrote it, but it’s so old that we’re not even sure about that anymore.

From the original 4-track cassette recording, to the demon-voiced version with 8-bit drum sounds and lots of guitar sweeps, to the version that The KMX Band did that was just like this but not as good ... it seems like KMX insisted on making more versions of this song than any human being asked for.

But there won't be a fifth. At least not until we do an acoustic or synth album. As far as "proper" versions go, Captain Nemo has finally married the white whale. Or however that book ends.

If The KMX Band was financially successful, this would be the point where Fool Circle would come off as a cash grab. While the previous versions of the previous three songs all contained at least one thing that KMX could nitpick ten years after the fact, the previous version of American Soul came out about as good as a song about political Internet message board protestors is going to come out.

Or so it would seem, until this lineup came together.

Granted, the same three people played on both versions, just in different roles. Maybe now is the time we can actually write about our current lineup, with relative newcomer DUDEMAN (est. 2016) on drums, Searbanh moving from drums to bass and Marc Farful moving from bass to just shouting things, sometimes in a shrill old lady voice. Which is what he did on the old recording, too. He just also played bass on it. Okay, we wrote about our lineup.

This cover of a KISS song that KISS still hasn’t written doesn’t sound exactly like KISS, but that’s just because Tommy Thayer refused to do a guest spot on it (we THINK we have his number).

While the song was co-written by KMX and Marx Farful, the line up for the original version consisted of KMX on lead vocals, KMX on guitar, KMX on bass, and KMX on keyboards pretending that they are a drum kit.

Now, he didn’t actually hit his keyboard like it was a drum kit or anything, he just used a drum setting on the keyboard. And while that approach worked for the entire Italicize album, this is just the kind of song where an actual drummer might help things.

Intended as part of a concept album that we released in the 80s, this fell apart because the original version didn’t come out until 2004.

It was also intended to be part of a rock opera. But as with Football Fat Ass and Chocolate Moose, that fell apart because the rock opera never made it past the first song. Still, that’s a pretty good writing exercise - plan an opera and you might get one full song. If you’re really lucky.

It was then intended to be part of Sacred Cheese, but then that fell apart during one of the five drummer shifts on that record (and when our negative budget ran out).

It was then intended to be on a re-release of Sacred Cheese, but that fell apart when we decided to scrap the re-release and instead put out a full-length album of new recordings of old songs. I think that plan didn't fall apart.

I think it’s about time that I started writing about what these songs are actually about. Which in this particular case is a bloody revolt in a nursing home. 

As another song that had a 15 year+ gap between the original demo and the current version, we had an excuse for never recording this one: it was written for two guitarists. And a singer with a higher pitch.

We realized that recording two different rhythm guitar parts is kind of “cheating” when we only have one guitarist, so we recorded four rhythm guitar parts instead. We also worked in about eight extra vocal parts. On the live stage, no one seems to have noticed the eleven missing parts yet, but “shhhhhh…. don’t tell anyone.”

With a 20-year gap between the original version and this version, nothing says “mid-life crisis” quite like The Steel Crusade. Well, maybe this song and “Peaches” by The Presidents of the United States of America.

Once The KMX Band kicked into high gear, there was always some talk about taking this song off of the shelf and removing the dust from it.  But we would always end up deciding to focus on newly-written songs instead of living in the past with music that was best left there. With that being the case, we decided to record this song along with an entire album of older songs instead of just leaving them in the past.

This is the oldest song on this record, with the absolutely horrible original version having been made in 1999. A rewritten version graced The KMX Band’s early live set, only to fall out amidst lineup changes just shy of the song's ten-year anniversary.

But there was always something unique about One and a Half Steps Down. Whereas the other songs that we brought back for this record had some amount of demand over the years, no one seemed to want this song to come back. It’s hard to describe, but it’s almost like it just wasn’t that good.

The new task then, was to make One and a Half Steps Down good. This required giving the song another rewrite and throwing out almost everything except for one part, but we don’t want to include any spoilers. I mean, if you actually made it this far into it, you are into some literal deep cuts. We might as well tell you some secrets, because we don’t think anyone else is still reading. As of this writing, we actually DON’T know how Searbanh’s name is going to be spelled [EDIT: The "h" now comes after the "n"]. It could be totally different than the way it was written in the last sentence. If we’re going to change our song arrangements, we might as well change member names. Hell, while we’re at it - we only change his name’s spelling because a certain band member effed it up on the back cover of the second record, so we have been playing “I meant to do that” for ten years and counting.

As this is our take on a song by the legendary Type O Negative - a band that meant a lot of things to a lot of people - we think it’s about time we started writing more about us. We could also write about things that aren’t relevant to anyone except for us.

Sometimes when you record a song, you know your band is special. That didn’t happen with the first version of Black Rubber Nose because it was recorded by KMX on a 4-track cassette machine before he even had a full band.

As a matter of fact, not a whole lot happened with this song at all until it was extensively rewritten and then redone with an actual band. Some will argue that we should have just done that the first time, but we’re not listening to those people. We’re listening to KMX, who is planning another “Barbarian” recording to celebrate the 15th anniversary of this album.