Dark Hollow Bottling Company
Dark Hollow Bottling Company (DHBC) is no stranger at Acadia, between doing sessions with DHBC in addition to everyone’s side projects both current and old (Battery Steele, Peep Show, Lost Cause Desparados, GK and the Right of Way…) We’ve grown quite fond of seeing Greg Klein, Riley Shryock, Jim White, Nick Scala, and Brian Durkin around the studio.
GK preparing to add vocals
By all accounts this band is a string band but…. at the same time they are so far removed from the rest of the string band flock. Most of these guys have come from super diverse musical backgrounds, Pop punk, Heavy Rock, Pop, you name it. I like to think everyone got sick of lugging massive amounts of gear from show to show and hung it up for acoustic instruments and one mic. You can here it in their material and individual approaches to their instruments.
Desperate Neon is DHBC’s third full length album tracked and mixed at Acadia. Most if not all of this record was recorded live, minus vocals. We all wanted to take a much more stripped down approach to this record, which was a departure from the last record (American Ghosts) where we let the songs dictate the production. This was a very deliberate choice to represent DHBC as one might see them during a live show. We still did slip in a little production but not to the extent that it walked on the live-feel of the performance.
I personally have a number of tunes that I really like on the record. Brian’s song Border town is an epic story about moving to Mexico and getting caught in a web of crazy drug-doings. Nick’s tune called Naming Scars is a great song about life, love, and self-acknowledgment, plus it includes the secret DHBC weapon that has made it on all the records (a cardboard box!). Of course, another favorite is the title cut–Greg’s song Desperate Neon–which is about Las Vegas. Here’s a little bit from his perspective about the track:
““I’m really happy with how Neon came out. Todd had the idea of not only capturing my vocals clean but to run a separate mic into a small amp to capture some distortion. The result wasn’t something I was initially going for, but it really added to the mood of the tune. Todd also spend some time trying to scratch down the side of a cymbal to capture the kind of tension achieved with fingers down a chalkboard. It sounds like something you wouldn’t want to put on your song but carefully placed in the mixed it really adds tension. The end result far exceeded what we were aiming for and contributed to the naming of the album.””
Be sure to follow them on Facebook to stay current with upcoming shows, and check out their new album Desperate Neon, released September 16th at Blue.