2.09.2009

B.O.B.O'B (BOMBS OVER BRENDAN O'BRIEN)




Famous record producers are kinda like fashion designers: occasionally worthy of acclaim, just as often merely the recipients of good luck and fortuitous timing. The opposite seems to be true of Brendan O'Brien, who, though currently omnipresent in the big-budget recording circle (most recently Aerosmith YAY!), spent the '90s suffering guilt by association thanks to his credit on every single Stone Temple Pilots record. That's all changed, as guitarist Joe Perry tells ABC ePrep:
We're real excited about it, we've wanted to work with O'Brien for a long time. [We're] hoping to get back to our roots by doing it more like we used to do the old records, which is the band playing live in the studio.
Yep it's 2009 and O'Brien's the man for the job of bringing the headstrong (usually rightly so) Steven Tyler and Aerosmith back from the grossly overproduced and overworked albums Just Push Play and Nine Lives. To wit: His triumphs amid unfriendly conditions include the only Bruce Springsteen album to have a song I like ever since the dawn of time ("Lonesome Day" from The Rising), a Korn album full of (gasp) well-arranged songs (Issues), and AC/DC's Black Ice, which, despite being an AC/DC record, fairly crackles from the speakers. And of course no circumstances could be as trying as the attempt to draw an album's worth of vocals out of STP's Scott Weiland. And while everybody everywhere is excited as fuck for the new Mastodon, there've been endeavors too hopeless for even O'Brien (Velvet Revolver, Train, The Offspring), and I'm gonna go ahead and assume crash position for his pairing with Killswitch Engage. 


No comments: