Alright alright alright… make sure you’re standing far far away from your aul one’s finest China before you give Touch Excellent’s latest track a go. You have been warned.
At one minute and eight seconds long this track is a burst of exhilarating energy that is impossible to ignore.
It’s the type of track that brings me back to 2010 when I’d be glued to the TV screen trying to connect the letters S.K.A.T.E in my favourite PS2 game Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4! Trust me, if you know… you know!
This is a track you have to check out!
Check out what Touch Excellent had to say about Record below!
The collective words of Touch Excellent for Voidmagazines All Rights Reserved © Void Magazines
Modern medicine is incredible. However, it’s impossible for any one person to understand every disease, test and treatment. This leaves us at the mercy of the medical system. You have to believe that every doctor knows exactly what to do. Your autonomy is limited. The system works a lot of the time, but can cause harm. This adds a layer of tension to the experience if you think about it too much. I thought about it too much.
The song itself describes, in very loose terms, the experience of being in a hospital, going under anaesthetic, then waking up groggy and unable to move. At all points, the language and imagery is totally submissive to the other party (“You’re the boss/You are right/I am wrong”).
This is our first studio single, and we wanted to make sure that this track has the energy that the audience experiences when we play the song live. We recorded at Beardfire Studios, who also mixed and mastered the track. They really made all the components sound great while keeping that spirit of the song as it’s played live.
The composition of the song is very classic punk – short, loud, fast, 2 chords! The lyrics are sang in triplets. The effect is frantic, like racing thoughts or a fast heartbeat. The mini-choruses (“I’m falling/Eyes closing…Shock absorbing/Scars forming”) are these high clear notes, which contrast with the verses like a cold bucket of water.
Our drummer Amber does amazing work on this track, it’s 180 BPM and she kills it. Ló, our guitarist, got this really great overdrive sound on the guitar. The distorted higher frequencies evoke standing in a hospital while different machines beep in every room. The bass really just follows the guitar to create that massive sound, but vocally this is a really fun song to perform. As well as those mini-choruses, at the end of this song I repeat this 3-note semitonal riff in alternating keys for 16 bars. It’s not what you’d expect at the end of this track, but that helps capture the tension I want to communicate with Record. It channels the energy of this song, and these feelings that are hard to verbalise, into this controlled, powerful sound.
As always, there is more to explore in the void!
