Continued from page 24
it a day, and it will be great and it will feel
really good and it will closure.'' Gordon
continues. "But then after playing together
a little bit and realizing, yeah, we love
those old songs but we don't want to just
harp on the past, we want to actually move
forward. We both started writing songs
and it became clear that we weren't just
going to revisit the past. We were going to
make a new album."
That new album would become Ghost
Notes, the true and proper follow up to
Eight Arms to Hold You. Cuts like "Come
Clean Dark Thing" and "Eyes On You"
finds the group's pop tendencies front and
center, while unabashedly upfront album
opener "The Gospel According To Saint
Me" makes sure you know this is the same
group that named their first EP Blow It Out
Your Ass It's Veruca Salt. What's most
immediately apparent from listening to the
album, however, is just how much Veruca
Salt here sounds like, well, Veruca Fucking
Salt.
"It started just with me and Louise
going down in my basement at my old
house and we started playing guitar and
singing together and we immediately
couldn't believe how much we sounded
like Veruca Salt," Gordon states. "It was
like, 'Wait, they sound like the girls from
Veruca Salt.' I mean, really, our voices
together...it's that sound. And then certainly, when Steve and Jim joined back up
again and we all got into a room with amps
and drums and all that, then yeah, it
sounded like us."
"(The band) hadn't run its course when
we finished and we stopped short of seeing our third album through, and Nina and
I were working on new material for our
third record when we broke up for personal reasons. But creatively we weren't finished and certainly the same extends to the
guys (Shapiro and Lack)," Post explains.
"We were able to revisit the chemistry that
was really purely this band and that we
began in Chicago in the early '90s. We really felt natural. We just picked up naturally
where we left off and we were all eager to
do so."
Yet it's not a Veruca Salt record without
a hard earned power ballad, like the creeping, confessional "Empty Bottle," which
cuts as cold as the Chicago winters it looks
back on. The album centerpiece laments
"Love is over /it's over and you can't go
back/when you're older/you just keep
telling yourself that/the door is open
/even if it's just a tiny crack / you're up at
night and wondering."
"'Empty Bottle' is about that time and
what it was like being in a band in
Chicago," Gordon confesses. "Going out in
the freezing cold to see the band that you
love. In the case of that song the band
Hum…" "Or Red Red Meat," Post interjects. "Or Red Red Meat," Gordon affirms.
"Both going to see them play and a bitter
cold outside and just electric inside and
that just very Chicago feeling and that feeling of that time. So that song is specifically
about what it was like being in a band in
Chicago in the '90s."
Yet if there's one