#bodega disco

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Tapes, tapes, tapes! We're selling tapes! Selling tapes!

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Our cassette tapes from Really Rad Records are done and they look great! Buy them here: https://www.reallyradrecs.com/product/curse-league-bodega-disco/

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Here’s a video of us playing the entirety of “Counting Sheep” off Bodega Disco!

Thanks again to Brenna Kamppi (http://www.facebook.com/BrennaKamppiPhotography) for filming us!

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Review: Curse League Plus You Equals Us - Atwood Magazine

Curse League's "Bodega Disco" EP transports you to a world of exquisite jammy math rock that celebrates a journey into something new.

Connor Bush from Atwood Magazine wrote some really sweet things about our music and our Santa Barbara show!

http://atwoodmagazine.com/bodega-disco-curse-league-review/

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Thank you Aux Trader for including our song “Vencido” in episode #36 of your podcast series! You guys are doing really cool stuff over there. Keep up the great work!

21:21 for Curse League

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I’m a HUGE fan of Last Dinosaurs. Crazy right?! What’s a math rock fanboy doing listening to indie rock? Meh, we’ve all got pasts. Plus you gotta diversify! Anywho. A while back, those guys made a Facebook post (https://www.facebook.com/lastdinosaurs/videos/10153461747391413/) saying that they were going to release the demo version of every song off their sophomore album Wellness and I was super stoked to hear them. Writing music is so hard for me and it takes forever to do because everyone writes differently and sometimes I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Being able to get some insight on how other musicians write their songs is super cool to me.

So... I’m going to do the same thing for our EP, Bodega Disco. I’m pretty sure no one reads this blog, but in the off chance that someone cares about Curse League enough to make it this far into our archive these next few posts might be an interesting read for them.

Curse League’s writing process is kinda funky. We basically write all the guitar parts first, add some drums, and then Jake will write some vocal parts over certain sections that might have “room” for a vocal melody. The vocals will also dictate how many times we play each section in the final version of a song. We don’t really tab out our parts either, so I don’t know how to play all of Kai’s parts and he doesn’t know all of mine. Instead of tab or chords, we like to invent words or phrases to describe the guitar parts. These end up functioning as instructions for us. In the picture of Song 1 (Vencido) above, you can see that we’ll use circled numbers to remind ourselves how many times to play a given section. Kai and I both played classical piano growing up (like proper Asian kids) and our music teachers would probably shit a chicken if they saw our ghetto music notation. In some of the later posts, you’ll even see that some sections are named after the time signature that the riffs are in.

Okay. On to Vencido specifics. The Part 1 riff is in 22/8 and I came up with it back when Kai and I were still playing in our indie-pop project called Wild Wants (https://wildwants.bandcamp.com/). He came over to my apartment one day and we looped that section until Kai had an equally shreddy part. I still don’t remember where the 22 count came from. I was listening to a lot of Thermals back then and they do a lot of accented chords on offbeats. Jake must’ve had a fun time figuring out what to play for this :P

Part 2 uses the chord progression E, F#m, G#m, A, but I didn’t really want to play straight chords so I arpeggiated them. It was definitely inspired by twinkly/noodly bands like Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing. Kai’s part came from improvising while I looped this riff over and over. That happens a lot with our band. One of us will show a guitar riff to the other and we’ll just loop it until the other person writes an accompaniment. To avoid burning out on riffs, we have a soft rule called the “90 second” rule. Any material presented from one band member to the rest of the band must be 90+ seconds and have at least 2 well defined sections (e.g. verse, chorus, bridge, etc). We’ve found that this keeps us from jamming on one riff forever.

Part 3 was kind of a happy accident. Kai and I wrote our parts at the same time in a jam session where we were going back and forth between Amaj7 and Emaj7. Both of us like The Fall of Troy so there are a lot of pull-offs onto open strings in both guitar parts. I love writing riffs that I imagine Thomas Erak would play if he were happier and “major” sounding.

The call and response in both the demo and the blueprint got scrapped in the final version and we replaced it with a section that can be counted as 13/8 or two sections of 6/8 followed by 7/8. This made the transition into the “triplet feel” ending a little easier on the ears. Plus tapping is fun!

And the ending is... well the ending.

Chester

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Here’s the blueprint for Counting Sheep!

The tapping intro is a riff in F that I’ve had since college, maybe even earlier. I was listening to a ton of Maps & Atlases and at that point in time I was trying to pull off onto open strings at every opportunity. Christian Olson, guitarist for Female Fiends (https://femalefiends.bandcamp.com/) and our band BFF, told me that our song reminded him of Minus The Bear’s song “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse” which is pretty cool. I love MTB!

The “heavy” section was an excuse for me to turn on my Big Muff Pi fuzz pedal. That riff is heavily inspired (see what i did there?) by By the End of Tonight’s song Delaware is Depressing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgT_BMYtv5k). Jake also thinks it’s a pretty math rock thing to do in the middle of a song.

Ghost is a Kai riff and it’s got a 10/4 time signature. He’s had that riff since his days in Sibling Rivalry (https://siblingrivalryband.bandcamp.com/). Jake played in that band too, but on guitar. What’s different between the demo and the final version is that Kai added a 5/4 section to play between the ghost riffs. I suggested that we play the ghost riff shifted up 5 frets because Tera Melos does something similar in their song Sunburn and I had that song on repeat that entire week. I suggested the ooooooooh-bop-bop’s as a vocal part because Hanson is one of my guilty pleasures and their song MMMBop is awesome.

Trans got cut from the final version. We decided it didn’t vibe with the rest of the song.

On the demo, after we play the second “heavy” section, we go into a part that Jake called “the western.” because it felt like it could be in a wild western movie. This section also got cut from the final version. Instead of the western section, we took a cue from Rage Against The Machine and went with some power chords on F# ending it with “I am the postman.” The postman lyric is a actually reference to the Presidents of the United States’ song “Some Postman” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdM5ucUCUa8). Kai and Jake were really stoked on sneaking that into our song!

The ending that you hear on both the demo and the EP is a sweep picking riff that I used to play as a practice exercise at home. I think it’s funny hearing it on the recording because it’s such an old riff. I have been playing it for many years now. Remember, if you want to be metal then you gotta know how to do some sweeping!

Chester