“I Still Feel Cold” is the newest iteration of California gritty post punk / hardcore band VULTURES UNITED. After years of touring and gaining a steady following in the US West Coast and the UK, the band decided to hit the refresh button, releasing a new intricate double album with mentorship from Paul Miner from Buzzbomb Studios. The 2-part offering is both versatile and hard hitting tapping into elements of various moods, and it serves an engrossing spectacle from beginning to end. We’re very excited to share our exclusive stream of the full record that drops today via Outsider Art, Black Numbers and Red Flag Records.
Photo by Caprice Castano / Strong Man Films.
“I STILL FEEL COLD is us wanting to try some different things sonically and stylistically but not wanting to commit a whole record to it. So instead we opted to just write a double album where half the record is more straight forward (subtitled “Memory Loss”) and the other half (subtitled “Adulthood”) is us stretching a bit sound wise. It’s all a step forward from past releases but you’ll hear a difference between both parts of the album.
Double albums usually never work out. Assholes will always say “If I can make 1 album out of so and so’s double album it would be a perfect album.” Most of the time that’s true. And that’s fine. People are gonna like 1 disc more than the other in most cases. That was reason enough to make 2 albums on our end. You might like the straight forward stuff. You might like the more post-punk weirder stuff. Or best case scenario you’ll like both…..or hate both. It had been 4 or 5 years since we wrote and recorded new material so we had a lot of music to get off our chests and a lot of things we wanted to talk about in these songs. We can make another double album about how difficult it was to get this record together. We won’t. But we definitely could. Almost everything about it, from the writing, the recording, the post production drama within the band, just everything, was very difficult. But it’s finished and we think it was all worth it.
Asked about the content of the record, the band commented:
There’s 30 songs and although a few are sort of about the same thing in ways, the subject matter is kind of all over the place. Songs range from working two jobs and feeling run down, to insomnia, relationships with both friends and relationships with maybe a partner, police violence, inner band turmoil and a couple about this actual band and what it means to me. Early on in the writing, we knew we were going to do 30 songs so I wrote about things that came to mind. Some of them as simple as diet or about my dog passing away and some even as broad as religion or about having guilt about a certain thing.
They further explained:
We recorded the album with Paul Miner over at Buzzbomb Studios in Orange, California. Besides our demo, we’ve only ever recorded with Paul. Since this 30 song monster was intimidating and just a huge task, Paul was the right guy to have on our side to help us get everything down and made just the way we wanted it. It comes with experience, but after every recording you almost always have a regret or 2 about how something came out. Or you forgot to do something on a song or was rushed to do a certain thing. With this, that didn’t happen. Or if we did forget or were unsure about something, we’d go back and fix it (and just pay whatever studio time it took to fix it.)
There’s a version of “She Never Sleeps“, one of the songs off the new record that was recorded at the wrong speed. Totally our fault. But we noticed it after we recorded all the instruments and even vocals. I had such a hard time singing the chorus and couldn’t figure out why. The demos all sounded great, etc. And I can’t remember how, but we figured out that the speed was off, particularly in the chorus after the fact. We had slowed down the song in the studio somehow. Paul of course recommends always to use a metronome when recording drums so these mistakes don’t happen but for a few songs, we didn’t. And the price we paid was we had to book a separate recording date and re-record the whole song. I’m sure Paul was annoyed. We were. But the song came out the way it was supposed to in the end.
Our thought with this record because it’s so massive in total songs and sound, that if something’s not right, just go back and fix it. That played a huge part in why the recording process was difficult and it definitely put a strain on the band while in the studio. But it’s one of those things that now that we’re out of it, it was worth it. The recording’s done, we feel like all the negative stuff didn’t happen in vein. We’re just very proud to be done with the record and anxious for people to hear it.
