Nothing Is Cohesive, certainly the band’s most critically acclaimed release so far , stands out for several reasons. The album was recorded in the band’s garage by the band for no other reason than that they were between albums and wanted to make music together. They funded it, engineered it, and produced it themselves. You can hear the band’s influences through the filter of their own unique sound more clearly on this one because the CD was not recorded with wide commercial appeal in mind, but just five guys in a garage jamming together and loving it. You hear the Beatles, BRMC, Queen, Bowie, Roxy Music, U2, Radiohead, the Strokes, whatever the band happened to be listening to that summer, all mashed together and filtered through Ed Hale‘s unmistakable vocals and the insanely creative guitar and keyboard work of Fernando Perdomo and the other members.

The way the album was put together was organic and spontaneous. Someone would come in with a riff or a lyric or a song idea and the band would start jamming on it in guitarist Perdomo’s garage studio or in Hale’s rehearsal room. And then they would record it as a band. Any time they wished, each member could then add whatever they wanted to to each song as they saw fit.

The first song to be tracked was I Wanna Know Ya. Perdomo came up with the song’s main riff and the band attacked it mercilessly turning it into one of the most raw and powerful rock songs the band has ever put to tape. Hale sang “Now that I’ve slept with you/ what more can I do?” referring to the band’s prior Sleep With You CD. Dummy vocals were then tracked without any lyrics being written, where Hale just mumbles gibberish throughout the rest of the verses. When the time came to redo the final vocals for the song, the band agreed that the vocals were just so good and pure on that first dummy take, that rather than try to re-sing them, they should just remain as is. This explains why besides an occasional audible word or two there aren’t any real lyrics on this song.

Somebody Kill the DJ was a theme that Hale had been tossing about for a few months about the state of the Miami music scene – considering initially to make a documentary film about it – referring to the almost complete decline of the rock music scene in the city due to the replacement by dance clubs with DJs spinning records instead of live venues for bands to play. The band wrote the song together in the studio and recorded it that same night. At the last minute they decided to change the bridge of the song to 7/8 time from the 4/4 that the rest of the song is in, which adds to the song’s unique sound and feel. Although at first considered a statement about the current state of radio, the song actually refers to dance clubs. “I think we’re all just pretty fucking sick of losing work to DJs spinning records. If you’re in a band down there, that’s the scene now,” commented Hale.

The song Caetano was the moment the band recalls they knew they were reaching a new level both in songwriting, and production and arrangement. Hale had come in with the song finished, performing it for the band in a peculiar open G tuning he had been using. Featuring the lyric “man you are the only man I’d make love to/I swear it” in both choruses, at first the band urged him to change the lyrics. In the end a compromise was reached and this lyric was only used in one of the choruses. The band tracked it and went home. After everyone had left, Perdomo stayed up all night with the track, added six guitar tracks, a sitar track, three out of tune cellos, and keyboards. When the band returned the next day they couldn’t believe what they heard. “What Fernando did to that song blew my mind,” recalls keyboardist Jon Rose , who then added his signature piano and more string orchestration to make the song what many consider the highlight of the album.

The controversy over the anthemic fade out lyrics at the end of the song is that they are in either Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian. The reality is that they intermittently switch between all three languages. “Everyone said that since the song was about Caetano Veloso and that he was from Brasil, then those lyrics should be in Portuguese, but that’s not what Caetano is all about. He never would have done that. It would have been too predictable. So the only way to make that work was to incorporate all three,” said Hale about the origin of the idea.

The song Tomorrow is actually an old often unnoticed album track from Wildlife, the 1972 Paul McCartney & Wings release. It was a favorite of the guys in the band. They amped it up a bit to bring it into the 21 st century and had been performing the song live for several months. They added their own intro to the song, Hale singing the idea he had for the melody to the band as pianist Jon Rose eared out the chords underneath. They recorded twenty-one different takes to it with various melodies and take seven was kept as the final.

The song Cleopatra Ecstasy was actually a song entitled Crazy Paving off of the first solo album by bassist Roger Houdaille, Ginger, Baby . Hale loved the song but couldn’t make sense of the lyrics. When he asked Houdaille what the song was about, the bassist responded “I don’t really know.” Hale asked if he could rewrite the lyrics and have the band re-record the song for their new album that by now they realized they were making. Interestingly, there was no real album intended initially. The band was between albums, still coming off of Sleep With You, and between tours; a European tour was in the works and they knew any week they would be flying out to London for this tour. But the excitement of what they were hearing from the rough tracks every night were enough to make them keep showing up everyday to see what else they would come up with. So they just kept recording everyday into an old PC using ProTools and whatever mics each of them brought from their home studios. The band members would take turns engineering the sessions depending on who was playing what at the time.

All This is Beginning to Feel Like an Ending was originally a poem that the band’s new drummer Bill Sommer had written. He gave it to Hale who went home and turned it into a song. The band tried for hours to record it but Sommer was too emotionally attached to the poem to cut a keepable drum track for it. When the band left the studio that night, Perdomo sat behind the drums, Hale engineered, and Perdomo ended up performing the drum track on the song.

“Ed just kept saying ‘play it like the fucking Beach Boys’ all night to Bill, and everyone was getting really frustrated because we tried it for like three hours and we were tired and sick of the song by then, but I think Bill was too shocked by the fact that his poem that was very emotional for him was just being sung over and over all night as we tried to record it. I think it was too personal for him. Fernando got it in one take after everyone left,” says Houdaille. “It was obvious what the song needed and Fernando just nailed it.”

The album’s closer, If Your Baby Could was a song that Hale had written for a friend who had recently lost a baby during childbirth. He came in to record the song and Perdomo offered up his beatup old Gibson Hummingbird which sounded perfect for it. At the last minute Perdomo recommended that Hale record the song live by himself without the band, and that he go outside and record it with one microphone picking up both the guitar and the vocals. “Ed’s not used to recording both guitar and vocals at the same time, so at first he was like ‘no way man no way, why are we doing this? it’ll never work!’ But he got it in a few takes and it sounds perfect for what it is,” says Perdomo. That is why you can hear cars passing by and horns honking and birds chirping in the background throughout the song.

The Nothing Is Cohesive album also features several experimental instrumental tracks. The album opener and the title cut at the end of the CD were actually outtakes from the Sleep With You sessions that producer Fred Freeman wouldn’t let on that album. Track 11 on the CD, actually the fade out of the song Cleopatra Ecstasy is untitled; a noisy and chaotic two and a half minutes of CD skipping sounds and guitar feedback and squelching.

Perdomo had recorded his guitar tracks for the song Revolution In Me laying on his back on a couch because he was drunk at the time. Ed was engineering the session, and instead of dissuading Perdomo from the noisemaking, he encouraged him. “Just do whatever the hell you want to man,” Hale would tell him. And he recorded it, track after track. “Fern had his amp all the way up and he was wasted and he was laying there slamming the guitar into the couch and against the wall. It sounded unbelievably good.” He then layered all the feedback tracks together, and then overdubbed various oddities he had recorded on a mini-tape recorder in Europe that summer. The rest of the band saw no relevance in two and half of minutes of noise in the center of what was turning into their finest recorded work to date. “Ed loves that kind of shit,” says keyboardist Allan Gabay . “If he could have it his way, the whole album would sound like that. O.k. so fine, take your two minutes and make your noise and get it out of your system so we can make some music,” he laughs.

In the new Journey of Dreams documentary Everything Is Cohesive, Hale speaks about Nothing Is Cohesive: “There was no agenda when we made this album. Rise and Shine was a concept album, you know, let’s try to mix world-music and pop and funk and rock. And Sleep With You had a very definite agenda, like ‘you’re a rock band. why don’t you make a really commercial rock album?’ That was only partially our agenda. But with Nothing Is Cohesive we just went in and recorded whatever we wanted to because we wanted to. Every guy just did what he wanted to because he was feeling it. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever been a part of so far.”

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