VEP - Too Much Too Often

These days it is more or less exactly 10 years since I joined the then almost one year old band Vep. As told before, most of that time was spent without a guitarist.

At the time I joined, the band had no songs of their own, but played assorted coversongs. I wanted us to play our own material, so I brought some songs into the band, and rest of the band also started to write songs. Aud Sissel's second, and last, song to be introduced to the band was Too Much Too Often. Written on top of her bassline, she had the title ready (and thereby also the lyrics for the chorus), but left the writing of the lyrics of the verses to Karine (who also contributed to the band's repertoire of original songs with Delete as Required, which I'll return to in a later post).

The song being fairly bouncy, I figured I should do something different with the guitar than I usually did on my own "post-rock" like songs. Inspired by Jesus Lizard's fantastic Nub, I therefore tried, for the first and last time, to play with a slide (made of glass, not metal as JL's, which gives a bit softer effect). At rehearsals we usually started with half a minute of guitar feedback before the rest of the band kicked in - kind of like the noise heard at the end of this version. This song was one the funniest to play, and also one of those that sounded OK at rehearsals (unlike, say, No Offence).

The title is taken from a film by one of the most idiosyncratic movie-directors of the b-film circuit of the 1960s, Doris Wishman. Too Much Too Often is one of the "roughies" she made after the market for nudist camp movies and nudie-cuties had dried up. As usual with Wishman's movies, the title was much better than the actual film. It also makes a great song title (and song!). Perhaps somebody should make an album consisting entirely of songtitles from Wishman's oeuvre? The danger, of course, is that people would say that the song titles are much better than the songs...

Like the other VEP songs already posted here, the drums are programmed samples and the bass was meant to be preliminary (see why here). As time goes (now it is more than 7 years since work started on the demos), I guess it is more and more unlikely that the recordings will be finalized with proper bass and drums. Too bad, really.