Umphrey's McGee | Band on a Mission

Aug 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           
 

HOW UMPHREY'S MCGEE RECORDED MANTIS, THEIR TIGHTLY ARRANGED PROG-ROCK OPUS

From left: Brendan Bayliss, Ryan Stasik, Joel Cummins, Andy Farag, Jake Cinninger and Kris Myers

Photo: Rich Markese

The multicolored lights swirl on the stage at the Nokia Theater in Manhattan as prog-rock jammers Umphrey's McGee glide through riff after riff, solo after solo, song after song — seemingly without effort. Fluid guitar and keyboard phrases roll off their fingers; drum and percussion fills punctuate; lyrics and harmonies layer on top: The 6-piece ensemble is in its element — playing live and improvising heavily.

But flash-back to Chicago a few months earlier, and you would have found the guys hard at work at I.V. Lab Studios, which is owned by a friend of the band, Manny Sanchez. There, they were carefully crafting their latest CD, Mantis (SCI Fidelity, 2009), a tightly structured, prog-rock-meets-pop album for which the precise arrangements were, in some ways, the antithesis of the band's heavily improvised live show (see Web Clip 1).

Bonus Material

Related Link: SCI Fidelity Records

Related Link: Electrical Audio

Related Link: I.V. Lab Site

Mantis is also a tour de force of the band's musicianship and songwriting, and, considering the source, has relatively few solos. Musically, it runs the gamut from melodic vocal passages (Beatles-influenced at times) to thrashing industrial riffs to tightly crafted compositions with multiple sections, clever segues, terse yet intense lead breaks and impeccable sound. After previous studio recordings that were sometimes, by necessity, hurried through, the band decided to really take their time with this one. In fact, the production of the CD took almost two years, albeit interrupted by many tour dates.

Master Plan

“We really wanted to walk in and know that we had time in the studio to create and that it wasn't like a rushed thing,” says lead guitarist Jake Cinninger. “And it wasn't songs that were played live previously. It was like, ‘Let's make up this whole entity of songs that sound like they should be on one disc together and almost kind of tell a story and feel kind of like one of those great prog-rock albums that we love.'”

“We didn't want there to be any filler,” adds Kevin Browning, the band's studio and live engineer, as well as the producer, along with the band, for Mantis. (Manny Sanchez is the co-producer.) Browning has been an integral part of the band since their founding at Notre Dame University in 1997. “We wanted it to be very well-thought-out from start to finish,” Browning says, “so we were very meticulous with the writing process and the editing.”

Cinninger adds that the idea for Mantis was for the band to take the next step as recording musicians — to leverage their experience. “We have more studio prowess than we had before, and studio confidence as a whole. All the way down to producing our vocals and getting more of a vocal performance rather than just, ‘Let's go in and lay the vocals down for the song.' No, let's see if we can go past the bar a bit and get an actual performance, using more of a producer-type mentality to get better results. It's more about being older and researching more and understanding the tools of the studio. When you twist that knob, what is it doing? You know and apply.”

Of course, having to sandwich their production schedule around 115 to 120 live shows a year was part of what made the recording of Mantis such a drawn-out affair. Still, the amount of hours actually spent in the studio was prodigious, especially when compared to some of the band's earlier recording experiences. “For our first real studio thing, we were in a barn for two weeks and slept there in sleeping bags under the console,” recalls keyboardist Joel Cummins. “We had two weeks to get the whole thing recorded, and then it was like, ‘Okay, now we mix it.' To be able to take that process out over the course of a couple of years, and say, ‘I really like the tone of how the kick drum sounds in this room, so why don't we go record some drum tracks over here?' ‘What kind of piano sound do you want for this?' A bunch of different options. So being able to really cater to exactly the vibe of a song or a section of music really helps develop those ideas.”

Adds Cinninger, “That's what we had time to do on Mantis — to really make sure every second counted and that there was no stone left unturned.”

Write on Target

Writing the songs for the CD was a fairly involved process. It was also unconventional in that the music was written and the tracks recorded for many of the songs before lead vocalist/guitarist Brendan Bayliss wrote any lyrics, much less put down his vocals. But the main impression I got from talking to a number of the bandmembers — including Cinninger, Cummins, Browning, percussionist Andy Farag and drummer Kris Myers — was that this project was one in which time was not a factor. The band was committed to taking as long as they needed to realize their artistic vision.

“It kind of starts with that brainstorming book idea,” says Cinninger of their songwriting process on Mantis, “and you've got rough draft 1, rough draft 2 and rough draft 3. And you know, over a year or two years of making just the musical bed — even before the lyrics are done — we went through like five or six different phases. It's kind of like taking away or trimming the fat to get at the core idea of the song. What's really popping out of this 10-minute segment. Let's whittle it down to what really counts. And that's what we had time to do on Mantis.”