Wah Wah (album)
Wah Wah is the sixth studio album by the Manchester-based English indie rock band James. After the success of their fourth album, Seven, the band entered Real World Studios, Box, Wiltshire, to record their fifth album Laid in early 1993 with producer Brian Eno, with whom the group had longed to work. Prior to recording Laid, Eno observed the band's jam sessions at their Manchester rehearsal room, and considered these improvised pieces to be as important to the band's music as their eventually crafted songs. He requested to the group that whilst they were recording Laid, they would also concurrently record an album of their improvisations which Eno and, by Eno's request, second producer Markus Dravs would produce in a secondary studio in the Real World complex. Each composition started off with the band's improvisation being recorded, which Dravs would then edit, generally alone whilst James and Eno were recording Laid. Eno and Dravs would take a "promising" part of a recording and then mixed them only once. Tim Booth's desire to re-record some of his vocals caused friction in the studio.
Wah Wah consists of twenty-three tracks in total, and is often seen as the band's "experimental" and "jamming" companion to the "song"-centred Laid. Consequently it's their longest studio album to date with the band recording more than 300 songs for it. Ned Raggett said the album shares Laid's general focus towards an "evocative, restrained attractiveness and moody melancholy," but Wah Wah features more immediate numbers with full lyrics from Booth sung in his "fine voice", mixed with more open-ended instrumental or wordless vocal jams. The band intended to release Laid and Wah Wah at the same time, either as separate albums or as a double album, but hesitation from Fontana Records meant that Laid was released alone in October 1993 whilst Wah Wah was delayed until August 1994. In the intervening time, the only single from Wah Wah, "Jam J", was released in March 1994 as a double A-side with "Say Something" from Laid, reaching number 24 in the UK Singles Chart. When Wah Wah was eventually released, the band decided it would only be a limited edition available for one week, before only being available from mail order thereafter.
Critics were often divided in their reviews for Wah Wah, but were mostly positive. The Independent said that "a little bit of confusion is good for us all" whilst the NME called it "one of the few genuinely engaging dance albums around." Nonetheless, fans were more divided by the album, with the album's experimental bent meaning there was little to appeal to the more casual James fan. Retrospective assessment has been more positive, with Record Collector calling it a "landmark" album, whilst Allmusic noted that it was "one of the more uncommercial albums any band of its stature and its accompanying major label has had a hand in releasing." Select magazine named it the 45th best album of 1994 in their year-end critics poll. Wah Wah was remastered and re-released on clear heavyweight double vinyl in March 2015, alongside a remastered CD version in an expanded box set also containing a remastered edition of Laid.
Background and conception
James released their fourth studio album Seven in 1992 to critical and commercial acclaim. Lead single "Born of Frustration" became their biggest hit in the United States at the time, becoming a Top 5 hit on modern rock radio, and the band opened for Neil Young on the tour supporting his most recent album, Harvest Moon. The band spent the rest of the year touring before reconvening to begin work on their next album, Laid. The band's tour with Young had proven influential on the album, especially because Young requested they play acoustically, something James had never done outside of radio sessions. The band's new stripped down approach for the album was helped by its producer Brian Eno. Working with Eno was a career long dream for the band, who had been trying to work with Eno since their first album, Stutter ; the band had sent demos of the song that would feature on Stutter to Eno's management but the band did not hear a reply, and they had consistently tried to work with him since. In the early stages of writing Laid, Booth addressed a person letter to Eno with a cassette of demos, and was surprised when Eno phoned him back, agreeing to produce the album.Prior to the six-week recording sessions for Laid at Real World Studios, Box, Wiltshire, in early 1993, the band performed jam sessions at their Manchester rehearsal room in order to form songs. This was not unusual for the band; Booth commented in July 1994 that "every song ever created was spawned from improvisation," adding that "we'd go in a room and make a racket." For the first few years of the band's career, "from three hours of cacophony would come maybe two minutes of semi-coherence," which would ultimately "be the seed of which would attempt to repeat and refine and eventually reveal to the public." By the recording sessions at Real World, the band had become "more efficient" in their "method of extraction." All twelve songs eventually released on Laid had evolved from this process.
Brian Eno observed the band's jam sessions during the rehearsals, calling them "extraordinary pieces of music appearing out of nowhere". He considered these pieces of "raw material" to be as much a part of the band's work as the songs that would have eventually grown out of them. Thus, he suggested to the band that in addition to recording Laid, he would also record and produce the band's jam sessions during the same sessions for a separate album, so that the band would be recording two albums concurrently: Laid, the album of "structured" songs, and Wah Wah, the album of improvisations. Speaking about the idea, Eno commented in July 1993:
Recording
For the recording of Wah Wah, Eno enlisted the help of engineer Markus Dravs to work as a co-producer, "providing distraction" to the band inside a secondary studio inside the Real World Studios complex from the recording of Laid, which was being recorded in one of the complex's larger studios. Eno recalled in June 1993 that he wanted Dravs "to look at the improvisations and see what he could make of them" while he and James carried on recording Laid. Each improvisation started with the band recording a jam session improvisation, and then Eno or Dravs would then select a "promising" part of the improvised music and mix it, but with only one take on each mix to keep in the improvisation spirit. According to Annie Zaleski of The A.V. Club, each piece would be "whisked away" to Dravs "straightaway" for studio "tinkering" after the initial jamming process. Bassist Jim Glennie recalled that "it was a bit of a production line: We’d jam, those would go over to Markus to start properly messing about with. I think Brian was happy for us to be actively involved in that process, to try and keep it away from the main studio." Booth was then left to come up with lyrics, but many of the tracks ultimately remained instrumentals or had soundbites rather than coherent structured lyrics.Generally, the band improvised late at night and in very dim light, working on "huge" reels of tape, so that they, Eno and Dravs could play for over an hour without needing to change reels. According to Eno, "strange new worlds took shape out of bewildering deserts of confusion, consolidated, lived gloriously for a few minutes and then crumbled away." They never tried making anything twice: "once it had gone, we went somewhere else." Ben Fenner, who was engineering the sessions, "attentively and unobtrusively coped" with unpredictable instrument and level changes in near-total darkness, leaving the band and the producers to "wander around our new landscapes." Dravs generally worked on the material alone, improvising at the studio console, as James and Eno were busy recording Laid, but as Laid neared completion, the band and Eno spent more time in the "wild" studio where Wah Wah was being edited, where they worked long days, but there was "always enough going on to prevent any loss of momentum," and "things happened very quickly." Eno completed his mixes for the jams in a single afternoon, where he spent time trying to "get a little of each jam onto DAT because there was so much new work flying around that it was hard to remember it all." He had made 55 mixes that day and never mixed anything twice, not expecting to use these mixes for the final album, but he decided that this fast, impulsive way of working was "right in the spirit of the performances," and that the results, as he described them, "often make a cinematic, impressionistic counterpoint to the elaborate post-industrial drama of Markus' mixes." He commented that "they set each other off well: the combination feels like being at the edge of somewhere - where industry merges with landscape, metal with space, corrupted machinery with unsettled weather patterns, data-noise with insect chatter."
Three of the songs were written outside of the sessions, two prior to the sessions and one afterwards, although these songs are generally accepted to also be improvisations. "Pressure's On" in fact dated back to 1991, whilst "Maria", albeit in more conventional form, had been commonly played live by James since 1992, but failed to make the cut for Laid. However, "Tomorrow" was said to have been conceived at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios on the day Laid was released, when the band had some free time between playing a song into each show that day on BBC Radio 1. Ultimately, the recording sessions were not smooth; the band later told Stuart Maconie in 2000 for their authorised biography Folklore that the album caused disagreements, particularly over Booth's wish to re-record some of his vocals and over how to deal with the finished record. Booth remembers jamming "hundreds of songs that never saw the light of day" and guitarist Larry Gott suggests it might have been "as many as 340 tracks" recorded.