The Mad Science Behind Pretty & Nice’s Get Young

By P.Nick Curran

Pretty & Nice are the self-proclaimed horsemen of pop doom. But with the release oftheir first full length next month, the self-recorded, self-produced Get Young, something like the mad scientists of pop salvation might be more apt.

Get Young is a frenetic example of two songwriters, Holden Lewis and Jeremy Mendicino, with far too many ideas. The songs rip through structures with little regard for continuity, revisiting themes rather than returning to verses, creating intense crescendos through all manners of instrumentation and deep, multi-track layering. And with six months to record their album in their own all-analog studio, P&N had plenty of time to agonize over every little keyboard blip, every subtle vocoder hook that might not survive the live translation. But this is just what makes Get Young the catchy art-punk oeuvre that it is.

Pretty & Nice had an intense schedule of working various day jobs and coming home at night to record, sleep and repeat. Their lives became inseparable from the process, living what Lewis jokingly referred to as a guilt lifestyle. “If we were doing anything besides recording when we could be recording, it was sort of bitter sweet,” he said. “You couldn’t go anywhere and feel free. Every couple weeks we’d be like, fuck this shit I’m going out, go out for a half hour, then run home.”

“Recording had always been really separatefrom my life - but my room is above the studio. I have to walk through the studio to do my laundry,” added drummer Bobby Landry.

The dedication paid off - each listen revealsa new layer, like the tribal chants at the end of “Pixies” or the strings of bells on “Gypsy”(which Mendicino and Landry spent four hours recording, late into the night.) On “Piranha,” the album’s opener, abrasive guitar interludes cut between fluid segments ofverse, pounding the memory of each previous verse away, cleaning the palate and allowing the new pop burst to be something completely novel. The hooks are scattered but tight, the production polished but natural, all reflections of Mendicino’s recording philosophy.

“My mindset isn’t to get the song down, it’s not to know where we’re going; it’s to write a good song, then make a good recording,” he says. “It’s to deconstruct any pre-conceived notions of a song, then reconstructing, reorchestrating it with a bunch of goofy shit.” Mendicino has been building his studio since he was seven years old. At it’s inception, his studio consisted of some open reel tape decks and a 4-track recorder. Over the years he went to 8-track, to 16, to 24, back to 16, and now back to 24. His current tape machine, a Sony MCI, bought from a North Carolina studio, recorded Ryan Adams and Whiskeytown. Two of the tape reels P&N used to record Get Young came with old Big Punisher and Da Brat recordings. “When you’re going to record over them 200 times anyway, what does it matter that Big Pun layered ”Landry said.

Q: What is your secret studio weapon?

J: Trash - all of my favorite bits of what we typically
tend toward are bits that originate from $1 Keyboards
and $50 guitars.

Bobby: The things Jeremy uses to make the record sound good are things you would never want - things you would never think to put on a list of things to buy.

J: The record could have been done without a lot of
the elements we used, but I think the elements that
were most important were the trashy guitars and bad
speaker cabinets.

Q: How’d you get the super warm, fluid bass sound on “Piranhas”?

J: That was a keyboard bass and also a thumpin’
McCartney bass, doubled.

H: I got some keyboard bass on there.

J: Three basses at the end of the song, keyboard, bass
bass and pad bass. We used a realistic mg1, which was the first polyphonic moog.

Q: The guitars on “Pixies” sound like a clash
between late Of Montreal and early Queens of the Stone Age. What did you do to get that?

J: The main guitar was an early nineties Jaguar that
I converted to be a short-scale Jazzmaster - Jag with
Jazzmaster pickups, along with a ’61 SG Junior (Bob’s
only guitar and one of the sweetest in the house), a
dean 12-string and an acoustic 12 string.

H: For an album that we made a pact we wouldn’t play guitars on, there are a lot of guitar tracks.

J: For a record that was going to have very few tracks - from there to the concept of any guitars we do will be lined directly, they’ll sound like trash, then it was like,“OK, if we use speaker cabs, they are going to be really bad” and then 6 Months later, we’re ecording the last track for “Pixies” with a big rock ‘n’ roll sound.

Q: How did you do the drums? Did you get each song in one take?
(laughs all around)

B: We did pixies in one take, the very first one, and
we were like, “Well, that’d be great if we were doing
that type of record, now let’s go punch in all the little
things.” We spent 8 hours on “Hideaway Tokyo” one
day, then started over the next day and did it in an
hour and 15 minutes.

J: We never used top mics. All the snare is bottom mics,
gated. Not a lot of stereo, no stereo overheads ever. If
there was an overhead at all, it was a single - the idea
of an overhead mic on a drum-set bugs me innately. I’m prejudiced against the idea of putting mic above a drum set, where no one’s ears have ever been.

B: Our drums don’t sound like drums to begin with anyway.

-P. Nick Curran