Heights
heights cover

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licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 License

Jump to songs:

  1. Come Too Far
  2. We Could Do Anything
  3. You Make Me Worry
  4. Farewell Joel Dean
  5. PS
  6. Act of Violence
  7. The Face is That of an Angel
  8. Tired Eyes
  9. Welcome Home

This is our second record. It is called Heights. Were anyone to have heard it yet, they would most likely think it quite executive! Don't would you? We think that there is audible growth on this record in all respects: songwriting, musicianship, track length and bone density. If two aspects of At Dusk presented themselves alternately on The Summer of Promises Kept without ever really being fused -- the melodic indie popitude (e.g. Starman) vs. playful angular madness (e.g. Seventeen Fever Dreams) -- then we'd like to believe that Heights showcases the synthesis of those two At Dusks on every song. Contiguous made continuous.

Heights was recorded under the skillful, patient, and sometimes unintelligible, guidance of Chris Anderson in two discrete bursts. Having lived with us during The Summer of Promises Kept, Chris chose to move back to his hometown of Austin, TX as we began to write new material. Consequently, our recording time was largely dictated by his ability to get sufficient time and funds. We're bad at making decisions, so it's just as well that some temporal order was imposed on us. Might I suggest a game such as you might find in Highlights magazine? See if you can guess which songs were recorded together, and which set came when.

The first set of 5 tracks was recorded in a room in our practice space at NWRS in Portland's Northwest Industrial District in November 2003. The room in question is not the one we rent, but was vacant at the time and less regularly shaped. We set up in there for a weekend and knocked out what we'd written over the summer since pressing SoPK. The weather was cold and the sun absent, leading us to lovingly working-dub this series of tunes The Blizzard of Forgotten Hope in answer to our bygone youthful optimism.

Chris then departed, leaving us to mull over the basic tracks and strategize a bit how best to augment them. We'd never before had this kind of schedulish luxury. We would hole up in the practice space (our own room this time) for entire nights and knock out overdubs that, by and large, worked out pretty well and made it onto the final album. In some cases, we even went so far as to replace old parts with new ones -- a Wilsonian decadence we wouldn't have dreamed of but a year ago. Meanwhile, we spent our Spring '04 touring for the first time (a two-week jaunt around the Northwest), wroting the second set of Heights songs, completing our music thesis, and co-organizing the PDXPOP Now!

We lured Chris to Portland with hyper-compressed recordings of our new songs recorded on our camcorder, as well as with grossly-inflated legends of acquiring some spending money. Chris came for the two final weeks of May to accomplish a Herculean labor with us -- record basic tracks for our 4 new songs, record overdubs for them, record vocals for everything and mix the whole mess. Much sleep was not had. Much fun was, as Chris knows that putting killing in animals is what animals is liking. Figure that out, cuz we're 2/3 vegetarian.

As fate would have it, destiny made luck go our way, to our good fortune. That is to say, the good will of our friends and colleagues made this madness possible. Having acquired some new gear, we borrowed amazing monitors from our friend and master-man, Jon Cohrs, and semi-secretly recorded our basic tracks in the amazingly non-parallel band room at Gregory Heights Middle School on NE Portland, where our roommate and friend Ethan Chessin was marshalling the school band, the State of Oregon having failed to do so itself. We were well cared for by the after school staff -- SUNfolk, janitors, passing vagrants -- and knocked out a track a day. Then, somehow, in a fit of delirium, we recorded all our vocals, all of our overdubs and mixed the album over the course of the second week. Chris had so much fun, he's moving back! That's just the kind of fun time you can expect from us.

And that brings us to now: Friday, June 18 2004. We'll be turning over our Cohrsified master to Cravedog tomorrow, and we'll have 1,000 of these bad boys to figure out what to do with. Likely, we will try and sell them to you. We will bring them on tour with us across the nation. We shall send them to the far corners of the earth to be written about -- Khabarovsk, Ouagadougou, Yellow Knife, and The Sydney Opera House. We will find you. We hope you're not too sad about that.