A wonderful full-length album by Mr Pineapple. I'm on keys and BVs.
I joined the good ship Mr Pineapple in early 2025, having first witnessed them at a gig in late 2023 where I instantly appreciated their mix of well-executed rock, prog and general silliness. Since then, we've played a bunch of gigs and recorded and released an EP called 'Live In The Shed'. Alex (lead vox and guitar) is the principal songwriter of the group. My addition is mainly textural, rounding out the lean guitar-bass-drums sound with keyboard parts that fill up the gaps. This has allowed the band to move into some pretty epic-sounding territory, which was showcased on the EP mainly on the track Cheesecake. Keyboard-wise, I've tried to push a little further in that direction on this album.
As mentioned above, Alex is the group's writer and nearly all the songs are entirely his; the only exceptions being Juice Overture, which is lots of his riffs and themes from across the album glued together by me, and Barry Evans Shows Janine His New Car Horn, which is an adventurous group improvisation based on a riff Alex provided. As with the previous EP, Alex sent us demos of each song to learn, with any important parts on each instrument played in and the rest left for us to fill out as we saw fit. Some of the tracks had a prescribed part pretty much the whole way through, and others had no keys part whatsoever, which gave me plenty of room to run around in.
As I mentioned above, the main contribution I seek to make to a Pineapple song is textural, filling out spaces and hopefully setting off and enhancing the other parts nicely. Occasionally however I will pop my head up and play something a little more elaborate or foreground-y, if I reckon the music demands it. It's important to me not to overstep and impose my musical inclinations over the direction the song wants to go in, so I try to wait for places where I absolutely can't help but hear a part in my head where these isn't one elsewhere. There are a few such places on this album:
The demo came over with the ending epic Mellotron-style strings already on it, but no other keyboard parts. I was in Cornwall on holiday with my family at the time I first heard this, and I'd bought my laptop and MIDI controller along with me so I could get some practice in for an upcoming gig with another band I play with. I was therefore well-equipped to mess around with extra parts, and I think the change of scene helped my brain to work.
I'm such a sucker for big dramatic chords and long songs with sections, so the sound palette was immediately classic prog to go with the pre-existing Mellotron. I used a big polysynth key/pad sound straight out of Cheesecake, and a lead sound straight out of the '70s. The epic-sounding Em F# Bb chord progression in the opening section suited the big poly sound, but it repeats four times each time with no development. I figured something should appear once the pattern had established, which was the impetus for the little synth riff. It's the 'kids can be so cruel' melody from the end of the song wound back around to the start, in an attempt to retroactively develop the theme by putting it before itself. This notion was taken further by putting it in two separate places in the opening track of the album.
Then there's a big strumming and singing section in which keys felt obtrusive, so I joined the rhythm guitar part on uke, making my non-keys debut (I am not very good at the instrument so I predict very little uke will be forthcoming in the near future). This section eventually got some keys, mostly doing fills during the B section. In the transition from the strumming/singing section into the final uptempo part of the song, the synths from the opening come back quietly in a 'buckle up, here we bloody go' sort of way.
The ending section features the band riffing between D minor and Bb major for quite a while, and then continuing to do so when the vocals come in. To give the section more of a sense of building towards the vocals, I played 16th-note arpeggiated chords over the top: Dm over all the Dm bits, and then a progression of Dm, Am, F, Gm over the Bb bits. I reeeaaaally like the effect this has, increasing the tension until Alex comes in with his big vocal bits. The last full song on the album, No Replacing, had me feeling a little left out as everyone else is absolutely going for it in 10/8 while I'm holding down simple chords for full bars. A highly necessary part, but I felt like a freeloader. That's why my part at the end of The Little Billy Chronicles is so constantly busy- I want to play fast and difficult things too, damnit!
One of the first songs I learnt for the band when I joined, my immediate contribution was a weird siren over the 7-time riff, inspired by the DEVO song Peekaboo. As well as this I had an idea which would be re-used in Billy: adding an extra chord progression to the outro so it wasn't just static riffing on Em for ages. The additional chords build upwards, too: Em, F#m, G, A, Em, F#, G, A. I like going major on the F# the second time around, it adds a little more clashiness.
The other thing I thought would be great were funhouse screams, malevolent laughter and gleeful cackles during the first, slow common time section. During overdubs, Alex and I took turns in front of the vocal mic contributing witch cackles, supervillain laughter/proclamations, and ghostly moaning. It turns out they were indeed great. The extension of this idea was to add horrified screams to the fast section, which Alex found as a sample and which was set to be just audible in the mix, enough to be unnerving.
This song took me ages to work out parts for. The initial demo I was sent back when I joined the band had guitar, bass and drums and sounded very full already- anything I played seemed to be smothering the already present parts. I decided therefore to just go along with what was already there, and developed synth sounds that mimicked the guitar for both the intro riff and the verses. After the first chorus, the intro riff and a second fast section both repeat. I was again not planning on letting exactly the same thing happen twice in the song, so I tried a bunch of different parts over the top of the fast bit. Nothing worked for like a week, and it was coming up on band practice day when in desperation, I scrolled to a random cheesy brass preset patch and started playing jauntily over the track. And it kind of worked. No band members told me off for it so I kept it.
At the end of the song, the chorus repeats a few times. To give some growth to this section, I lifted the intro riff and played it under the chorus melody, just like in Billy (although the songs came the other way around chronologically, so Billy's actually just like Dog's Dead). This works well and has resulted in the most difficult bit of the album for me to play live, as I have to play moving patterns on two separate keyboards but can't look down at my hands as I'm also singing backing vocals. Joy of joys.
Lots of local, small, and generally up-and-coming bands really struggle to translate their masterful live performances into convincing studio tracks. Sometimes it's because of producers with different expectations of how the group should sound, sometimes it's bad equipment or technique, and sometimes it's the loss of musical mojo that comes with recording the instruments separately from one another, whether in different rooms or at different times. With our previous EP we managed to deftly sidestep many of these problems by recording (nearly) all the performances live together, employing one of our own (Colin, our wonderful bassist) as producer, and having a bunch of decent equipment and a good space to record with/in. So pleased were we with the result of this process that we opted to do the same for the album.
All the tracks were recorded as we play them live, with the amps in the control room with baffles around them for sound insulation, the keys direct-injected into the console, and the drums mic'd up nicely. One or two sections of the album retain this setup exactly, with no additional overdubs- Barry Evans, being a live improvisation, is the main one. Everything else then had the vocals re-recorded separately to eliminate drum bleed and enable us to pick from a few takes to get the best sound. The keys were all re-recorded as separate layers for ease of mixing on Colin's part, and some extra embellishments may have snuck in there. Additional overdubs included silly sounds such as duck calls and noise-boxes, alongside extra acoustic and electric rhythm guitars and some added harmonies and stage piano parts, where the synth's own sounds came up a little short of perfect. I also doubled and panned a few keys parts (vocoder in RIP the pig T-shirt, sampled guitar in Tilt The Cartridge) to thicken and/or sweeten them.
A fun recording challenge was when Alex wanted his long held notes in the song MISSINGNO to kind of meld into the background rather than just trail off. We tried applying gradually-increasing effects to the vocal takes while fading out the dry signal, but couldn't get what we wanted. I was reminded of the Pink Floyd song Sheep, where David Gilmour holds a long note while gradually being faded out as a synth playing the same note fades in, so that his voice appears to become synthetic and unnatural; the effect is awesome. I decided to attempt this effect on Alex's voice, using the oft-neglected pitch-tracking feature on my synth. I fed the vocal take into the line input and had it control a simple sawtooth wave. The tracking was a little dodgy but generally accurate. I added some effects to the synth's output in Logic Pro, and crossfaded it with the original vocal. Quite a weird effect in the end, but it seemed to work pretty well.
Performed once again by Colin, with revisions sent out to the rest of the band to listen to on as many sets of speakers as possible, and to provide feedback until we arrived at a good result. As this gradually took place, we continued to play gigs and developed the album cover, which features all of our handwriting on post-it notes showing the album's title. The pictures were mainly provided by Alex, with Colin providing a picture of his teenage self, and me providing a picture of a weird smiling man on an advert, and a picture of my family's dog Poppy (who is quite lovely underneath her Evil Eyebrows on the cover). A picture of my penguin profile picture from YouTube/SoundCloud/Reddit/Discord/etc. managed to find it's way on there too, which was neat.
Several samples collected by Alex are dotted throughout the album, inbetween tracks and occasionally in the middle of them. Some of the studio chatter picked up during the tracking sessions also made it in, with a 'waaaaaaaahhh!', a 'beautiful!', a 'please stop!' and a 'mellifluous!' from Alex, a 'Dear God...' from Colin, and a 'nah that's all wrong' from me. Combined with George's 'FUCK THEM!' from the previous EP, we're now mostly one-all on spoken interjections on recorded Pineapple music, trailing Alex with an impressive four.
We discussed putting together some music videos for the album at one point. Insidious Gomphidius was to have a video featuring us playing the song in an appropriate forest, with weird people dressed up as mushrooms and boogying (I would have liked to see this one). Evil Eyebrows was going to be a more elaborate affair, with Mr Pineapple himself (a pineapple with sunglasses on, often spotted on stage at our gigs) turning evil and chasing us down. After discussions during band practice generated a bunch of fun ideas, I attempted to formalise them into a storyboard for possible further production, but it never came to be.
The gear I used to play my parts on this album were the Roland JD-Xi synthesiser, the Roland RD-88 Stage Piano, a Swissonic EasyKey 49-key MIDI Controller, Colin's Korg Triton Taktile 49 (as a MIDI controller, only on Barry Evans), my Redwood tenor ukulele, an Atari Punk Console and Baby 8 Sequencer my brother got me for Christmas, a rubber chicken, my voice, and my 2015 MacBook Pro running Logic Pro X, for some processing. New to Mr Pineapple for this album are the uke and the APC+Sequencer.
I'm very pleased with the album in general. It's got strong work from everyone, and covers a nice chunk of the current Pineapple oeuvre. There's a good variety of songs quiet and loud, short and long, and there's not one weak point (Barry Evans doesn't count, it's different in an important way that I'll explain some other time). Alex's guitars sound absolutely badass on No Replacing, George's drumming in Billy is just incredible, Colin's basslines throughout the album are forever justifying a second listen, and I guess I'm there too (although I have to say I'm quite pleased with most of my backing vocals, and Juice Overture managed to do pretty much what I hoped it would)!
My least favourite thing about the album is my playing; technique-wise I feel as if I've let myself slip a bit, and consequently had a hard time re-tracking my parts. Even with the best takes in place (and I allowed myself a maximum of three per part to prevent perfectionism from delaying the whole album), my rhythm and general finger speed are far below where I'd like them to be, and I feel like I'm lagging behind my bandmates in terms of pure instrumental ability. As much as I quite like playing textural parts, it would be good to have the chops to play a squiddly solo once in a while. Still, a very rewarding experience and much yet to yearn for and to strive towards. We've already undertaken substantial work on composing the follow-up album as I write this, and it's shaping up to be a very fun one- onwards!
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