The Dawn Collective

Drum Media reviewed our album today…I think they said some nice things, but you can decide for yourself:

The Dawn Collective
Save A Place For Us
Green / MGM

The cover of The Dawn Collective’s Save A Place For Us draws you in and lets you ignore the old “can’t judge a book (or record) by its cover”. It shows a cluster of trees growing on a bleak hill, shot on grainy film with an almost sepia tone. It’s both unsettling and beautiful, yet strangely hopeful. The music within matches these impressions.

The music, as the press guff notes, is hard to categorise. At its core it’s indie-folk, but there are flourishes of traditional Eastern European music, splashes of jazz and streaks of progressive rock. A Russian Trilogy is bombastic, galloping and soaring like Muse. Eat, Drink, For Tomorrow We Die is a gravely singalong and A Handful Of Moments is a pleasantly off-beat country dirge, while Stop This Worry is a raucous, hysterical alternative rock track that unexpectedly veers into a lovely bridge before crashing violently into a brass section.

Producers Tim Whitten and Tony Dupé have done an exceptional job, particularly Whitten. The album has an epic, expansive feel to it. The crescendo of penultimate track The Art Of Longevity is thrilling, as strings shriek over a beat that sounds like the thundering hooves of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Save A Place For Us is not an easy album. It languished in the stereo for weeks before I really understood or even liked it. But save a place for The Dawn Collective on your album shelf. With time, this release proves itself to be a grand and glorious piece of dark, orchestral folk.

Liam Casey
Drum Media Issue 932 - November 18th 2008 

Does anyone else feel that there is some kind of cosmic coincidence that their favourite tracks on some of their favourite albums tend to be 3, 6 or 9? Some people have that slow burning track 7 that becomes the highlight. For many, all they need is track 1 and 2 and they have had their fix. On a subconscious level, there must be a natural energy drawing bands to track their albums the way they do. The High Fidelity generation will swear that there is only one way to arrange the track list, and for those who are ‘background’ listeners- track lists are obsolete.

I have a new favourite album and my favourite tracks are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10! BEHOLD! Our debut album Save A Place For Us will hit stores on Saturday the 20th of September (tomorrow!) and you are now able to have a sneaky preview of the track list ahead of time. Oooooh, don’t you feel special!

Save A Place For Us – The Dawn Collective

1. All Those Pigs And Enemies
2. A Russian Trilogy
3. Ghosts Shod In Steel Shoes
4. Eat, Drink, For Tomorrow We Die
5. A Handful Of Moments
6. Numbers Are The New Alphabet
7. Stop This Worry
8. Shadow Friend
9. The Art Of Longevity
10. Hold Your Breath

It has taken some time to gather these songs together and think about them in the context of an album for release. The way you perform songs live can be very different to the way they communicate through people’s stereos, so we wanted to take the time to really work through this, but not weigh ourselves down with over analysis. What we needed was a simple and effective way to tell a good couple of stories.

When we started tracking the album over a year ago, we all felt that All Those Pigs And Enemies would be a great opener. The ambience which stirs into the growing intensity felt perfect to use as an introduction to our sound. The lyrics seemed to start an unsettled story that would float and swoop through the rest of the album. Great! Track 1 was locked in. Where to next? Well, this was the hard part…

As individual musicians and contributors, we have all grown to love each song for different reasons, so the natural flow of the album was quite a task. In the same way we were happy with the position of track 1, we felt that the song The Art Of Longevity - the climactic coda of our live sets - would be a great way to bring the album to a close. In the end, we felt the humble Hold Your Breath would be the perfect acoustic sign off.

The bulk of the album changed quite a bit and after playing way too much switcharoo, we contacted one of the album’s producers, Tim Whitten, to give us his unbiased and educated opinion. It was strange hearing an outsider’s ideas on the flow of the band’s material. In a way, I felt like I was finally listening to the album with fresh ears, receiving my first pang of excitement! The curse of being in a band and writing the music you love, is that you often see too much of the process to feel the magic of a first listening. Honestly, the fresh track listing got me pretty close to the magic and it felt natural to lock it in.

So, here we are - a day before it’s finally released. We all feel very happy and we hope you will be happy too! Dynamically, there is a lot to digest. For those who like to whack on headphones in the quiet of their rooms trying to hear the recording space and its natural quirks - you will find this recording a treat. There are lots of awkwardly beautiful quirks hidden throughout the frequencies. You will learn a lot about us too! For example: one of us can tap dance; we like to mic up badminton games; we like to yell and smash metal drums with thongs and bricks; and we can create quite the make shift kitchen percussion section.

Thank you all for your support over the years, we sincerely hope you enjoy this album and we will see you soon!

In this age of mp3s, do people really care about a CD’s artwork and packaging? Well I certainly do, and having spent the last week finishing off the design for our album, I hope that others feel the same. We’ve been throwing ideas around for the last few months, trying to work out what we’d like, and what we can afford. Sadly the burgopak (I’m serious, it’s really called that) was out of our reach, but we decided to splurge a little and go for a six panel digipak.

Of course packaging is just one part, it’s also about what you put on it. We were quite drawn to the idea of an image that would wrap right around all the panels of the case, though what that image might be wasn’t quite clear to us. There was however a consensus that photography was the way to go, and after the success of our last band photos we thought our friend Lucky could be right for the job, and thankfully he was happy to help.

Thus began the process of finalising what we going to shoot. From a desserted old house, to a dinner party in a forest, to digitally manipulated armies of people running over hills like something out of Lord Of The Rings - we certainly weren’t lacking in ideas. But in the end simplicity won out, and we started hunting out for a landscape that would fit the mood.

Whilst out one day I happened to drive past a cleared forest, and caught a glimpse of a group of remaining trees. I thought it could perhaps work, but I needed a few more opinions. Next time I was around the area I was with Rob, and attempted to show him what I was thinking, though in the pitch black of night it perhaps lost some of its impact. Time was not on our side however, as our deadlines were fast approaching, and we decided just to give it a go.

So, early one Sunday morning I met Lucky and drove him out to the site. He liked what he saw, and after scouting around for the best location he started snapping away. Well not so much snapping, as carefully calculating the angle and alignment of each shot. It was all a bit of a gamble, as we really didn’t know what the finished product would end up like. I anxiously checked my email that night, waiting for Lucky to send through the first rough proofs. I needn’t have worried - the results were fantastic.

After a few days of tweaking, searching for fonts, proof-reading and still more tweaking, the final design emerged. And so, I present to you the cover of our album Save A Place For Us. To see the rest you’ll just have to wait (like I am) for the CD. Not long at all to go though.

There’s a quote by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Patience is bitter, but the fruit is sweet” which has been very fitting to the process of releasing our debut album. The album which we began tracking in late 2006 and finished mixing close to a year ago is one step closer to being on the shelves of stores and scattered throughout the net. The album is finally mastered! And the fruit of our labour is oh so sweet.

We enlisted Don Bartley to do the job. He’s quite good at the mystical art of mastering albums. He’s mastered a lot of albums. So it was a pretty easy day for us. Don did most of the work. We just sat back and enjoyed hearing the mixes come to life with extra presence and punch. There are moments on the album which when polished up feel like a warm hug and then moments that smack you around the face and leave you crying like a little girl on the ground. We made the decision to keep a lot of the dynamics in the mix, to keep it breathing a bit. There were also a few anomalies that we needed to fix up. One was this low rumble whenever Andrew was singing in one of the slow songs. The assumption was it was vibrations picked up off the mic stand. Don fixed this with some magic eye looking application which is a graphical representation the energy of certain frequencies. Gotta love technology. There were also some clicks of me turning pedals on and off at a point of a song. It’s the catch of tracking nearly everything live. You end up with some unique “performance related” sounds in the mix. We did end up keeping in some little surprises but you’ll have to find them for yourself when the album is out.

Much discussion was had about the word “shod” which is part of the title of a song on the album Ghosts Shod in Steel Shoes. Turns out that shod is the past tense and a past participle of shoe. I did not know that. And to be unshod is to be barefoot perhaps. With the track listing written out we realised how long some of our song titles are, which is diametrically opposed to Pearl Jam’s Ten which consists of mostly one word song titles.

The tracks came up well and the challenge of sorting out segues and the gaps between each track was next. It’s always a tricky thing as the mastering studio feels like a bit of an artificial listening environment. A few transitions were quite easy and natural, some required a bit of agonising but you want to get these things right so there was a purpose to us being pedantic.

Overall, we were really happy with the flow of the album. It’s so satisfying to hear it done. Now to focus energies on all the other jobs that need to get done and things that need to be in place for the release of it. Thank you all for being patient - it’s great to finally be able to say it is not far off now! We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating.