Costello, Cool Minors tune in, jam out
“I really think he’s a masochist.” Andre Costello isn’t talking about a criminal or world leader, but rather the gentleman who produced the latest album from Andre Costello and the Cool Minors.
The plan behind “Resident Frequencies” was to work kind of like Neil Young recorded “Harvest,” but without the barn, and in Mr. Smalls Studio.
“What I wanted it to be was just truthful, honest, just-us-in-the-room playing the songs together,” the Pittsburgh singer-songwriter says. “People sometimes tell me I sing like Neil Young, and I don’t want to just push comparisons with Neil Young, but I wanted to do like Neil did on a few songs on ‘Harvest,’ setting up in a barn, you can hear him when he bumps into the microphone stand.
“It’s so honest and the fidelity is remarkable as well. The performance is really the goal for me and the production second, so I convinced Nate to let us work in the same room, and he set us all up and set up these sound absorbers to minimize bleeds.”
Nate is Nate Campisi, the talented inhouse producer also behind recent projects by Bastard Bearded Irishmen, Side Eye and Kayla Schureman, among others. They played through the songs live and picked their favorite takes, and he sent them the recordings.
“And I said, ‘These are great, I’ll do vocals and they’re done,’” Mr. Costello says, “but Nate added this whole extra layer of neurosis to it, where he’d be like, ‘Andre, I need to you to come in, do this, do that.’ I kept telling, ‘Stop, Nate, it sounds great!’
“Whenever I thought the album was done, I didn’t realize we had just as much work left to do as it took to write the songs, arrange them, play them, track them. It ended up being so painful but so gratifying, and that’s what I love about working with Nate Campisi.”
“Resident Frequencies” is the best work yet from Mr. Costello, an Ellwood City native who settled here in the mid-’00s to attend the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and joined an indie-rock band called The Slant in 2006 for an album that sounded like Radiohead meets The Band.
He broke off to form The Cool Minors as a solo project in 2011 and rolled out a few EPs before making a full-length debut with “The Rattling Arcade” in 2014.
Bassist Matt Fiorillo and drummer Nicholas Charters have been there from the beginning. The band’s newest addition, guitarist James Hart (Harlan Twins), helps up the band’s bright jam quotient considerably on “Resident Frequencies.”
Like My Morning Jacket, Andre Costello and the Cool Minors is a little earthy, a little space-rock, so it was fitting that the band premiered it back in February with a custom laser show at Carnegie Science Center’s Buhl Planetarium. On Friday, the band gets back on solid ground for the proper release at The Stage at Karma, South Side.
Mr. Costello says the songs took shape over a period of three or four years, during which he went through “an entire range” of things, including “a period of depression, and that kind of went into those songs in a way.”
Among the ideas he tried to convey in the songs is the notion of the normalcy amidst turmoil.
“I think about all the unrest that’s happened in the world, politically, the violence but, everyone has their own stories,” he says. “Love and life happens in the midst of these crazy things that are happening.”