JULY 10, 2025 INTERVIEWS
The Wrens: 16 bit ADAT rocks!
In Tape Op #31, West West Side mastering engineer Alan Douches observed that sometime in the next millennium, retro-minded sound smiths will be seeking to recapture "that classic late-century ADAT studio sound" and begin scouring the world for the few Alesis tape machines that had survived the ravages of time. "It's hilarious," says Wrens guitarist/vocalist/recordist Charles Bissell of Douches' prediction. "It's hilarious because it's inevitable." Bissell is probably right. The ADAT revival will occur, and people will pay through the nose for the machines themselves and for the VHS tapes that they employ. What Bissell is too modest to admit, however, is that if this all goes down as projected, he'll be partially to blame, because the Wrens new album, The Meadowlands (mastered not so coincidentally by Douches), clearly demonstrates how much can be achieved in this much-maligned medium. Of course, you can make a good record on any format you want if you're willing to spend five years getting it just right. Yeah, you heard me — five years. Every night for nearly half a decade, Bissell would return from a New York City white-collar day gig to the New Jersey house that he shares with bandmates Kevin Whelan (bass/keys/vocals) and Greg Whelan (guitar/vocals) to fire up the studio that occupies much of the living room. Songs were compulsively worked and reworked, parts changed, and sounds tweaked within an inch of their lives. And then, when the last track of their long-gestated third album was finally mixed and mastered, the Wrens did the only thing they could to ensure that the ordeal had in fact come to an end: They brought their ADATs to a local Garden State watering hole, propped them up on the bar, ordered some beers and got sloshed while they erased the master tapes. The mixes that remain are a shining example of what indie rock can and should be when low expectations — and even lower budgets — are not allowed to encroach upon a desire to create music that is as artful as it is kick-ass. Certainly the Wrens' two previous full-length efforts, 1994's Silver and 1996's Secaucus, are also exceptional home-recordings, but The Meadowlands is an instant DIY classic, worthy of sharing a shelf with Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes or the Shins' Oh, Inverted World. Imagine it's a sinewy long- distance runner, picking up the smart-rock torch right where Wire and the Buzzcocks dropped it. Who could have guessed that that was in a New Jersey swamp?
