The Pepper Pots: Now!

Okay, so maybe a group of three cute, young ladies fronting a band of dudes in sharp suits and playing music inspired by Motown and Stax with a tinge of sixties ska might not be what you'd expect coming from Girona, Spain (really Catalonia/Catalunya, if you ask them). But this is really happening, and it's done so well on this record that you could easily be fooled into thinking you found some wonderful hidden gem from the past. How did they get such a great sound on the album? They hired Binky Griptite to produce it - a man who knows what makes soul/R&B/pop records sound good from his experience with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Amy Winehouse and more. With midrange-y, stripped down, economical drum parts, ribbon mic-sounding horns, slightly roomy and crunchy tambourine, extreme panning, and what sounds like plate reverb, the pieces all work together like classic tracks from the past. Surprisingly, the CD was recorded in Pro Tools (though I would have never guessed that) at Music Lan Recording Studios (Catalonia), overdubs and submixing (to 8-track) happened at Dubway Studios (Manhattan) and mixing in Brooklyn at Plus 9 - as Binky says, "Not really a studio at all, just a room in my house." Now! was mixed on some modest gear: an Otari MX-5050 8-track through a TL Audio M3 TubeTracker with four channels of ART Pro VLA compressors, two channels of Drawmer 1968 compression, a Master Room XL-210 spring reverb to an Otari MX-5050 2-track. Monitoring was via KRK VXT8s with a subwoofer. Mastered by Joe Lambert in New York at his Joe Lambert Mastering. www.thepepperpots.com