Photo by Gary Sabin
Midnight Reruns’ hooky rock ’n’ roll draws from all over the place. The riffs summon thoughts of Big Star and Cheap Trick’s sturdy power-pop, but there’s also a whiff of pop-punk in singer/guitarist Graham Hunt’s insouciant croon, and a little bit of Tom Petty’s rollicking heartland rock in their rhythms. Of all the bands that have shaped the Midnight Reruns, though, there’s one that’s always sprung to mind first: The Replacements, a comparison that has trailed them in nearly every write-up they’ve received since their 2013 self-titled debut.
Here’s hoping they didn’t mind those comparisons too much, because they’re in store for another flood of them. The group’s latest album, Force of Nurture, out now on Dusty Medical Records, was produced by Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson. After hearing the band’s debut through a mutual acquaintance, Stinson invited them to record with him at his New York home, an offer they didn’t have to think long about before accepting.
Ironically, Stinson was one of the only people who didn’t seem interested in talking to the band about The Replacements. “We never talked about The Replacements when we were there recording with him,” Hunt says. “There was one point where I wanted a vocal to be weird and echoey, and I was like, ‘Oh, like on ‘Willpower,’ and he just ignored me, so it seemed like he didn’t want to talk about it. It was more or less just a normal working relationship between a band and an engineer, so it wasn’t super weird for us. When we first met him maybe it was a little weird for a second, but we only had four days there, so we didn’t really have time to be starry eyed.”
Stinson was still fairly new to producing when they tracked the album last November, and at times it showed. “You can tell that he’s just getting into it,” Hunt says. “He has good ideas and he’s good at it for sure, but I think we were one of the first bands he ever recorded. There would be times where he’d be like, ‘Wait, stop, start over, I forgot to hit record’ or something like that. I don’t know if this is how he works with all bands, but for us he saw us live, because we played in Hudson [N.Y.] in his hometown the night before we started recording, and he was like, ‘I just want you to sound like that.’ So he was really hands off for the first three days. Then the last day was when we were getting into overdubs. He wanted us to record guitar solos over everything, which we did, though we didn’t use all of them.”
As Hunt tells it, the setup in Stinson’s studio was a little unorthodox, too. “We were recording live where we all just set up in a room without any barriers between the amps,” he says. “It wasn’t like most recording studios where you have isolation booths for the amps, so you can hear some of the guitars through the drum mics. It all bled into each other a little bit.”
That sounds like a recipe for a muddy, lo-fi record, but Hunt was surprised by how clean the final product came out. He credits Justin Perkins’ mastering job for making the record come together.
“He’s just such a wizard, and he uses computer magic to make everything sound really good,” Hunt says. “The room we recorded in was really small and dead sounding. Like, the drums on those first mixes just sounded like sandbags a little bit, but Justin mixed it and it all sounded a lot bigger. I’m not sure what he did, but it was a combination of Justin and Tommy that made this album sound like it does.”
Midnight Reruns’ Force of Nurture is streaming now at soundcloud.com/dustymedical. The band plays an album release show Saturday, Nov. 14 at the Cactus Club at 9 p.m. with Space Raft, Sat. Nite Duets and DJ Chris Schulist.
