Irish four piece band, Don’t Fear The Natives, have just released their latest song, We Don’t Wanna Hear A Thousand Reasons.
Ordinarily we write at length about various instrumentation and production, but for this song, we feel its vital as well to give a voice to the subject matter behind the song.
We Don’t Wanna Hear A Thousand Reasons is a protest song, a call to action to help families in Ireland fighting the on-going mica scandal. Micas are a group of minerals that are found in rock, including rock taken from quarries. They make extremely poor building materials leading to houses that have been built with them crumbling away and leaving families at risk.
It seems that the families have, to a large extent, been silenced and this song is aimed at raising awareness of the situation and let more people know that there are counselling services for those struggling with mental wellbeing as a result of the dangers in their homes.
We Don’t Wanna Hear A Thousand Reasons is an organic sounding folk/rock song. With some almost Stevie Nicks sounding vocals from Claire McDaid, this is a song to capture the heart. The song has many layered guitars and string instruments as well as some lovely layered vocals, especially towards the end of the song.
The strummed guitar leads the song with everything else fitting in around it. Its off to a strong start and the vocals are very endearing and almost pleading with you to listen to their plight.
From our perspective (and it is of course just our perspective), there are a lot of instruments competing for the same EQ area in the overall mix. A wide cut in the 200-1000Hz range will help make this a little clearer but it may be preferable to look at the mix to separate the instrument EQ ranges out a little more. Its hard to tell if we’re hearing just several guitars, or whether any other instruments are in the mix – for one second we thought we heard banjo but it was hard to tell. We’d also suggest a boost of the top octave and a little boost around 5kHz for a little more presence.
For a song like this, however, the production isn’t the essential thing to focus on. The vocals are clear and present, they get the message across well and everything else falls into place behind them.
We imagine that Don’t Fear The Natives are a great band to hear live. We can hear some real passion in the vocals and the instrumentation and we anticipate they’ll be super busy during the festival season and we wish them well with their awareness campaign.