For those about to rock harder: Post and Gordon (from left)
Veruca Salt's Nina Gordon is sprawled on a couch amid magazines and candy wrappers at A&M's Studio D, in Los Angeles. "Before we went to Maui [Hawaii] to record this album, I dreamed we played a huge stadium," she says. "The lights go down, and you hear this quiet chanting - 'The bitch is back, and she's ready to party.' The chanting gets louder until 50,000 people are screaming: 'The bitch is back, and she's ready to party!'"
Two and a half years after storming the alternative nation with the raging, infectious pop-punk smash "Seether," from their debut album, American Thighs, Veruca Salt are back - and definitely in the mood to party. Following three months of recording with producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Motley Crue), the Chicago quartet is holed up in the studio, mixing and laying down last-minute overdubs to next month's Eight Arms to Hold You. On this afternoon, Gordon and Louise Post - the band's singers, songwriters and guitarists - are trying to nail a vocal harmony for the blistering, metal-edged rocker "Shutterbug."
"Do you think it's too sweet?" Gordon asks Rock after one take.
"A little sweet," says Rock with a nod, dividing his attention between the mixing console and a ballgame on TV.
"It should rock harder," adds Gordon's brother, drummer Jim Shapiro, who's huddling over a crossword puzzle and munching cookies.
"Rock harder" is something of a mantra around the Veruca Salt camp, a reaction to what the band considers its relatively lightweight performance on American Thighs. And from the slashing guitars of "Shutterbug" to the dense, muscular rhythms that underpin the sweetly melodic "With David Bowie" to the sensual vocal interplay between Post and Gordon on the first single, "Volcano Girls," Eight Arms explodes with a tense, riff-heavy complexity that's more akin to '70s hard rock than most current alterna-pop.
"We've always wanted to sound big," says Post. "But on our first record, we weren't sure of our guitar sounds yet."
If Eight Arms is more hard edged than Veruca's debut disc, it also shows new lyrical maturity. Where many songs on American Thighs were fueled by themes of self-doubt and emotional codependence, this time Post and Gordon exorcise old demons with a sense of increasing self-confidence and a taste for revenge. "Goodbye cowardice!" Gordon exalts in the driving "Awesome." And in "One Last Time," Post wavers in her feelings for an ex before walking away with, "I'll see you around."
"On the last album, we were still figuring out who we were as people and as musicians," says Gordon. "We've gotten beyond that now."
"Yeah," Post adds, "this time it's just about kicking some royal ass."