SAINT VITUS released their fourth album, Mournful Cries, on this day in 1988 through SST.
The band practiced in a shed behind a crack-house in Torrance and they worried they might get their amps impounded or stolen before the studio date came. Whereas for the first album the band could only conceive of playing the tune in its live arrangement, by now they practiced rhythm arrangements for the studio so we could lay down a consistent sound-bed and more carefully set a sound for the solo and overdub it. We were getting real pro by our lights, but you could tell the Music Grinder Studio folks up on Melrose had never had any other band come in and pound out an album's tracking and mixing in four straight twelve hour days. On "Mournful Cries" Wino plays second guitar on some tunes which worked out great; he's got the best rhythm sense of any guitarist I've heard, something elastic akin to John Bonham's drum-feel. Listening to these great Saint Vitus slabs of sound in these studios was better than any live P.A. or LP or CD playback could possibly be.
Joe Carducci, The New Vulgate #75, 2010