Vapour Trail | Full Band Cover | Ride

If I could name two songs that instantly conjure memories of my first two years in college in San Pedro, California, one would be Sometimes by My Bloody Valentine and the other would be Vapour Trail by ‪@RideOfficial‬. From my time doing national service in Singapore to my early college years, the lush textures and catchy melodies of shoegaze music were a calming relief during arguably the most tumultuous period of my life. Vapour Trail in particular became a hit with my friends in college, and they would demand I play the song over and over again in the car until I got sick of it and refused to listen to it for several years.

After tackling a number of songs with complex arrangements, I thought it would be a fun change to pay tribute to this tune, which is different in many ways from the other songs I’ve done. It’s only got four chords, no chorus, two verses, and an instrumental jam that takes up over half the song. Yet, Vapour Trail proved to be as challenging as any other cover I’ve done because of how the guitar and bass work by Mark Gardener, Andy Bell and Steve Queralt melt together into one lush texture, with Loz Colbert’s drums giving it structure. I watched several live performances, scrutinized where their hands were on their fretboards, read what I could about the recording of the song and album, and concluded that without a 12-string Rickenbacker, I had to come up with alternative solutions to achieve that shoegaze sound. This amounted to layering multiple guitar tracks with various amounts of flanger, phaser, chorus, delay, compression and pitch shifting in order to get the guitars to sound less like guitars and more like a textural ocean.

Unexpectedly, this cover turned out to be a great and rare opportunity to record with my ‪@ernieballinc‬ Music Man Bongo. I tried recording with my other basses first, but none of them quite gelled with the tapestry of guitar noise I had conjured. For whatever reason, the Bongo’s low-mid thump sat nicely in the mix, which goes to show that there’s a song that’s perfect for every kind of guitar.

After throwing in the usual Gothik Serpent additions of expanded harmonies and layering, we now have what I hope is a fitting tribute to one of my favorite bands of all time.




Check out the Gothik Serpent discography:
Bandcamp: gothikserpent.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1T78Z...
Kerwin Tsang - Vocals, guitars, bass, strings programming, percussion, mixing, video
Olivia Jean Kong - Vocals
Tau Bowyer - Drums, mastering