Album Notes

Following up on the release of 2001's Karmaland, Caffeine Sunday went to work promoting itself via live shows. There were a couple of live TV performances,a number of gigs around Edmonton, inclusion on Edmonton campus radio CJSR's "Ralph Nader Was Here" compilation and a UK Depeche Mode tribute album that never saw the light of day. But after three years of constant effort to find any gigs it could, the band took a breather. Its creative process hadn't stopped though, and song demos started piling up. By 2006, when Ryan and Christopher officially decided to start recording another album, there were several songs on the To Be Finished list.

Recording was a slow but enjoyable job this time around. With Christopher and Ryan living in different locations, much of the work was done by each member in his own home studio, with the results shared back and forth over the Internet. About 90 per cent of the music files were, in the end, recorded by Christopher on a cheap laptop while riding the public transit commuter bus from Spruce Grove to Edmonton every day. The electronic music generated while bumping along the highway at 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. was transferred to the studio, where it was combined with vocals, guitars and other hardware synths. Soon the working-on list reached 16 tracks, and the decision was made to pick out 10 songs that were nearly done and flowed well together, and focus on finishing up those songs in particular.

By early 2009, I Wish I Could Film Tonight in Black and White had taken its final form. The overall sound was unmistakably Caffeine Sunday, but the individual tracks ranged in style the way tracks on an old New Order record would. There's the four-on-the-floor melancholy of Plane and Set Me Free, the loud power pop of Lost and Found and The King is Dead, the digital swagger of Three Song Cutoff, and the nightclub lights of Cubicle. Combined, they make up the band's strongest and most exciting material to date.