When Exquisite Noise artist Mike The Punk entered a professional studio last month, he had some hand picked musicians in tow, a batch of fully written songs, and positive expectations. Weeks later, he was pulling the plug on the entire operation – and yet would soon discover this was the greatest thing that possibly could have happened.

The album was in fact fully finished, but the results were not what he’d hoped for. So he returned home, downloaded a free recording program, plugged in just a pair of microphones, and cranked out ten songs, all on the first take. The resulting effort, Michael Adams, is a refreshing ode to simplicity. Proving once again Tom Petty’s maxim that if you’re having trouble getting a song right, the solution is to strip it down rather than become more technical, recording these songs in this manner brings their hooks and fine lyrical edge closer to the surface than they otherwise might be.

Mike isn’t quite sure what he plans to do with this album, or if he wants a formal release at all. For now, you can listen to the entire project on SoundCloud here. So give it a spin, download some tracks, leave some commentary and by all means share with your friends. We at the label think it’s a great story that illustrates our overriding philosophy here. Another Exquisite Noise band, The Judas Cow, once saved up $1200 in anticipation of knocking out a complete CD professionally, blew through that entire budget with nothing to show for their time but a handful of drum tracks, which were scrapped when they too decided to go the lo-fi home recording route. In this day and age, going high dollar and high tech is simply no longer an absolute requirement, and it has prompted a question we’ve been asking our artists of late: is it really worth spending thousands of dollars just to sound maybe, at best, 10% better, if at all? Our opinion, demonstrated again by Michael Adams, is a resounding no. Let us know what you think.