So I've been told recently that I take criticism to heart, and that may be true but I never really see the point in seeking anyone's approval. I'm generally proud of what I do without being self-satisfied. There's always improvements to make, always tonnes to learn and that's the way it should be, otherwise why carry on? By the same token, I don't compare anything I write to anyone else because I don't see the point. However anyone who says in his bio, with all seriousness, that "he even rejects typical notions of creativity...and instead sees himself as one who simply reflects the earthly forces and realities that surround him," should probably look a bit deeper at himself and work out exactly the point when his head and anal passage become fused instead of criticising others.
Anyway, The Chap are fucking amazing and need far more attention than I can give them. But at least I'm doing something.
The Chap
Pop music should be mined, explored and retrieved from an array of wild ideas. Some of the best songs ever have been the result of madcap ideas: slashing speaker cones a la The Kinks or nicking Kerry King from Slayer like the Beastie Boys. This bravery doesn't often extend to entire catalogues of work though. The Chap's version of pop music is formed from a constant disregard for formulas and playing safe. That's why their four albums are all sublime yet inextricably weaved works of eccentric sounds and noises.
“On this one and the previous album, we were aiming at writing some very shiny, straight forward pop music. In both cases (Mega Breakfast more than Well Done Europe), some of that old screetchy chap magic kept sneaking back in and made it all a lot less commercial than originally intended. We just can’t help ourselves! On Mega Breakfast, the poppiness was intended to sound quite sick and misplaced, which I think it ended up doing to quite an extent. On Well Done Europe, we allowed ourselves to be a bit warmer or - dare I say it - heartfelt with it.” Heartfelt? Weirdly, Well Done Europe sounds less sardonic and as if it's striving to capture some delightful melodic suss the band have hitherto thrown to the wind.
“When we start trying to make an idea into a song, we often go through a long process of rejection of ideas until we find a concept we want to go with. In the old days, these concepts usually consisted of trying to subvert the traditional pop song format by recording stuff really badly and trying to think of the least likely reference to juxtapose the initial recording with. These days, the subversion seems to stem more from the realisation that we have become characterised as this lo fi weirdo underground group and are consequently trying to make everything sound as slick as our budget home studio set-up allows. But in a slightly wrong and unsettling way.” The Chap seem concerned with deconstruction. Even Your Friend, for instance, has a typically deadpan female vocal, some innocuous warped sounds in the background and a steady beat. This soon gets co-opted by huge sampled choral crescendos, twisted, muffled voices, an almost freeform bassline before it all collides into a choppy, anthemic chorus. It's bewildering and brilliant. The amount of throwaway innovation is reminiscent of the approach recently reformed 90s eccentrics Pavement had, unafraid to plunge songs into gallons of awkward ideas.
It's extremely difficult to divide The Chap's musical direction from their consistently intriguing and hilarious lyrical stance. This is without mentioning the pop culture references such as the snippet of Dancing In The Dark by Springsteen in Well Done You. Consider this gem: 'Well done you, you've really really got the hang of it/that's excellent stuff there..../we're really glad to have you with us/I know you were struggling at first/but soon you tackled it head on/and that was quite a feat considering..' Somehow the languishing and deadpan delivery of the vocals seems to overlap with the slick, ambiguous feel and texture of the music. “As with the musical content, we try to come up with something unusual. We will sometimes come up with a concept or just write down phrases which spring to mind by free association. The lyrics are very important, but not necessarily in a way of a particular meaning. That said, more recently, we have started writing songs which actually have an easily indentifiable meaning, like We Work In Bars or Chalet Chalet.”
This patchwork approach goes hand in hand with their similarly sewn musical ouvre. The result is that The Chap's output is distinctive and a refreshing dunk into the oft murky waters of independently weaved pop music. Legendary sonic crackpot Frank Zappa once asked whether humour belongs in music – naturally he had already answered yes to his own question – and it seems ludicrous, in light of bands such as The Chap, that such a question need be asked.
“After making quite a conscious decision to have almost only straight forward song structures on Well Done Europe, we are planning to come back soon with a classic chap style album… I think we’ve just about had it with trying to be Fleetwood Mac all the time! ‘Cause we’re not!” They may not be Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, but to deny them their little niche for not following the accepted rules – including striving for hooks in places where most fear to tread, perhaps because they might appear less serious and committed – would not only be unfair but actually extremely short sighted.
Brad Barrett
Friday 28 January 2011
Tuesday 25 January 2011
Articles Part VII: Portico Quartet
Currently in limbo, the only way to retain normality is to continue writing about my own writing. Well meta. Here's the seventh article I was most proud of from last year.
With the re-release of their fantastic second album, Isla, last year Portico Quartet deserved a second shot at wider acclaim. Their instrumental, resonating ambient-flecked jazz suits a certain mood - partially melancholy but hopeful anyway. The perfect antidote to overly skronky or intricate meanderings, their sound is built around one instrument - one that you'd be forgiven for thinking was unnecessary in any other place. But within their context, it more than makes sense - it's almost the instrument's entire purpose. And how many musical groups are capable of that?
Portico Quartet
Rarely do we find an artist’s entire output inspired by and reliant on a fairly unfamiliar instrument. Joanna Newsom’s harp is perhaps the only exception we can think of here. The East London-based Portico Quartet are not only one of those rarities but an astonishing discovery in their own right as well. The band’s second album Isla, released in autumn last year, is an exceptional work bereft of cliché and imbued with an exceptional command of jazz and ‘world’ music instruments to craft a gripping, gooseflesh-inducing sound.
The story itself is a suitably heartening one. Nick Mulvey discovered the hang at the WOMAD music festival. “I heard the sound first and saw a crowd of people and just loved the sound of it. It wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Very quickly I forced my way to the front of the queue and had a go and found that I could play it, not because of any particular gift, but it’s a very intuitive instrument so I could play it instantly.” This rudimentary-looking pitted steel UFO is a Swiss made alien object, with a bewitching sound. Portico Quartet’s elegant yet riveting soundscapes are formed from the simple sculpted steel drum noise through which treated saxophone and double bass swarm and penetrate.
“I’ll put a hang pattern together that has a nice pocket of space and then maybe an inherent tension like it’s asking a question. Then Duncan (Bellamy – drummer) locks in very quickly just using the bell of his hi hat and I know already this is going to go somewhere because we’re already making a nice sound and he’s only using a fraction of his kit, he’s still got all the rest to play yet. Milo (Fitzpatrick – double bass) might have a little lick on the bass and if it catches very quickly we all slot into place around it and usually a groove forms and we’re all jamming on the groove and then we’d then sculpt a tune out of it, pull stuff back and Jack Wylie (saxophone) will find a melody. The second album was largely how can we push beyond this method. Part of the thing is we think textually rather than develop the harmonies like a jazz pianist might, it’s about textures and sound worlds.”
Their balance of composition and improvisation leads not only to incredible studio takes but sophisticated, sensual and haunting live deviations. It was this other worldly sound which brought them from casual busking as students to playing a sold out Barbican in London back in March.
“We’d had one jam in our student halls of residence and everyone, all the students hanging around were like ‘that’s wicked’ so we thought ‘fuck it let’s go down Southbank’ and the response was really overwhelming and we made £300 in a couple of hours. The next Saturday we made more and a festival promoter from Italy walked past and loved it. We started to meet people in the media who were walking down and our repertoire began to solidify, so it was just became a good place to play. I think after the first week we invested one months earnings into an industrial CD burner, went to a mates private studio, recorded four or five of the first tracks and then printed up about 100 copies. We went to the Southbank the next day and shifted all of them for a fiver. Next week we did 200 copies and suddenly we’re making a grand a weekend for five hours work. So we quit all our bar jobs and we were making much better money much easier playing the music we really love. The whole thing, in a way, encouraged itself. We never had any intention. We feel really lucky about it.”
From these humble beginnings, three or four years later, Portico Quartet are working with renowned producer John Leckie. Far from the Muse and Radiohead records he’s known for, Leckie has worked with a huge amount of different music (the India Soundpad project covered by PMP last year for instance). He contacted the band’s new record label Real World, owned by Peter Gabriel, after he heard them play the Mercury Music Prize ceremony for which their debut Knee Deep In The North Sea was nominated. On the same week John contacted Real World, Real World were attempting to contact him for the same reason.
“Having the rock background was really useful for us because we wanted a slightly more muscular sound on the second album,” explains Nick. “We wanted someone who had made a hundred second albums and wasn’t 25 years old and not someone who would interfere in our process too much or at all because we know what we want to do musically.” John Leckie turned out to be the perfect choice.
The proof is contained on Isla, which captures the scintillating results of hard work, inspiration and creativity. In following nothing other than their love of music, Portico Quartet have stumbled upon that remarkably elusive tryst which blossoms from unexpected meeting to rewarding romance. Listening is all it takes to hear why.
Brad Barrett
With the re-release of their fantastic second album, Isla, last year Portico Quartet deserved a second shot at wider acclaim. Their instrumental, resonating ambient-flecked jazz suits a certain mood - partially melancholy but hopeful anyway. The perfect antidote to overly skronky or intricate meanderings, their sound is built around one instrument - one that you'd be forgiven for thinking was unnecessary in any other place. But within their context, it more than makes sense - it's almost the instrument's entire purpose. And how many musical groups are capable of that?
Portico Quartet
Rarely do we find an artist’s entire output inspired by and reliant on a fairly unfamiliar instrument. Joanna Newsom’s harp is perhaps the only exception we can think of here. The East London-based Portico Quartet are not only one of those rarities but an astonishing discovery in their own right as well. The band’s second album Isla, released in autumn last year, is an exceptional work bereft of cliché and imbued with an exceptional command of jazz and ‘world’ music instruments to craft a gripping, gooseflesh-inducing sound.
The story itself is a suitably heartening one. Nick Mulvey discovered the hang at the WOMAD music festival. “I heard the sound first and saw a crowd of people and just loved the sound of it. It wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Very quickly I forced my way to the front of the queue and had a go and found that I could play it, not because of any particular gift, but it’s a very intuitive instrument so I could play it instantly.” This rudimentary-looking pitted steel UFO is a Swiss made alien object, with a bewitching sound. Portico Quartet’s elegant yet riveting soundscapes are formed from the simple sculpted steel drum noise through which treated saxophone and double bass swarm and penetrate.
“I’ll put a hang pattern together that has a nice pocket of space and then maybe an inherent tension like it’s asking a question. Then Duncan (Bellamy – drummer) locks in very quickly just using the bell of his hi hat and I know already this is going to go somewhere because we’re already making a nice sound and he’s only using a fraction of his kit, he’s still got all the rest to play yet. Milo (Fitzpatrick – double bass) might have a little lick on the bass and if it catches very quickly we all slot into place around it and usually a groove forms and we’re all jamming on the groove and then we’d then sculpt a tune out of it, pull stuff back and Jack Wylie (saxophone) will find a melody. The second album was largely how can we push beyond this method. Part of the thing is we think textually rather than develop the harmonies like a jazz pianist might, it’s about textures and sound worlds.”
Their balance of composition and improvisation leads not only to incredible studio takes but sophisticated, sensual and haunting live deviations. It was this other worldly sound which brought them from casual busking as students to playing a sold out Barbican in London back in March.
“We’d had one jam in our student halls of residence and everyone, all the students hanging around were like ‘that’s wicked’ so we thought ‘fuck it let’s go down Southbank’ and the response was really overwhelming and we made £300 in a couple of hours. The next Saturday we made more and a festival promoter from Italy walked past and loved it. We started to meet people in the media who were walking down and our repertoire began to solidify, so it was just became a good place to play. I think after the first week we invested one months earnings into an industrial CD burner, went to a mates private studio, recorded four or five of the first tracks and then printed up about 100 copies. We went to the Southbank the next day and shifted all of them for a fiver. Next week we did 200 copies and suddenly we’re making a grand a weekend for five hours work. So we quit all our bar jobs and we were making much better money much easier playing the music we really love. The whole thing, in a way, encouraged itself. We never had any intention. We feel really lucky about it.”
From these humble beginnings, three or four years later, Portico Quartet are working with renowned producer John Leckie. Far from the Muse and Radiohead records he’s known for, Leckie has worked with a huge amount of different music (the India Soundpad project covered by PMP last year for instance). He contacted the band’s new record label Real World, owned by Peter Gabriel, after he heard them play the Mercury Music Prize ceremony for which their debut Knee Deep In The North Sea was nominated. On the same week John contacted Real World, Real World were attempting to contact him for the same reason.
“Having the rock background was really useful for us because we wanted a slightly more muscular sound on the second album,” explains Nick. “We wanted someone who had made a hundred second albums and wasn’t 25 years old and not someone who would interfere in our process too much or at all because we know what we want to do musically.” John Leckie turned out to be the perfect choice.
The proof is contained on Isla, which captures the scintillating results of hard work, inspiration and creativity. In following nothing other than their love of music, Portico Quartet have stumbled upon that remarkably elusive tryst which blossoms from unexpected meeting to rewarding romance. Listening is all it takes to hear why.
Brad Barrett
Sunday 23 January 2011
Articles of 2010 Part VI: Frank Turner
After three years of trying, I finally managed to get Frank Turner a cover with Playmusic. This is significant because we've both been long term supporters of each other. It just so happens that Kerrang! beat us, which is just the way it goes. I shouldn't have to spout on about what FT means to my friends and I, how his lyrics saved one of my friend's life, to the point where he now lives with someone he truly loves somewhere in the American continent, how his music has affected myself and always reminds me of home, especially now I'm in Germany. His cover rates alongside my Sonic Youth one in personal victories and that is a huge deal. So without further blathering, here's the cover I produced in August 2010. May it be the second of many others for possibly the hardest working man in music today (apart from Peter Andre of course).
Meeting up with Frank Turner and having a chat has become a yearly occurrence. We're too busy for anything more. In the past six months folk-rock songwriter Frank has visited Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and Israel all for the first time, toured America a bit, headlined his first festival and supported Green Day at Wembly Stadium. He has reached this plateau in just under five years; since September 2005, in fact, when he first took his sadly departed first and only acoustic guitar out on the road and proceeded to never look back.
“I'm gonna get a tiny bit defensive now and even get a bit of my pride out on show,” he warns while supping a pint of golden nectar in a Notting Hill beer garden towards the end of our interview. “It's just funny because there is a folk punk thing, particularly in America. But in the UK five years ago, people thought I was fucking mental when I said this was what I was gonna do and retrospectively even I think I was mental as well. I don't wanna sound prissy about this but it wasn't the obvious move. So, yes, I do feel vindicated about that.”
Ask Frank what has been most fulfilling about his rise to headlining venues like Brixton Academy, which he will do in December, he'll explain that it's the publicly perceived sense that his rise “isn't a fabricated or a flash in the pan thing”. He admits with blunt honesty that he has never hidden his roots and never wanted to. “I can't claim and don't see the point of claiming and will never claim to be working class in anything that I do in my life with the possible exception of the way I've gone about my career which is that I've done this through graft and I'm proud of that fact. It's the one bit of blue collar in my life.” For a man rapidly approaching his 1000th show in five years, this is no overstatement. Playmusic, in all its guises, has followed Frank from his early shows at tiny acoustic clubs like Monkey Chews in Chalk Farm, open mic nights at The Snooty Fox in Canonbury and three shows at the local Tunbridge Wells Forum. The gig count is well into double figures but that's only roughly about 2-3% of his actual gigging schedule. Which perhaps puts his work rate into perspective for even the most sceptical of you.
Between that time he has also released three full-length albums, an armful of EPs, split singles – all collected on The First Three Years - and two DVDs plus a live recording of his triumphant Shepherd's Bush Empire show in 2009. He's also contributed to several tribute albums (the highlight of which is the excellent Mark Mulcahy tribute album made to raise funds to help the American songwriter raise his family and continue to make music after the death of his wife), been added to countless compilations and has guested on records by Chris T-T and The Dawn Chorus of late. Prolific just about covers it and with a new EP out November, there's no shortage of songs in the Turner canon it seems. “One of the things that drives me to write as much as I can and tour as much as I can, is, to be very specific about it, Bob Dylan in the late seventies. If even Bob Dylan can run out of juice then everyone's gonna run out and that makes me hammer it for all its worth. Of course, if I run out of songs than I'll just coast, tour and not release new material,” he adds, laughing.
“I want to see it as a way into the new album,” Frank says of the new five track EP. “I'm quite confident in the stockpile of songs I've got at the moment and its almost quite hard to choose what songs are gonna go on the EP rather than the record but I think its important to stress that it's not gonna be second class songs on the EP. The lead track is gonna be I Still Believe which is rapidly turning into a live favourite.” Frank's recent iTunes Festival performance at the Roundhouse included this huge, jaunty singalong. With lyrics espousing the virtues of rock and roll, a choral echo primed for arenas and a central lyric that goes 'I still believe (I still believe)/In the need for guitar and drums and desperate poetry', its no surprise that about its first UK outing at a last minute secret show at The Flowerpot in Kentish Town Frank says “the crowd response to it was totally overwhelming, more for any new song I've ever had”. Nevertheless, while he is aware of the importance of meshing his passionate lyricism with indelible hooks, something he's incredibly adept at, it's not necessarily the most fulfilling of his oeuvre for him.
“That was an easy song for me to write. I can already tell you what my favourite song on the next record is going to be and it's not going to be a crowd favourite and we probably won't play it more than once live”, he admits. “It's just got an incredibly dense and complicated set of lyrics that took me forever and its the closest I've ever felt that I've got to writing poetry in my life. I just spent ages on meter and rhythm and rhyming structure. This is not a gripe in anyway but I always felt like people hone in on the more simplistic stuff, with the notable exception of 'Prufrock' which is a crowd favourite and one of the best sets of words I've ever turned out. I'm just geeky about words,” he says, shrugging.
Frank has made no secret of his adoration and continuous research into English folk music, another subject he can be incredibly 'geeky' about. He points to his suitcase – awaiting its trip to Canada the very next morning - which has a volume detailing the history of English folk songs during our conversation. He has also recorded a version of Barbara Allen, first mentioned as a Scottish folk song in Samuel Pepys diary, as well as performing it completely acapella at Shepherd's Bush Empire. This may well have started a trend. “I've been writing a few acapella songs recently. I also found this old myth which is a folk tale from the New Forest, which is just down the road from where I'm from. William II, was killed in a hunting accident in the forest and there's a local myth that his father William the Conqueror stole commoner John the Blacksmith's land for royal hunting grounds and John the Blacksmith laid a curse on the King and said 'I'll kill your son for stealing my land.' I'm just trying to turn that into a traditional song.” Frank also isn't shy about his libertarian political standpoint. Songs like Sons of Liberty should make that really clear. Discussing everything from government funded lobby/charity groups and his distaste for such a practice to the real Robin Hood being a tax-hating worker, its easy to get Frank onto a tangent which eludes an answer entirely, while showing how much he thinks, reads, absorbs and consequently, has to say. The topic of place spreads from “a slight obsession with Ernest Hemingway and this idea of collecting experience,” to the possibility of playing prison shows around London and even the Alternative USO, for US soldiers at military bases and even Afghanistan. He references Kerouac's On The Road and being asked by an American customs official on the phone if he was “the singer in Million Dead”. These tangents are triggered simply by his need to express his love of new experiences and returning to his own country.
“In the last couple of days I've just finished a song about rivers and England. Even when talking about something else, when there comes a time to mention a city or a place, without wanting to sound like Lily Allen, (mocking singing voice)'al fresco, Tesco', I'd rather drop Manchester or Exeter into a song. I probably go more to Denver than I do Exeter but Exeter sounds more relevant to me. I completely agree with you that a sense of place is fascinating and really important and that's one of the many things that attracts me to folk music generally. When I go to other places I'm always super interested in how people live, how other people work and I think it makes me appreciate my own cultural and political identity a little more.”
It's an issue that dominates the media, arts and, yes, songwriting and it's genuinely refreshing to have an increasingly popular musician approach the matter from both a personal and educated standpoint.
Perhaps the biggest shift from his defiantly solo beginnings, and one that originally caused a schism between fans, has been the introduction of his band. They comprise of three members of Oxford band Dive Dive – bassist Tarrant Anderson, guitarist Ben Lloyd and drummer Nigel Powell – and keys player/multi-instrumentalist Matt Nasir. Though they've been present since the first full band show in Oxford's Port Mahon on 20th January 2007, with Matt joining in October of 2008, third album Poetry of the Deed is the first to have the whole band recording their parts in the studio at the same time. “I still say this is MY project and I have done this,” proclaims Frank. “(But) there are one or two songs I don't like and/or can't do solo already, though I have to say I'm slightly annoyed by that because I do like the idea that there's always a solo version of the song that I can play.”
Though Frank refutes the idea that he couldn't imagine his songs without the other musician's contributions, he's very stringent on one point: “I certainly don't want to play with any other musicians any time soon,” he says. “We've actually legally bound ourselves to each other quite recently which I'm very happy about and I was keen to do. There's a strength to the paradigm of one man and his guitar which is important, and there is a reason I'm doing this under my own name and not in a band and all the rest of it, so I don't want to lose sight of any of that but they are important to what I do, particularly to the live show now.” Yet, there have been challenges along the way. Not least the balance between being the four guys in Frank's backing band, and turning into a band with equal billing to Frank himself. His rather cynical but hilarious nickname given to him by the band is 'the product', which aptly distinguishes their roles.
“In the annals of rock and roll, there's not that many well-known established backing bands. There's E Street, there's Crazy Horse but its a delicate balance and I think its great that the guys in the band have got that now. I'm more than happy and comfortable to talk about them in interviews and introduce them on stage and I like that its got to a point where people know them by name. Fans are like 'hey it's Nigel' backstage.”
Inevitably, for a man wanting to distance himself from previous working practices in hardcore and rock bands, there has been a certain amount of “headbutting”when working on new material. “We're still learning. See, one of my reservations about Poetry of the Deed as a record is that I got overly carried away with recording with a band. I think arrangement wise it just kinda goes like that,” he says moving his hand upon an invisible horizontal conveyor belt. “Whereas Love Ire and Song and Sleep Is For the Week have a lot more peaks and troughs. I think part of the reason for that is I was like 'I've got a band in the studio! Everybody play all the time, on everything!' and I think for the next record I'm now less worried saying to a band member, 'hey, you know what? You're not playing on this one'. I feel like we're reaching an equilibrium now and I would love to look back like Springsteen at, say, Born To Run through to Born In The USA, where there's that string of great E-Street band records. I'd love to look from Poetry of the Deed through to whatever album in the same way...”
A week ago at time of writing, Frank won the Kerrang! No Half Measures award, formally the Spirit of Independence award which has seemingly been renamed specifically for him. I don't think there's many who would argue with the sentiment and, as a final example of why he deserves this recognition, Frank tackles my query on just why he considers himself an entertainer rather than an artist. “I don't think there's anything more pretentious than referring to yourself as an artist. I think other people can decide whether what you do is art. Obviously what I do is songwriting and in a broader sense I'm an entertainer. There are people who are very snobby about the term entertainer. Off the top of my head (political activist punk band and one of Frank and my favourite bands as younger men) Propagandhi said: 'It seems we're only here to entertain.' And I think 'ONLY entertain?'. See, you can tie yourself in with travelling players and vaudeville and anyone who has got up on a stage and tried to make people feel better about their life. I actually happen to think that's a very noble tradition to be a part of. So if someone else wants to describe what I do as art, that's fine I'm just not gonna get involved. It's not really for me to say. Actually, I don't think it's for anyone to say except when I'm dead, or at least, older. I think Born To Run is art and I think first of all, we can judge this more than Springsteen can and second we can judge it because it has survived the passage of time and it has become a cultural landmark, in a way. I don't wanna stand here and say I engage in art. I engage in songwriting which might cumulatively become art. I certainly think that of all the tests to establish whether something is art or not, the test of time is a pretty strong one. Townes Van Zandt was really not popular in the day but he has endured and the reason he's endured is because he was a fabulous artist. I know it sounds like a self absorbed thing to be concerned about, but first of all I don't like the connotations of the word artist because the kind of people who describe themselves as artists are cunts. But, also, I'm really bothered about reclaiming the term entertainer. I have this mental image of the old luvvie getting up to play a pantomime dame for the 700th time at the age of 75 and saying 'my public need me' and you know what, they fucking do. And its not because you're saving the world, but because everyone needs to have their mind taken off things. Life is horrible and entertainment and friends are God's compensation. Loudon Wainwright does that for me. He's a consummate entertainer. He tells jokes and tells stories and plays songs and gets the crowd on side and I really like picturing myself like him. I'd love to be Neil Young, doing stadium shows when I'm 60 years old but if I'm like Loudon, who is still just on the road and got enough of a crowd to pay his petrol and the hotel, I'm in.” I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it: this country needs Frank Turner; his band, his energy, his attitude, his guitar, his voice and his desperate poetry. Because if there's anyone in music who can inspire you to do the very best you can and disregard the bloated ambitions of wannabe rock stars, it's him.
Meeting up with Frank Turner and having a chat has become a yearly occurrence. We're too busy for anything more. In the past six months folk-rock songwriter Frank has visited Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and Israel all for the first time, toured America a bit, headlined his first festival and supported Green Day at Wembly Stadium. He has reached this plateau in just under five years; since September 2005, in fact, when he first took his sadly departed first and only acoustic guitar out on the road and proceeded to never look back.
“I'm gonna get a tiny bit defensive now and even get a bit of my pride out on show,” he warns while supping a pint of golden nectar in a Notting Hill beer garden towards the end of our interview. “It's just funny because there is a folk punk thing, particularly in America. But in the UK five years ago, people thought I was fucking mental when I said this was what I was gonna do and retrospectively even I think I was mental as well. I don't wanna sound prissy about this but it wasn't the obvious move. So, yes, I do feel vindicated about that.”
Ask Frank what has been most fulfilling about his rise to headlining venues like Brixton Academy, which he will do in December, he'll explain that it's the publicly perceived sense that his rise “isn't a fabricated or a flash in the pan thing”. He admits with blunt honesty that he has never hidden his roots and never wanted to. “I can't claim and don't see the point of claiming and will never claim to be working class in anything that I do in my life with the possible exception of the way I've gone about my career which is that I've done this through graft and I'm proud of that fact. It's the one bit of blue collar in my life.” For a man rapidly approaching his 1000th show in five years, this is no overstatement. Playmusic, in all its guises, has followed Frank from his early shows at tiny acoustic clubs like Monkey Chews in Chalk Farm, open mic nights at The Snooty Fox in Canonbury and three shows at the local Tunbridge Wells Forum. The gig count is well into double figures but that's only roughly about 2-3% of his actual gigging schedule. Which perhaps puts his work rate into perspective for even the most sceptical of you.
Between that time he has also released three full-length albums, an armful of EPs, split singles – all collected on The First Three Years - and two DVDs plus a live recording of his triumphant Shepherd's Bush Empire show in 2009. He's also contributed to several tribute albums (the highlight of which is the excellent Mark Mulcahy tribute album made to raise funds to help the American songwriter raise his family and continue to make music after the death of his wife), been added to countless compilations and has guested on records by Chris T-T and The Dawn Chorus of late. Prolific just about covers it and with a new EP out November, there's no shortage of songs in the Turner canon it seems. “One of the things that drives me to write as much as I can and tour as much as I can, is, to be very specific about it, Bob Dylan in the late seventies. If even Bob Dylan can run out of juice then everyone's gonna run out and that makes me hammer it for all its worth. Of course, if I run out of songs than I'll just coast, tour and not release new material,” he adds, laughing.
“I want to see it as a way into the new album,” Frank says of the new five track EP. “I'm quite confident in the stockpile of songs I've got at the moment and its almost quite hard to choose what songs are gonna go on the EP rather than the record but I think its important to stress that it's not gonna be second class songs on the EP. The lead track is gonna be I Still Believe which is rapidly turning into a live favourite.” Frank's recent iTunes Festival performance at the Roundhouse included this huge, jaunty singalong. With lyrics espousing the virtues of rock and roll, a choral echo primed for arenas and a central lyric that goes 'I still believe (I still believe)/In the need for guitar and drums and desperate poetry', its no surprise that about its first UK outing at a last minute secret show at The Flowerpot in Kentish Town Frank says “the crowd response to it was totally overwhelming, more for any new song I've ever had”. Nevertheless, while he is aware of the importance of meshing his passionate lyricism with indelible hooks, something he's incredibly adept at, it's not necessarily the most fulfilling of his oeuvre for him.
“That was an easy song for me to write. I can already tell you what my favourite song on the next record is going to be and it's not going to be a crowd favourite and we probably won't play it more than once live”, he admits. “It's just got an incredibly dense and complicated set of lyrics that took me forever and its the closest I've ever felt that I've got to writing poetry in my life. I just spent ages on meter and rhythm and rhyming structure. This is not a gripe in anyway but I always felt like people hone in on the more simplistic stuff, with the notable exception of 'Prufrock' which is a crowd favourite and one of the best sets of words I've ever turned out. I'm just geeky about words,” he says, shrugging.
Frank has made no secret of his adoration and continuous research into English folk music, another subject he can be incredibly 'geeky' about. He points to his suitcase – awaiting its trip to Canada the very next morning - which has a volume detailing the history of English folk songs during our conversation. He has also recorded a version of Barbara Allen, first mentioned as a Scottish folk song in Samuel Pepys diary, as well as performing it completely acapella at Shepherd's Bush Empire. This may well have started a trend. “I've been writing a few acapella songs recently. I also found this old myth which is a folk tale from the New Forest, which is just down the road from where I'm from. William II, was killed in a hunting accident in the forest and there's a local myth that his father William the Conqueror stole commoner John the Blacksmith's land for royal hunting grounds and John the Blacksmith laid a curse on the King and said 'I'll kill your son for stealing my land.' I'm just trying to turn that into a traditional song.” Frank also isn't shy about his libertarian political standpoint. Songs like Sons of Liberty should make that really clear. Discussing everything from government funded lobby/charity groups and his distaste for such a practice to the real Robin Hood being a tax-hating worker, its easy to get Frank onto a tangent which eludes an answer entirely, while showing how much he thinks, reads, absorbs and consequently, has to say. The topic of place spreads from “a slight obsession with Ernest Hemingway and this idea of collecting experience,” to the possibility of playing prison shows around London and even the Alternative USO, for US soldiers at military bases and even Afghanistan. He references Kerouac's On The Road and being asked by an American customs official on the phone if he was “the singer in Million Dead”. These tangents are triggered simply by his need to express his love of new experiences and returning to his own country.
“In the last couple of days I've just finished a song about rivers and England. Even when talking about something else, when there comes a time to mention a city or a place, without wanting to sound like Lily Allen, (mocking singing voice)'al fresco, Tesco', I'd rather drop Manchester or Exeter into a song. I probably go more to Denver than I do Exeter but Exeter sounds more relevant to me. I completely agree with you that a sense of place is fascinating and really important and that's one of the many things that attracts me to folk music generally. When I go to other places I'm always super interested in how people live, how other people work and I think it makes me appreciate my own cultural and political identity a little more.”
It's an issue that dominates the media, arts and, yes, songwriting and it's genuinely refreshing to have an increasingly popular musician approach the matter from both a personal and educated standpoint.
Perhaps the biggest shift from his defiantly solo beginnings, and one that originally caused a schism between fans, has been the introduction of his band. They comprise of three members of Oxford band Dive Dive – bassist Tarrant Anderson, guitarist Ben Lloyd and drummer Nigel Powell – and keys player/multi-instrumentalist Matt Nasir. Though they've been present since the first full band show in Oxford's Port Mahon on 20th January 2007, with Matt joining in October of 2008, third album Poetry of the Deed is the first to have the whole band recording their parts in the studio at the same time. “I still say this is MY project and I have done this,” proclaims Frank. “(But) there are one or two songs I don't like and/or can't do solo already, though I have to say I'm slightly annoyed by that because I do like the idea that there's always a solo version of the song that I can play.”
Though Frank refutes the idea that he couldn't imagine his songs without the other musician's contributions, he's very stringent on one point: “I certainly don't want to play with any other musicians any time soon,” he says. “We've actually legally bound ourselves to each other quite recently which I'm very happy about and I was keen to do. There's a strength to the paradigm of one man and his guitar which is important, and there is a reason I'm doing this under my own name and not in a band and all the rest of it, so I don't want to lose sight of any of that but they are important to what I do, particularly to the live show now.” Yet, there have been challenges along the way. Not least the balance between being the four guys in Frank's backing band, and turning into a band with equal billing to Frank himself. His rather cynical but hilarious nickname given to him by the band is 'the product', which aptly distinguishes their roles.
“In the annals of rock and roll, there's not that many well-known established backing bands. There's E Street, there's Crazy Horse but its a delicate balance and I think its great that the guys in the band have got that now. I'm more than happy and comfortable to talk about them in interviews and introduce them on stage and I like that its got to a point where people know them by name. Fans are like 'hey it's Nigel' backstage.”
Inevitably, for a man wanting to distance himself from previous working practices in hardcore and rock bands, there has been a certain amount of “headbutting”when working on new material. “We're still learning. See, one of my reservations about Poetry of the Deed as a record is that I got overly carried away with recording with a band. I think arrangement wise it just kinda goes like that,” he says moving his hand upon an invisible horizontal conveyor belt. “Whereas Love Ire and Song and Sleep Is For the Week have a lot more peaks and troughs. I think part of the reason for that is I was like 'I've got a band in the studio! Everybody play all the time, on everything!' and I think for the next record I'm now less worried saying to a band member, 'hey, you know what? You're not playing on this one'. I feel like we're reaching an equilibrium now and I would love to look back like Springsteen at, say, Born To Run through to Born In The USA, where there's that string of great E-Street band records. I'd love to look from Poetry of the Deed through to whatever album in the same way...”
A week ago at time of writing, Frank won the Kerrang! No Half Measures award, formally the Spirit of Independence award which has seemingly been renamed specifically for him. I don't think there's many who would argue with the sentiment and, as a final example of why he deserves this recognition, Frank tackles my query on just why he considers himself an entertainer rather than an artist. “I don't think there's anything more pretentious than referring to yourself as an artist. I think other people can decide whether what you do is art. Obviously what I do is songwriting and in a broader sense I'm an entertainer. There are people who are very snobby about the term entertainer. Off the top of my head (political activist punk band and one of Frank and my favourite bands as younger men) Propagandhi said: 'It seems we're only here to entertain.' And I think 'ONLY entertain?'. See, you can tie yourself in with travelling players and vaudeville and anyone who has got up on a stage and tried to make people feel better about their life. I actually happen to think that's a very noble tradition to be a part of. So if someone else wants to describe what I do as art, that's fine I'm just not gonna get involved. It's not really for me to say. Actually, I don't think it's for anyone to say except when I'm dead, or at least, older. I think Born To Run is art and I think first of all, we can judge this more than Springsteen can and second we can judge it because it has survived the passage of time and it has become a cultural landmark, in a way. I don't wanna stand here and say I engage in art. I engage in songwriting which might cumulatively become art. I certainly think that of all the tests to establish whether something is art or not, the test of time is a pretty strong one. Townes Van Zandt was really not popular in the day but he has endured and the reason he's endured is because he was a fabulous artist. I know it sounds like a self absorbed thing to be concerned about, but first of all I don't like the connotations of the word artist because the kind of people who describe themselves as artists are cunts. But, also, I'm really bothered about reclaiming the term entertainer. I have this mental image of the old luvvie getting up to play a pantomime dame for the 700th time at the age of 75 and saying 'my public need me' and you know what, they fucking do. And its not because you're saving the world, but because everyone needs to have their mind taken off things. Life is horrible and entertainment and friends are God's compensation. Loudon Wainwright does that for me. He's a consummate entertainer. He tells jokes and tells stories and plays songs and gets the crowd on side and I really like picturing myself like him. I'd love to be Neil Young, doing stadium shows when I'm 60 years old but if I'm like Loudon, who is still just on the road and got enough of a crowd to pay his petrol and the hotel, I'm in.” I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it: this country needs Frank Turner; his band, his energy, his attitude, his guitar, his voice and his desperate poetry. Because if there's anyone in music who can inspire you to do the very best you can and disregard the bloated ambitions of wannabe rock stars, it's him.
Saturday 22 January 2011
Articles of 2010 Part V: Field Music
Part five of my alphabetical retrospective of interview features I wrote for Playmusic last year continues with the return - in a collective sense - of Field Music. The brothers Brewis are essentially Field Music. Andrew Moore may play drums, but it seems the trio format was always dispensable. The second self-titled album was entirely written and recorded by the Sunderland pair after they separated their efforts into two projects: namely School of Language and The Week That Was, though they both played on each other's 'solo' records.
The point is that this musical collective is fluid, not confined to the band format and the results have always been some of the consistently brilliant guitar pop in the UK. Below is the result of two inspiring phone conversations with the two men and they remain two of my favourite musicians to talk to, to quiz and to challenge. That they were so well rewarded by the UK press upon their return fills me with a lot of satisfaction. They are two of the few who truly deserve every good thing that comes their way.
What’s your motivation for making music? Have you ever questioned why you are doing and how you are doing it? Are you afraid of cracking open that particular Pandora’s Box for fear of what may spring out at you? The reason for asking, for even getting those though processes churning, is that Field Music’s new double album – their finest work to date – was born almost directly from the consequences of those questions.
The way to purify the music making process is to strip away any distracting notions that pervade upon your creative intentions. Peter and David Brewis halted Field Music’s progress after 2007’s Tones of Town because of a myriad of reasons but the one they both seem to agree on is this: “Wait a minute! We’ve accidentally become a band!” Peter exclaims, mirroring his thoughts after completing their second record. “We were in the same sort of game as Kaiser Chiefs or Bloc Party. We didn’t ever see ourselves as that sort of thing. It wasn’t really the kind of music we listen to but we felt like we needed to try and be successful because we ended up in that game and I think we just thought: let’s just stop. Let’s not do Field Music anymore.”
The result was not the loss of a promising and dedicated pop band, but rather the production of two more excellent records the following year: the laptop-rock groove of School of Language, helmed by David, and the ambitious orchestral concept album The Week That Was, led by Peter. These two releases proved David’s point that “within the sphere of indie band music, it seems like a lot of people care more about bands than the music and being in a band gets in the way of making interesting music. For us that’s a definite no no.”
With such undeniably diverse output from the same team members, albeit under the guise of solo projects, the decision to go back to Field Music feels less of a surprise and more like returning to a blueprint with a permanent black marker and some fresh designs. The critically-acclaimed album Field Music (Measure) refuses to adhere to preconceptions of what a double album should be. It does not run together smoothly. It doesn’t stick with a theme. It doesn’t even stick to a single genre with everything from funk, “musical nonsense” and found sound improvisation creeping in. “You always need something to begin with like ‘why are we actually making a record?’ It’s not to make any money because we’re never gonna do that. It’s not to be famous because we’re not interested in that. So what it is that we want to do? We’d been listening to Tusk and the White album and Physical Graffitti and things like that so we really though ‘wouldn’t it be really good fun and a good challenge to try and make a really long record?’ I think we just wanted to confuse ourselves a bit and try and make something a bit sprawling really, something that doesn’t make that much sense.” Peter’s honesty here is mirrored by his brother. Modest ambitions, a sense that music is not just their passion but something to be enjoyed and, perhaps most of all, as suggested by his own question, the need to remain true to the core of their songwriting experiences.
“We were of the mindset of: ‘oh I’ve got this piece of music and though I’ve not heard any Pink Floyd albums I think it sounds like Pink Floyd but shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Yes let’s do it!’ ‘I’ve got this song and it’s got this really kind of daft bluesy guitar riff which we would’ve never done before. Shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Is it good?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Yes then we’ll put it on!’ There was no attempt to make it seamlessly smooth and coherent.”
Of course, siblings in musical collaborations have a long rock history. As we’ve already covered in several short paragraphs, you’d expect by now that Field Music have very little in common with the Gallaghers and Davies’ of this stereotypical and outland musical world.
“I think we’re inspired by each other’s better songs. Peter brings in a song and I’m like ‘oh that’s great I wish I’d done something like that’. It may be slightly easier for us in that, well, we love each other! Sometimes we get pretty frustrated with each other but that competitiveness is never, ever a negative thing. It’s always tinged with pride and with love,” gushes David.
“Whoever writes the song, that’s the person who is in charge. It’s more difficult when we’re mixing and doing the mastering and deciding on track order because that’s when the democracy gets tested,” explains Peter. “We trust each other’s intentions and, it sounds really pretentious but, maybe also each others vision. Dave knows what he’s doing. If he needs me then he’ll ask me. If he can play something better than I can than he’ll do it himself and that’s fine. Some tracks I’m hardly on and some tracks Dave’s hardly on. In fact one of the tracks Let’s Write a Book…I went on holiday for a few days over the summer and I got back to the studio and Dave’s like: ’Hey I’ve recorded this song. Whaddya think?’ And I thought ‘Ah what?!’ To me that’s probably the best song on the record and I’m not on it.”
Nevertheless, there’s hardly a hint of jealousy, especially as Peter rationalises it by comparing the making of their new record to other classics: “I think Paul McCArtney played 90% of the instruments on the White Album, and probably Lyndsey Buckingham played 70% on Tusk. You start to think that’s fine. It’s important we enjoy the process. We’ve not enjoyed making records before. We tried to make sure everyone was involved all the time and now we just don’t bother. We’re fine getting on with things.”
Field Music (Measure) is an inspiring work. It’s a collection of twenty songs linked only by the Brewis’ and their studio. There were no rules laid down except for the one David expresses early on during our phone interview: “We wanna be able to make the best music we can make and operate in a way that conforms to our principles about music and our principles about how things should be.” From the exquisite merging of tinglingly picked acoustic guitar and regal string refrains on Measure to the bewildering “dissonant harmony” funk of Let’s Write A Book, there’s nothing here that doesn’t manage to capture those lofty goals. The result is armfuls of memorable melodies and a range of expressions which stretch from poignant all the way to celebratory.
Field Music’s key workspace is their studio to the point where David says that “our approach to making records is entirely formed by always recording ourselves.” It seems that self recording has been so essential to Field Music’s ethos that it’s inconceivable that they could work any other way. “I can’t imagine me not knowing how I wanted something to sound and I think really what we’ve found out over the years is we can pick up enough of the technical skills required to do whatever we need to do in an independent way much faster than we can explain to someone else what we’re trying to do. And that’s been made even more stark because there are so few new records we’re interested in. So it’s not like ‘oh I love the sound of that record. I want to work with that person because I think he’ll understand what we do’. There aren’t really any examples of that. The records that we like the sound of are usually stylistically a long way away from what we do. Of course we couldn’t afford a producer, so it’s completely theoretical anyway,” says David.
As well as saving money you don’t have in the long-run, ‘home’ recording has myriad benefits from the skills you develop to being able to realising the soundscape in your head in your own time. Field Music clearly relish the opportunity to craft the sounds they want within the confines of their own studio, as David explains. “Every song we keep trying to find a better way of doing something or we’ll have an idea and you’ll have to go through the quite fun process of figuring out technically how we can do that with our fairly limited resources. That’s something which entirely comes from recording ourselves. Also, coming form a point of really limited technical expertise, we don’t really know the proper ways of doing anything and most of the recording techniques that we use that I really like are, in one sense or another, against the rules. We record most things in ways that are unlike what you’d see in most of the studios that we could ever afford.”
Both David and Peter record ideas on their laptops, using software to compose before bringing those ideas to fruition in their studio. Not all the sounds on Field Music (Measure) are from instruments either. The last four songs on the fourth side – the Brewis’ always think in terms of vinyl with all their records – utilise sounds Peter recorded outside, including at his favourite café in his hometown of Sunderland. “It comes from an idea of improvisation when in our general every day lives people move around, they shiuffle their feet, they make noises they drive their cars they whistle they mutter away they beep their horns - there’s no such thing as an unmusical sound and that’s because everything has I suppose what you’d call a gesture. Rather than just having a pitch or a rhythm it has a movement to it, a certain shape and a dynamic to the sound. Those things aren’t really made by accident I don’t think. They’re made by physical things that we’re doing. In that loose sense the idea was that people are making music that I could accompany on piano or marimba or with strings.”
With refreshing approaches like these, a free spirit sense to recording thanks to their own studio and that constant guiding passion of principles throughout, it’s no real surprise that Playmusic considers Field Music one of the finest pop bands of the last decade. Similarly, it’s very hard to argue with David’s sentiments when he unexpectedly, but justifiably, let’s rip about a few untruths about music which Field Music are fundamentally opposed to. “There’s a real sheen of dishonesty which runs through the music business, which is distasteful because pop music sells itself by its authenticity. There’s fuck all of that as far as I can see. Authenticity has become like a genre rather than having anything deep seeded to it and musicians up and down the land are completely deluding themselves that they are honest and that they just ‘do what they feel’. When people say ‘I just do what I feel’ it means ‘I don’t want to think about it because I probably won’t like what it is’. I want to define us as being against that. It especially galls me that people associate not thinking about stuff as being authentic. ‘We don’t think about what we do, we just do it.’ Well for a start that’s not how thought works. It’s certainly not how my creative process works yet there’s this whole mythology around just ‘doing what you feel’ and not thinking about it coz that just spoils it. Well, what that mostly equates to is people repeating themselves, deluding themselves and making very sub-standard copies of whatever was most prevalent when they were 18. Obviously when I put it in those kind of propaganda terms it doesn’t sound like a very good idea.”
Field Music balance intelligence and intuition, understand that great accomplishments come from hard work, not some outdated notion of spiritual guidance and refuse to let anything get in the way of a good song. They understand that “the whole act of recording music is pretty contrived and ridiculous” which is why their new record is elaborate, open minded and, yes, in places just slightly ridiculous. Hardly ever does a musical duo come along that is so aware of what they want to do, why they want to do it and are so riddled with conviction on how they are going to do it. So, please, make the most of what we’ve got and hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to follow your own path too.
The point is that this musical collective is fluid, not confined to the band format and the results have always been some of the consistently brilliant guitar pop in the UK. Below is the result of two inspiring phone conversations with the two men and they remain two of my favourite musicians to talk to, to quiz and to challenge. That they were so well rewarded by the UK press upon their return fills me with a lot of satisfaction. They are two of the few who truly deserve every good thing that comes their way.
What’s your motivation for making music? Have you ever questioned why you are doing and how you are doing it? Are you afraid of cracking open that particular Pandora’s Box for fear of what may spring out at you? The reason for asking, for even getting those though processes churning, is that Field Music’s new double album – their finest work to date – was born almost directly from the consequences of those questions.
The way to purify the music making process is to strip away any distracting notions that pervade upon your creative intentions. Peter and David Brewis halted Field Music’s progress after 2007’s Tones of Town because of a myriad of reasons but the one they both seem to agree on is this: “Wait a minute! We’ve accidentally become a band!” Peter exclaims, mirroring his thoughts after completing their second record. “We were in the same sort of game as Kaiser Chiefs or Bloc Party. We didn’t ever see ourselves as that sort of thing. It wasn’t really the kind of music we listen to but we felt like we needed to try and be successful because we ended up in that game and I think we just thought: let’s just stop. Let’s not do Field Music anymore.”
The result was not the loss of a promising and dedicated pop band, but rather the production of two more excellent records the following year: the laptop-rock groove of School of Language, helmed by David, and the ambitious orchestral concept album The Week That Was, led by Peter. These two releases proved David’s point that “within the sphere of indie band music, it seems like a lot of people care more about bands than the music and being in a band gets in the way of making interesting music. For us that’s a definite no no.”
With such undeniably diverse output from the same team members, albeit under the guise of solo projects, the decision to go back to Field Music feels less of a surprise and more like returning to a blueprint with a permanent black marker and some fresh designs. The critically-acclaimed album Field Music (Measure) refuses to adhere to preconceptions of what a double album should be. It does not run together smoothly. It doesn’t stick with a theme. It doesn’t even stick to a single genre with everything from funk, “musical nonsense” and found sound improvisation creeping in. “You always need something to begin with like ‘why are we actually making a record?’ It’s not to make any money because we’re never gonna do that. It’s not to be famous because we’re not interested in that. So what it is that we want to do? We’d been listening to Tusk and the White album and Physical Graffitti and things like that so we really though ‘wouldn’t it be really good fun and a good challenge to try and make a really long record?’ I think we just wanted to confuse ourselves a bit and try and make something a bit sprawling really, something that doesn’t make that much sense.” Peter’s honesty here is mirrored by his brother. Modest ambitions, a sense that music is not just their passion but something to be enjoyed and, perhaps most of all, as suggested by his own question, the need to remain true to the core of their songwriting experiences.
“We were of the mindset of: ‘oh I’ve got this piece of music and though I’ve not heard any Pink Floyd albums I think it sounds like Pink Floyd but shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Yes let’s do it!’ ‘I’ve got this song and it’s got this really kind of daft bluesy guitar riff which we would’ve never done before. Shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Is it good?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Yes then we’ll put it on!’ There was no attempt to make it seamlessly smooth and coherent.”
Of course, siblings in musical collaborations have a long rock history. As we’ve already covered in several short paragraphs, you’d expect by now that Field Music have very little in common with the Gallaghers and Davies’ of this stereotypical and outland musical world.
“I think we’re inspired by each other’s better songs. Peter brings in a song and I’m like ‘oh that’s great I wish I’d done something like that’. It may be slightly easier for us in that, well, we love each other! Sometimes we get pretty frustrated with each other but that competitiveness is never, ever a negative thing. It’s always tinged with pride and with love,” gushes David.
“Whoever writes the song, that’s the person who is in charge. It’s more difficult when we’re mixing and doing the mastering and deciding on track order because that’s when the democracy gets tested,” explains Peter. “We trust each other’s intentions and, it sounds really pretentious but, maybe also each others vision. Dave knows what he’s doing. If he needs me then he’ll ask me. If he can play something better than I can than he’ll do it himself and that’s fine. Some tracks I’m hardly on and some tracks Dave’s hardly on. In fact one of the tracks Let’s Write a Book…I went on holiday for a few days over the summer and I got back to the studio and Dave’s like: ’Hey I’ve recorded this song. Whaddya think?’ And I thought ‘Ah what?!’ To me that’s probably the best song on the record and I’m not on it.”
Nevertheless, there’s hardly a hint of jealousy, especially as Peter rationalises it by comparing the making of their new record to other classics: “I think Paul McCArtney played 90% of the instruments on the White Album, and probably Lyndsey Buckingham played 70% on Tusk. You start to think that’s fine. It’s important we enjoy the process. We’ve not enjoyed making records before. We tried to make sure everyone was involved all the time and now we just don’t bother. We’re fine getting on with things.”
Field Music (Measure) is an inspiring work. It’s a collection of twenty songs linked only by the Brewis’ and their studio. There were no rules laid down except for the one David expresses early on during our phone interview: “We wanna be able to make the best music we can make and operate in a way that conforms to our principles about music and our principles about how things should be.” From the exquisite merging of tinglingly picked acoustic guitar and regal string refrains on Measure to the bewildering “dissonant harmony” funk of Let’s Write A Book, there’s nothing here that doesn’t manage to capture those lofty goals. The result is armfuls of memorable melodies and a range of expressions which stretch from poignant all the way to celebratory.
Field Music’s key workspace is their studio to the point where David says that “our approach to making records is entirely formed by always recording ourselves.” It seems that self recording has been so essential to Field Music’s ethos that it’s inconceivable that they could work any other way. “I can’t imagine me not knowing how I wanted something to sound and I think really what we’ve found out over the years is we can pick up enough of the technical skills required to do whatever we need to do in an independent way much faster than we can explain to someone else what we’re trying to do. And that’s been made even more stark because there are so few new records we’re interested in. So it’s not like ‘oh I love the sound of that record. I want to work with that person because I think he’ll understand what we do’. There aren’t really any examples of that. The records that we like the sound of are usually stylistically a long way away from what we do. Of course we couldn’t afford a producer, so it’s completely theoretical anyway,” says David.
As well as saving money you don’t have in the long-run, ‘home’ recording has myriad benefits from the skills you develop to being able to realising the soundscape in your head in your own time. Field Music clearly relish the opportunity to craft the sounds they want within the confines of their own studio, as David explains. “Every song we keep trying to find a better way of doing something or we’ll have an idea and you’ll have to go through the quite fun process of figuring out technically how we can do that with our fairly limited resources. That’s something which entirely comes from recording ourselves. Also, coming form a point of really limited technical expertise, we don’t really know the proper ways of doing anything and most of the recording techniques that we use that I really like are, in one sense or another, against the rules. We record most things in ways that are unlike what you’d see in most of the studios that we could ever afford.”
Both David and Peter record ideas on their laptops, using software to compose before bringing those ideas to fruition in their studio. Not all the sounds on Field Music (Measure) are from instruments either. The last four songs on the fourth side – the Brewis’ always think in terms of vinyl with all their records – utilise sounds Peter recorded outside, including at his favourite café in his hometown of Sunderland. “It comes from an idea of improvisation when in our general every day lives people move around, they shiuffle their feet, they make noises they drive their cars they whistle they mutter away they beep their horns - there’s no such thing as an unmusical sound and that’s because everything has I suppose what you’d call a gesture. Rather than just having a pitch or a rhythm it has a movement to it, a certain shape and a dynamic to the sound. Those things aren’t really made by accident I don’t think. They’re made by physical things that we’re doing. In that loose sense the idea was that people are making music that I could accompany on piano or marimba or with strings.”
With refreshing approaches like these, a free spirit sense to recording thanks to their own studio and that constant guiding passion of principles throughout, it’s no real surprise that Playmusic considers Field Music one of the finest pop bands of the last decade. Similarly, it’s very hard to argue with David’s sentiments when he unexpectedly, but justifiably, let’s rip about a few untruths about music which Field Music are fundamentally opposed to. “There’s a real sheen of dishonesty which runs through the music business, which is distasteful because pop music sells itself by its authenticity. There’s fuck all of that as far as I can see. Authenticity has become like a genre rather than having anything deep seeded to it and musicians up and down the land are completely deluding themselves that they are honest and that they just ‘do what they feel’. When people say ‘I just do what I feel’ it means ‘I don’t want to think about it because I probably won’t like what it is’. I want to define us as being against that. It especially galls me that people associate not thinking about stuff as being authentic. ‘We don’t think about what we do, we just do it.’ Well for a start that’s not how thought works. It’s certainly not how my creative process works yet there’s this whole mythology around just ‘doing what you feel’ and not thinking about it coz that just spoils it. Well, what that mostly equates to is people repeating themselves, deluding themselves and making very sub-standard copies of whatever was most prevalent when they were 18. Obviously when I put it in those kind of propaganda terms it doesn’t sound like a very good idea.”
Field Music balance intelligence and intuition, understand that great accomplishments come from hard work, not some outdated notion of spiritual guidance and refuse to let anything get in the way of a good song. They understand that “the whole act of recording music is pretty contrived and ridiculous” which is why their new record is elaborate, open minded and, yes, in places just slightly ridiculous. Hardly ever does a musical duo come along that is so aware of what they want to do, why they want to do it and are so riddled with conviction on how they are going to do it. So, please, make the most of what we’ve got and hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to follow your own path too.
Wednesday 19 January 2011
Articles of 2010 Part IV: Everything Everything
AS 2011 hauls itself into life gradually, mimicking the struggle we have to pull ourselves from the gravity of our beds as light slowly begins to dawn earlier and dwindles later, I'm still eking out the last droplets of 2010.
Last year I got to interview, and throw covers at, a lot of my favourite bands from old (Slayer) to new (The Gaslight Anthem). Everything Everything represent a lot of what I adore about quirky pop music - intelligence, full-steam ahead idea factories that damn the consequences of sounding silly or unlike most other quantifiable things. The day in Abbey Road as they recorded some live tracks was a great day for one particular reason and will always be remembered for that but in addition to that special reason, EE proved to be intriguing interviewees, and damn nice to boot.
Read on for the story I hewed from that afternoon.
ALIVE TO EVERYTHING
Everything Everything are a multi-headed chimera, absorbing musical styles into its awesome presence. Playmusic managed to ensnare the Manchester based quartet after their recording for television at the legendary Abbey Road Studios, another symptom of their steady rise this year since their inclusion in the BBC Sound of 2010 poll...
Do you really have the guts to take it all the way? Are you capable of building your skills, your knowledge and your abilities and bringing them with you? Will you have the heart to plough your own furrow until an unstoppable momentum begins to bring you what you wanted over three years ago? Creativity is a torturous ally. It is with you as soon as you're able to identify how to utilise it to your advantage and pleasure, and then sticks with you imploring that you feed it, harvest its wares and use them for whatever ends are available. Everything Everything, have clearly been hounded by their creativity, chased down many corridors and twisting stairs until, finally, they were able to harness it, leash it and train it into the bewildering array of acrobatics it performs on their debut album Man Alive.
“I think a lot of people, including ourselves, look at the band's development and think 'oh they've got some synths now' when it's really not as straight-forward as that. It wasn't a switching on of the light as soon as we got a keyboard in the room. It's all in the writing and the playing and learning how to be more tasteful, how to enjoy the music more in your own playing and how to write more effectively,” explains Jonathan Higgs, who sings lead vocals, plays guitar and synths.
“We've changed a lot musically even though our very first song and single is on there,” says Jeremy Pritchard, who sings and plays bass, about the savage Suffragette Suffragette. “Even at that stage that was the slinkiest thing we had and everything else was spikier and post punky and louder. It does frustrate me that people look at bands and they need that helping hand straight away: is it based with guitars, is it based with synthesizers? We never saw the fucking difference to be honest.” Jeremy briefly cites Kele Okereke and his solo album away from Bloc Party and how “all that band was doing was channelling the spirit of dance music through a kind of punk filter to begin with” so the lauded heavy dance direction was never a surprise in any way. “I think its unimaginative of the press to portray it as a surprise,” he says. And he's right. Dividing music into camps because of the instruments used to craft the music is far too simplistic. Especially if you're trying to pigeonhole a band like Everything Everything.
Instead we'll talk about the stirring synthetic strings that usher in a svelte funk-inspired stew on MY KZ YR BF, all Marr-esque arpeggios before xylophonic cadences flow underneath ping-pong ball vocals that hit pitches at odds with each other. We could yell about the 8-bit synth roll on Photoshop Handsome or the Eno ambient beauty of Tin (The Manhole). Perhaps the baroque harpsichord flavour of Two For Nero strikes an inspired chord or ten while Leave The Engine Room snaps minimalistic megabytes across the triumphant melancholy of Radiohead's Let Down. Creativity is a fickle and demanding pet. The fact is their inspirations may be audible but they've been strained through an amazing amount of opinions, ideas and sudden unpredictable, at times improvised, flourishes.
“Something like QWERTY Finger on the album, I wrote that after seeing Control, the Joy Division film. I just came down thinking I want this really dirty bass riff with that amazing bass sound so I just wrote one,” says Jonathan.
“It was half the speed as well,” pipes up Jeremy, complete with dirge-y sounding slow bass imitation.
“I was massively influenced by that film but the song sounds nothing like them at all.”
“It's filtered so many more times before people get to hear it on a CD,” says Jeremy. “I remember reading about that Radiohead track Exit Music (For A Film) and the rhythm section at the end was like 'let's do something like Portishead' but they couldn't really do it properly so it comes out as its own flavour and that what we do most of the time. We're not deliberately aping other styles.”
As a result of having elements of slick polish across odd clashes of textures and sound, Everything Everything have had some unintentionally hilarious suggestions from those wanting to work with them and their music.
“I remember when we were talking to labels and one of the majors said 'how would you feel about going into the studio with Fraser T Williams?'. A year ago he was the big R & B producer for Tinchy Stryder, N Dubz, Taio Cruz and all that stuff and that is exactly the wrong idea. That was a sort of press angle as far as we could work out. We really like that music and we like to channel some of those features but still...” says Jeremy.
“The end of Schoolin' is kind of a Dr Dre homage which is kind of how it started life,” says Jonathan, carrying on the theme. “But then it's got no harmonic basis at all. There's no home chord there at all. It's sort of in e minor. It's the kind of thing Dre would probably do, but he probably wouldn't put those guitars there.”
“See, you can't go through the whole process from demoing in the bedroom to playing it live to recording and putting it out thinking I want this to sound like...whoever,” says Jeremy. “We don't. That's why it sounds like us.” Jeremy offers to go easy on our slightly banal questioning though: “You have to remember people weren't there when you wrote it,” he admits.
You can sympathise with Jeremy's plight. It's extremely difficult to answer questions about a creative process because people automatically make assumptions about your inspirations, about your working practices based on what they hear in the music. One imagines it becomes a battle to say anything besides 'it just happens and we don't know how' when faced with legions of eager interrogators. Part of what draws us to music is the magic inherent in whatever we listen to. If you can't work out how it was made, it becomes something more than some miraculous composition of chords and a voice. Creativity remains an intricate, almost unexplainable thing. Another example:
Jonathan's extraordinary falsetto-laden vocal lines, scaled further into the Parthenon of amazement by his syllable-spilling, almost cryptic lyrics, sound as much like an instrument as a direct emotional hook to hang songs upon. Nevertheless, he denies that his choice of words are utilised for mere musical device, even occasionally. “No that's something that's appeared in print once or twice before, maybe because of a misquote or something, but I don't really think that at all. I don't use words to fill a gap. I always make sure they mean something as well as having the rhythm. I always make sure the melody is there and sometimes the rhythms get moved along with the lyrics. However, there's a lot of 'oohs' and 'aahs' on the record. Those are definitely instrumental ideas.” Man Alive's most obviously 'rock' moment, QWERTY Finger, jams these oblique sentences - 'We slide in from the epoch of anglo american wire and a saxon spire/glint in the glare far above me - put pressure on it/She collapse me/Man alive, her every ache a baton to me/Age of ending/where's the worth in proving I was here?' - into a vocal that shudders, explodes and smears across at least three separate ideas. It's only when we reach the middle 8 that normality is even approached.
“In some songs the verses in particular are more intense melodramatically and syllable-wise. You still get the occasional chink of light in the tunnel when something more legato will happen and there's examples of that in Photoshop Handsome and Schoolin'. There's just enough breathing space there. You've got to have those things otherwise you don't get the same joy if everything is ridiculously complicated,” admits Jeremy.
“If I keep coming back to something then there's obviously something in it that I'm enjoying myself and hopefully other people who hear it will enjoy as well. But I like complex melody and complex rhythm more than anything. Still, there are times when I had to be talked out of things,” says Jonathan, prompting laughter. “There are times with other parts, like telling Alex (Robertshaw, guitars and vocals) 'you need to play this',” he continues, imitating the sound of a complex arpeggio ascending to the clouds as an example. “Then the response is 'we could do that or we could do something else'. It's a balancing act sometimes. If it's something so full on we try and ease up in the chorus. If it's completely ridiculous then it's no fun for anyone, including me.”
“I don't think we know how to do it.” says Jeremy shrugging. “I think we've got a lucky a few times. As you said it's the balancing act of having the pop appeal and endurance I suppose. It probably has more to do with our musical training than we realise, just having that brain. We came from a classical schooled orchestra background.” Cello, trumpet, violin, piano were all school instruments that specific members learned. It is even mentioned that drummer and vocalist Michael Spearman is the best keys player in the band but is the only member who didn't play keys on the record. “He refuses to do it. He says its like typing to him. There's no art to it,” is the excuse. So, perhaps creativity is a lover who takes you to completely unexpected places the longer you get acquainted.
Everything Everything have long been an intriguing prospect as much for their utter devotion to maintaining control over how they present themselves and their music as for the end result itself. “We made our own videos, artwork and website and that really helped us out,” says Jonathan. The original Photoshop Handsome video, for instance, was made by the band on a tiny budget with the volunteered help of friends, and yet captured the frenetic atmosphere of the song perfectly.
“It gave us an identity. Basically, if you can give a crack at something, you should. You don't need all these professionals. You dilute your own identity each time you get someone else involved. I think that's why we were approached and signed to Geffen. We had proven ourselves to some extent and Geffen wanted us to carry on in the same vein.”
Nevertheless it remains that “songs and music are the most important thing. If you neglect that, take your eye off that for a second and concentrate on the very absorbing business side of things then you'll delay yourselves”.
Creativity waits around for no one, after all. To deliver a debut album of the unrelenting, boundless vision contained on Man Alive was a long process of determination, hard work and bravery, taking their supersonically-sprouting ideas all the way. Oh, and also having the foresight to be able to allow creativity to run at their own pace, or maybe slightly ahead, but not so much that its necessary to catch up and restrain it indefinitely. Instead, its the rest of us who may well need to sprint into Everything Everything's exhilarating proximity.
Brad Barrett
Last year I got to interview, and throw covers at, a lot of my favourite bands from old (Slayer) to new (The Gaslight Anthem). Everything Everything represent a lot of what I adore about quirky pop music - intelligence, full-steam ahead idea factories that damn the consequences of sounding silly or unlike most other quantifiable things. The day in Abbey Road as they recorded some live tracks was a great day for one particular reason and will always be remembered for that but in addition to that special reason, EE proved to be intriguing interviewees, and damn nice to boot.
Read on for the story I hewed from that afternoon.
ALIVE TO EVERYTHING
Everything Everything are a multi-headed chimera, absorbing musical styles into its awesome presence. Playmusic managed to ensnare the Manchester based quartet after their recording for television at the legendary Abbey Road Studios, another symptom of their steady rise this year since their inclusion in the BBC Sound of 2010 poll...
Do you really have the guts to take it all the way? Are you capable of building your skills, your knowledge and your abilities and bringing them with you? Will you have the heart to plough your own furrow until an unstoppable momentum begins to bring you what you wanted over three years ago? Creativity is a torturous ally. It is with you as soon as you're able to identify how to utilise it to your advantage and pleasure, and then sticks with you imploring that you feed it, harvest its wares and use them for whatever ends are available. Everything Everything, have clearly been hounded by their creativity, chased down many corridors and twisting stairs until, finally, they were able to harness it, leash it and train it into the bewildering array of acrobatics it performs on their debut album Man Alive.
“I think a lot of people, including ourselves, look at the band's development and think 'oh they've got some synths now' when it's really not as straight-forward as that. It wasn't a switching on of the light as soon as we got a keyboard in the room. It's all in the writing and the playing and learning how to be more tasteful, how to enjoy the music more in your own playing and how to write more effectively,” explains Jonathan Higgs, who sings lead vocals, plays guitar and synths.
“We've changed a lot musically even though our very first song and single is on there,” says Jeremy Pritchard, who sings and plays bass, about the savage Suffragette Suffragette. “Even at that stage that was the slinkiest thing we had and everything else was spikier and post punky and louder. It does frustrate me that people look at bands and they need that helping hand straight away: is it based with guitars, is it based with synthesizers? We never saw the fucking difference to be honest.” Jeremy briefly cites Kele Okereke and his solo album away from Bloc Party and how “all that band was doing was channelling the spirit of dance music through a kind of punk filter to begin with” so the lauded heavy dance direction was never a surprise in any way. “I think its unimaginative of the press to portray it as a surprise,” he says. And he's right. Dividing music into camps because of the instruments used to craft the music is far too simplistic. Especially if you're trying to pigeonhole a band like Everything Everything.
Instead we'll talk about the stirring synthetic strings that usher in a svelte funk-inspired stew on MY KZ YR BF, all Marr-esque arpeggios before xylophonic cadences flow underneath ping-pong ball vocals that hit pitches at odds with each other. We could yell about the 8-bit synth roll on Photoshop Handsome or the Eno ambient beauty of Tin (The Manhole). Perhaps the baroque harpsichord flavour of Two For Nero strikes an inspired chord or ten while Leave The Engine Room snaps minimalistic megabytes across the triumphant melancholy of Radiohead's Let Down. Creativity is a fickle and demanding pet. The fact is their inspirations may be audible but they've been strained through an amazing amount of opinions, ideas and sudden unpredictable, at times improvised, flourishes.
“Something like QWERTY Finger on the album, I wrote that after seeing Control, the Joy Division film. I just came down thinking I want this really dirty bass riff with that amazing bass sound so I just wrote one,” says Jonathan.
“It was half the speed as well,” pipes up Jeremy, complete with dirge-y sounding slow bass imitation.
“I was massively influenced by that film but the song sounds nothing like them at all.”
“It's filtered so many more times before people get to hear it on a CD,” says Jeremy. “I remember reading about that Radiohead track Exit Music (For A Film) and the rhythm section at the end was like 'let's do something like Portishead' but they couldn't really do it properly so it comes out as its own flavour and that what we do most of the time. We're not deliberately aping other styles.”
As a result of having elements of slick polish across odd clashes of textures and sound, Everything Everything have had some unintentionally hilarious suggestions from those wanting to work with them and their music.
“I remember when we were talking to labels and one of the majors said 'how would you feel about going into the studio with Fraser T Williams?'. A year ago he was the big R & B producer for Tinchy Stryder, N Dubz, Taio Cruz and all that stuff and that is exactly the wrong idea. That was a sort of press angle as far as we could work out. We really like that music and we like to channel some of those features but still...” says Jeremy.
“The end of Schoolin' is kind of a Dr Dre homage which is kind of how it started life,” says Jonathan, carrying on the theme. “But then it's got no harmonic basis at all. There's no home chord there at all. It's sort of in e minor. It's the kind of thing Dre would probably do, but he probably wouldn't put those guitars there.”
“See, you can't go through the whole process from demoing in the bedroom to playing it live to recording and putting it out thinking I want this to sound like...whoever,” says Jeremy. “We don't. That's why it sounds like us.” Jeremy offers to go easy on our slightly banal questioning though: “You have to remember people weren't there when you wrote it,” he admits.
You can sympathise with Jeremy's plight. It's extremely difficult to answer questions about a creative process because people automatically make assumptions about your inspirations, about your working practices based on what they hear in the music. One imagines it becomes a battle to say anything besides 'it just happens and we don't know how' when faced with legions of eager interrogators. Part of what draws us to music is the magic inherent in whatever we listen to. If you can't work out how it was made, it becomes something more than some miraculous composition of chords and a voice. Creativity remains an intricate, almost unexplainable thing. Another example:
Jonathan's extraordinary falsetto-laden vocal lines, scaled further into the Parthenon of amazement by his syllable-spilling, almost cryptic lyrics, sound as much like an instrument as a direct emotional hook to hang songs upon. Nevertheless, he denies that his choice of words are utilised for mere musical device, even occasionally. “No that's something that's appeared in print once or twice before, maybe because of a misquote or something, but I don't really think that at all. I don't use words to fill a gap. I always make sure they mean something as well as having the rhythm. I always make sure the melody is there and sometimes the rhythms get moved along with the lyrics. However, there's a lot of 'oohs' and 'aahs' on the record. Those are definitely instrumental ideas.” Man Alive's most obviously 'rock' moment, QWERTY Finger, jams these oblique sentences - 'We slide in from the epoch of anglo american wire and a saxon spire/glint in the glare far above me - put pressure on it/She collapse me/Man alive, her every ache a baton to me/Age of ending/where's the worth in proving I was here?' - into a vocal that shudders, explodes and smears across at least three separate ideas. It's only when we reach the middle 8 that normality is even approached.
“In some songs the verses in particular are more intense melodramatically and syllable-wise. You still get the occasional chink of light in the tunnel when something more legato will happen and there's examples of that in Photoshop Handsome and Schoolin'. There's just enough breathing space there. You've got to have those things otherwise you don't get the same joy if everything is ridiculously complicated,” admits Jeremy.
“If I keep coming back to something then there's obviously something in it that I'm enjoying myself and hopefully other people who hear it will enjoy as well. But I like complex melody and complex rhythm more than anything. Still, there are times when I had to be talked out of things,” says Jonathan, prompting laughter. “There are times with other parts, like telling Alex (Robertshaw, guitars and vocals) 'you need to play this',” he continues, imitating the sound of a complex arpeggio ascending to the clouds as an example. “Then the response is 'we could do that or we could do something else'. It's a balancing act sometimes. If it's something so full on we try and ease up in the chorus. If it's completely ridiculous then it's no fun for anyone, including me.”
“I don't think we know how to do it.” says Jeremy shrugging. “I think we've got a lucky a few times. As you said it's the balancing act of having the pop appeal and endurance I suppose. It probably has more to do with our musical training than we realise, just having that brain. We came from a classical schooled orchestra background.” Cello, trumpet, violin, piano were all school instruments that specific members learned. It is even mentioned that drummer and vocalist Michael Spearman is the best keys player in the band but is the only member who didn't play keys on the record. “He refuses to do it. He says its like typing to him. There's no art to it,” is the excuse. So, perhaps creativity is a lover who takes you to completely unexpected places the longer you get acquainted.
Everything Everything have long been an intriguing prospect as much for their utter devotion to maintaining control over how they present themselves and their music as for the end result itself. “We made our own videos, artwork and website and that really helped us out,” says Jonathan. The original Photoshop Handsome video, for instance, was made by the band on a tiny budget with the volunteered help of friends, and yet captured the frenetic atmosphere of the song perfectly.
“It gave us an identity. Basically, if you can give a crack at something, you should. You don't need all these professionals. You dilute your own identity each time you get someone else involved. I think that's why we were approached and signed to Geffen. We had proven ourselves to some extent and Geffen wanted us to carry on in the same vein.”
Nevertheless it remains that “songs and music are the most important thing. If you neglect that, take your eye off that for a second and concentrate on the very absorbing business side of things then you'll delay yourselves”.
Creativity waits around for no one, after all. To deliver a debut album of the unrelenting, boundless vision contained on Man Alive was a long process of determination, hard work and bravery, taking their supersonically-sprouting ideas all the way. Oh, and also having the foresight to be able to allow creativity to run at their own pace, or maybe slightly ahead, but not so much that its necessary to catch up and restrain it indefinitely. Instead, its the rest of us who may well need to sprint into Everything Everything's exhilarating proximity.
Brad Barrett
Tuesday 18 January 2011
Articles of 2010 Part III: Deftones
I finally managed to interview one of my consistently favourite bands of all time back in May. Not only that, but I could grace them with a cover for Playmusic Pickup which, along with Sonic Youth, Frank Turner and a few bands I've never managed to, was always one of my biggest goals.
Anyway, I'm tired after 6 days and nights in California doing this, so no more words from me....except for ones I've already written. Enjoy, or don't. It's entirely up to you, funnily enough.
Trying to do justice to an artist or ensemble whose music has consistently moved you for years with mere words when they have the full articulacy of sound in comparison is one of the hardest tasks a writer faces. Descending to hyperbole and analogy is all too easy and drifting into tangents which merely add colour to a narrative is a common trap. Sacremento's elite pioneers Deftones make my job extremely difficult, but if they didn't exist at all I would still miss them. Perhaps that's just as much about what they represent for us, the fans, as how their music has ensnared us.
The quintet currently touring the globe in promotion activities for their sixth officially released studio album, Diamond Eyes, may well be radically altered from that which made 2006's Saturday Night Wrist, but the heart, spirit and sonic sculptures are unmistakable. A huge amount of energy and thought has been expended by the band on their efforts to struggle on as a creative collective without founder member bassist and backing vocalist Chi Cheng who was left in a coma state following a severe car crash in November 2008, and at time of writing is at home under constant care of his family and a medical expert. Nevertheless, their first album without Chi (former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega has taken on bass duties) is perhaps their strongest work to date. Amalgamating the eerie, stark and savage sounds the band have been cultivating since 1997's Around the Fur and 2000's White Pony into a truly cohesive and resoundingly heavy record, Diamond Eyes represents a little bit more than a snapshot in time.
“Music in general that I listen to is pretty much put on because I wanna change my headspace so I do feel the same way about the music that we make. Why not be able to use it to escape?,” asks vocalist and guitarist Chino Moreno reasonably. A quick glance at our surroundings, Chino, keyboard/electronics guru Frank Delgado and I, in this inviting central London hotel room immediately makes Chino qualify his statement and question. “It's not like our life is so terrible that we need to escape it but just for a head change, a mood, to get into a groove.”
Placing Deftones' music on a pedestal goes hand-in-hand with the escapism inherently captured within their dense yet subtle concoction of voodoo ambience and brutal riffs. The effect is not unlike exquisite caligraphy formed from fissures and unstable faultlines. “Sonically and musically that's what the bands music does so lyrically I try to live up to that and try not to put up any boundaries. I do none of that.” In the past, Chino's lyrics may have been more direct, but the oblique references, obtuse and haunting imagery as well as a consistent fascination with waves could easily be the subject of several articles in their own right. Of course that isn't our intention here, but it's necessary to briefly illustrate that every part of the Deftones art is inseparable from the other. Though there is no glue that holds the operation together, it's arguable that certain aspects are often overlooked in favour of the most tangible. Hence, Frank Delgado's intricate webs of sound, flowing from effects driven turntables, synthesizers or warped samples and tape effects – perhaps because of their understated yet essential role in the music or perhaps due to being the least visible as well as the latest permanent member (barring Vega) – will be disregarded in favour of Steph Carpenter's magma guitars or Chino's scathing howl and seductive whispers.
“Whether its a riff Chino's creating subtly on his guitar or with me messing around on a synthesizer, we're getting better at closing it all in a song instead of one song being one way and another song being another way. We're able to mesh them now,” explains Frank. Since the eclectic platter of White Pony, where blistering metal like Elite resided along surprising, lush electronica as on Teenager, the band has always had tracks which proudly strutted their opposing colours. Diamond Eyes is notable for having seemingly abandoned that in favour of cohesion which doesn't narrow their ambition or experimental sides in the least. Frank's role, as a result has grown, despite his own misgivings about his position.
“Especially with Steph's sonics with his low guitar, at times it was hard for me,” he admits. “Like how the hell am I gonna fit in this spectrum of sound? On the earlier albums, I don't know how I'm supposed to do this in this band I don't know what the fuck I'm doing but I'm gonna paint my shit and I knew what I wasn't gonna do. As I got better at it I could extend these sounds and change pitches if I borrow Steph's guitar pedal. That's how I ended up creating a sequence of melodies.”
These cycling, shimmering, harrowing sounds creep throughout the Deftones work but is especially evident as defining moments on classics like Change (In The House Of Flies), Digital Bath and Hexagram – those voices, smeared squealing, putty-like sampled garbling are all Frank's work. Diamond Eyes begins with a statement of intent; a startling onward rush of translucent sound before Steph's sludge guitar threatens to drown all else out. By chorus time a sublime euphoric upper melody has arisen from Frank's effects and it's clear immediately that the awe-inspiring balance between metal, hip-hop, new wave, electro and who knows what other genres effortlessly glide together.
“We all love the same things but we've all found them at different parts of our lives or different routes got us there. It's crazy because sometimes people like to think of Steph as the metal dude and Chino as this new romantic dude and Abe...well he's the black dude,” laughs Frank with Chino joining in. Drummer Abe Cunningham is caucasian yet his hip-hop influenced beats suggest otherwise. “But it's not really that way man. People would bug out if they saw Stpeh in his truest form. He fucking loves Depeche Mode and he loves the shittiest stuff too, like we all do. We saw him listening to PM Dawn and it looked like he was thinking about his whole life!” With those sort of revelations it's no wonder Deftones are one of only a handful of bands in the last twenty years that can stand up and be counted as a truly defined unit with a musical DNA that is impossible to replicate. “It just so happens we're very good at these different parts and getting them to work. We're all honestly trying to do it a little bit cooler, a little bit better and that way it doesn't come off as painting by numbers. That's all those other bands.” Diamond Eyes has proven this to be fact; it's a Deftones record which doesn't surprise at all yet absolutely astounds in its vision and execution.
To complicate things further, the three of us agree that those who have songs fully written inside their heads before recording are to be wondered at. Chino says: “Some people may be able to do that and that's great but for us the fact that things aren't preconceived that's kinda the uniqueness about us. The organic quality. These are some my favourite songs we've written, those with that organic quality and we still have to work at it. But the more organic and natural the better. If there's an idea we start gravitating towards it filters through us and who else is going to do something like that? No one else because there's only one of me, one of him, one of Steph and when you put the five of us together that's a unique sound, something that's not contrived and not formulated.”
“It's funny because in reality, say we wanted to make this electronic song it's not gonna be Deftones before it filters through Steph and Chi and by then it's already fucking morphed already,” says Frank. “The same thing with Stephan's crushing riffs. I mean he was riffing like I hadn't seen him do in a long time but it would just stay like that if it didn't go through Chino and Abe and then it becomes something like You've Seen The Butcher which is something we could never do by thinking in that way. That shit just happens.” Opening with the distinctive jagged chug of guitars before the hesitant, off-the-beat pounding drums and layers of arcane sounds, You've Seen The Butcher branches into stoner rock riffs, long sustained hollering from Chino and seething undercurrents which bellow from the undulating crescendo section. And yes, reading that back it's fair to say that their music is fairly indescribable.
In an ever growing list of contrasts they somehow got Diamond Eyes to sound like a studio creation that is still achievable live.
“We were pretty well prepared as far as being able to play them live pretty much before we went into the studio which was important I think for the way the record sounds and now us going out to play we have a lot more confidence playing it because we're pretty strong. It's probably closer to the way we did things when we didn't have the means to use pro tools or going into a studio and writing the record there,” explains Chino. The record was done in two months, a much shorter time than the last three. It seems as well as having the drive to create – bearing in mind that the band had already written and recorded their sixth album Eros with Chi before the accident, a record that may see the light of day at some point – the refreshing back-to-basics attitude of avoiding pro-tools and rehearsing songs to perfection before recording led to the precise, amalgamated feel of the album.
“The producer Nick worked with us in pre-production which was pretty much the whole writing process. He was very helpful in getting us on what the task of the day or the hour was. In the past we'd all start digging on the same idea and without anybody there to kinda get us focused on that we'd start somewhere and start drifting off to nowhere land, although that's not a bad thing,” says Chino. “But if nobody's speaking up and keeping things in context or keeping an eye focused on the essence of the idea... It snowballed. We'd start with something hone in on it and complete something in a few hours that wasn't there before. When it's done that's more ammo you tuck that into your coat and move on to the next thing so you start getting really inspired. Once you start getting in that rhythm it feels great and everybody hits a super creative stride.”
Essentially, the core of Deftones has always been this unstoppable gang, a group of friends who share such disparate musical tastes but work so closely together that they could only ever end up sounding themselves. This has always been reflected in the warmth and density of their sound, something that embraces you in a way similar music fails to do. Everything from the splicing of musical genetics to the caustic or glorious performances – live or on record – enrapture and captivate but their essential elements are most poignantly proven on Diamond Eyes: courage, conviction and optimism in the darkest of hours and this is something Deftones fans across the globe have taken to heart from this most important of bands.
Brad Barrett
Anyway, I'm tired after 6 days and nights in California doing this, so no more words from me....except for ones I've already written. Enjoy, or don't. It's entirely up to you, funnily enough.
Trying to do justice to an artist or ensemble whose music has consistently moved you for years with mere words when they have the full articulacy of sound in comparison is one of the hardest tasks a writer faces. Descending to hyperbole and analogy is all too easy and drifting into tangents which merely add colour to a narrative is a common trap. Sacremento's elite pioneers Deftones make my job extremely difficult, but if they didn't exist at all I would still miss them. Perhaps that's just as much about what they represent for us, the fans, as how their music has ensnared us.
The quintet currently touring the globe in promotion activities for their sixth officially released studio album, Diamond Eyes, may well be radically altered from that which made 2006's Saturday Night Wrist, but the heart, spirit and sonic sculptures are unmistakable. A huge amount of energy and thought has been expended by the band on their efforts to struggle on as a creative collective without founder member bassist and backing vocalist Chi Cheng who was left in a coma state following a severe car crash in November 2008, and at time of writing is at home under constant care of his family and a medical expert. Nevertheless, their first album without Chi (former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega has taken on bass duties) is perhaps their strongest work to date. Amalgamating the eerie, stark and savage sounds the band have been cultivating since 1997's Around the Fur and 2000's White Pony into a truly cohesive and resoundingly heavy record, Diamond Eyes represents a little bit more than a snapshot in time.
“Music in general that I listen to is pretty much put on because I wanna change my headspace so I do feel the same way about the music that we make. Why not be able to use it to escape?,” asks vocalist and guitarist Chino Moreno reasonably. A quick glance at our surroundings, Chino, keyboard/electronics guru Frank Delgado and I, in this inviting central London hotel room immediately makes Chino qualify his statement and question. “It's not like our life is so terrible that we need to escape it but just for a head change, a mood, to get into a groove.”
Placing Deftones' music on a pedestal goes hand-in-hand with the escapism inherently captured within their dense yet subtle concoction of voodoo ambience and brutal riffs. The effect is not unlike exquisite caligraphy formed from fissures and unstable faultlines. “Sonically and musically that's what the bands music does so lyrically I try to live up to that and try not to put up any boundaries. I do none of that.” In the past, Chino's lyrics may have been more direct, but the oblique references, obtuse and haunting imagery as well as a consistent fascination with waves could easily be the subject of several articles in their own right. Of course that isn't our intention here, but it's necessary to briefly illustrate that every part of the Deftones art is inseparable from the other. Though there is no glue that holds the operation together, it's arguable that certain aspects are often overlooked in favour of the most tangible. Hence, Frank Delgado's intricate webs of sound, flowing from effects driven turntables, synthesizers or warped samples and tape effects – perhaps because of their understated yet essential role in the music or perhaps due to being the least visible as well as the latest permanent member (barring Vega) – will be disregarded in favour of Steph Carpenter's magma guitars or Chino's scathing howl and seductive whispers.
“Whether its a riff Chino's creating subtly on his guitar or with me messing around on a synthesizer, we're getting better at closing it all in a song instead of one song being one way and another song being another way. We're able to mesh them now,” explains Frank. Since the eclectic platter of White Pony, where blistering metal like Elite resided along surprising, lush electronica as on Teenager, the band has always had tracks which proudly strutted their opposing colours. Diamond Eyes is notable for having seemingly abandoned that in favour of cohesion which doesn't narrow their ambition or experimental sides in the least. Frank's role, as a result has grown, despite his own misgivings about his position.
“Especially with Steph's sonics with his low guitar, at times it was hard for me,” he admits. “Like how the hell am I gonna fit in this spectrum of sound? On the earlier albums, I don't know how I'm supposed to do this in this band I don't know what the fuck I'm doing but I'm gonna paint my shit and I knew what I wasn't gonna do. As I got better at it I could extend these sounds and change pitches if I borrow Steph's guitar pedal. That's how I ended up creating a sequence of melodies.”
These cycling, shimmering, harrowing sounds creep throughout the Deftones work but is especially evident as defining moments on classics like Change (In The House Of Flies), Digital Bath and Hexagram – those voices, smeared squealing, putty-like sampled garbling are all Frank's work. Diamond Eyes begins with a statement of intent; a startling onward rush of translucent sound before Steph's sludge guitar threatens to drown all else out. By chorus time a sublime euphoric upper melody has arisen from Frank's effects and it's clear immediately that the awe-inspiring balance between metal, hip-hop, new wave, electro and who knows what other genres effortlessly glide together.
“We all love the same things but we've all found them at different parts of our lives or different routes got us there. It's crazy because sometimes people like to think of Steph as the metal dude and Chino as this new romantic dude and Abe...well he's the black dude,” laughs Frank with Chino joining in. Drummer Abe Cunningham is caucasian yet his hip-hop influenced beats suggest otherwise. “But it's not really that way man. People would bug out if they saw Stpeh in his truest form. He fucking loves Depeche Mode and he loves the shittiest stuff too, like we all do. We saw him listening to PM Dawn and it looked like he was thinking about his whole life!” With those sort of revelations it's no wonder Deftones are one of only a handful of bands in the last twenty years that can stand up and be counted as a truly defined unit with a musical DNA that is impossible to replicate. “It just so happens we're very good at these different parts and getting them to work. We're all honestly trying to do it a little bit cooler, a little bit better and that way it doesn't come off as painting by numbers. That's all those other bands.” Diamond Eyes has proven this to be fact; it's a Deftones record which doesn't surprise at all yet absolutely astounds in its vision and execution.
To complicate things further, the three of us agree that those who have songs fully written inside their heads before recording are to be wondered at. Chino says: “Some people may be able to do that and that's great but for us the fact that things aren't preconceived that's kinda the uniqueness about us. The organic quality. These are some my favourite songs we've written, those with that organic quality and we still have to work at it. But the more organic and natural the better. If there's an idea we start gravitating towards it filters through us and who else is going to do something like that? No one else because there's only one of me, one of him, one of Steph and when you put the five of us together that's a unique sound, something that's not contrived and not formulated.”
“It's funny because in reality, say we wanted to make this electronic song it's not gonna be Deftones before it filters through Steph and Chi and by then it's already fucking morphed already,” says Frank. “The same thing with Stephan's crushing riffs. I mean he was riffing like I hadn't seen him do in a long time but it would just stay like that if it didn't go through Chino and Abe and then it becomes something like You've Seen The Butcher which is something we could never do by thinking in that way. That shit just happens.” Opening with the distinctive jagged chug of guitars before the hesitant, off-the-beat pounding drums and layers of arcane sounds, You've Seen The Butcher branches into stoner rock riffs, long sustained hollering from Chino and seething undercurrents which bellow from the undulating crescendo section. And yes, reading that back it's fair to say that their music is fairly indescribable.
In an ever growing list of contrasts they somehow got Diamond Eyes to sound like a studio creation that is still achievable live.
“We were pretty well prepared as far as being able to play them live pretty much before we went into the studio which was important I think for the way the record sounds and now us going out to play we have a lot more confidence playing it because we're pretty strong. It's probably closer to the way we did things when we didn't have the means to use pro tools or going into a studio and writing the record there,” explains Chino. The record was done in two months, a much shorter time than the last three. It seems as well as having the drive to create – bearing in mind that the band had already written and recorded their sixth album Eros with Chi before the accident, a record that may see the light of day at some point – the refreshing back-to-basics attitude of avoiding pro-tools and rehearsing songs to perfection before recording led to the precise, amalgamated feel of the album.
“The producer Nick worked with us in pre-production which was pretty much the whole writing process. He was very helpful in getting us on what the task of the day or the hour was. In the past we'd all start digging on the same idea and without anybody there to kinda get us focused on that we'd start somewhere and start drifting off to nowhere land, although that's not a bad thing,” says Chino. “But if nobody's speaking up and keeping things in context or keeping an eye focused on the essence of the idea... It snowballed. We'd start with something hone in on it and complete something in a few hours that wasn't there before. When it's done that's more ammo you tuck that into your coat and move on to the next thing so you start getting really inspired. Once you start getting in that rhythm it feels great and everybody hits a super creative stride.”
Essentially, the core of Deftones has always been this unstoppable gang, a group of friends who share such disparate musical tastes but work so closely together that they could only ever end up sounding themselves. This has always been reflected in the warmth and density of their sound, something that embraces you in a way similar music fails to do. Everything from the splicing of musical genetics to the caustic or glorious performances – live or on record – enrapture and captivate but their essential elements are most poignantly proven on Diamond Eyes: courage, conviction and optimism in the darkest of hours and this is something Deftones fans across the globe have taken to heart from this most important of bands.
Brad Barrett
Sunday 9 January 2011
Articles of 2010 Part II: Chrome Hoof
So while I'm listening to the soothing white noise assault of Cementimental - definitely the best way of calming all the broiling bad feelings about impending, extortionate self-employed tax bills - it's the second installment of my alphabetical list of my own favourite articles of last year about bands.
Chrome Hoof are not just exceptional fun to listen to, but also fun to chat to and interview. This was tremendous fun to write perhaps because they were so good natured. Also they touch upon how it might be to craft as a writer, which is always interesting. Anyway, here it is. NB: no header or standfirst, perhaps because I was creatively tired out by this point.
As fellow music obsessives, there's one thing we can probably all agree on: that there is music out there demanding to be made against whatever odds are thrown at it and regardless of who will listen. Chrome Hoof are in a unique place. The core duo Leo Smee, bassist of UK doom metallers Cathedral, and his brother Milo, on drums, formed an electronic side-project which has gathered musicians, absorbed genres and adopted an indelible image of a collective adorned in disco/sci-fi hooded robes. On the day of their sit-down show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's Southbank as part of Ether Festival's programme of exploratory music, they number 22 including two guitarists, a violinist, lead vocalist Lola Olafisoye, a trumpeteer, a saxophonist, a synth player, a full choir and a harpist. It's an arresting sight, and that's before the eclectic dynamic force of their performance. With the sheer amount of troops they're leading though, it's no wonder Milo – ever smiling, ever so slightly amused – confesses to feeling a little anxious. “I'm never confident. Keeping on high alert throughout the day and getting ridiculously stressed on the day of a gig is normal for me and, hopefully, being like that raises my game by 1%. If it doesn't it's just wasting my time, which is an even more joyous thought,” he says good humouredly. It doesn't help that because of the awesome power of nature, or Eyjafjallajökul as most people are not calling it, prevented Milo flying from his home in Berlin to the UK for rehearsals.
“The new album is obviously quite epic with complex time changes and allthat nonsense,” says the softly spoken Leo. “So with only two days (rehearsal) we're gonna be a bit on the edge but I think that'll add to it. As long as 22 people start and stop at the same time it doesn't matter what happens in the middle.”
Self-deprecating to the last, Chrome Hoof undersell themselves dramatically. Their latest opus, Crush Depth, is their third official album since their 2004 self titled debut and follows the funkdiscometalorchestratronica of Pre-Emptive False Rapture. Straddling the entirety of music like some globe spinning titan, Crush Depth is an astonishing amalgamation of freeform ideas. Gutteral guitars stand alongside funk bass, warped disco synthesizers, demonic choral chants, hi-hat shuffles, cantankerous strings and all embellished with self-styled diva Lola's enigmatic vocal and lyrical bent. It's as hard to describe as it is to imagine. The only option is to listen. Milo at least attempts to explain how it all flows together.
“I actually think what these Chrome Hoof tracks end up sounding like is just an ongoing unconscious progress that everyone has. If you're a writer you'll have that going on and you'll sleep on stuff and a nice way of putting something will come to you. You don't have to sit and think how am I going to approach this one, shall we do it like this or this. It just starts unfolding you start doing stuff that subconsciously you've been working out in your head at other times.”
Working from jams, the very nature of a blueprint or formula seems alien to Chrome Hoof. That there's nothing here that could easily be distilled or co-opted by a lesser collective is tribute to the wild imaginations at work, as well as the decades of experience at the helm; although Milo confesses to a real lack of band experience, his kit skills belie that and Leo has spent his time in Cathedral since 1989. Despite this, Crush Depth was a real effort for everyone involved.
“It was pretty chaotic and quite high pressure actually. There's a little bit of a connection with the album title and the pressure of being deep under sea and things like that. Basically we've got a manager who has done a lot to make this happen because this is a massive undertaking especially for this band to create something like that. The amount of people we've had to rope in and ask favours from...”
“We've got zero budget really,” adds Leo. “Me and Milo's relationship has gone through some funny moments but we've had to stick together whatever happened. We've come out the other side. We're sponges for our life and the music we listen to, things we dig and the styles we like and it comes out, like all the bands, unconsciously, consciously and it's not until the end result when you can sit back and think 'oh, that's just happened!'. In a way, we quite ruthlessly plan something and at the same time we do jam around it. I think the album does show the year we've had through the music, through things that have happened. I don't want to sound too corny but that's how music comes out most of the time.”
It's difficult to reconcile the tough times with the glorious utopian funk soundtrack of Sea Hornet or the pounding symbiosis of Third Sun Descendent despite their fractured, schizophrenic fluidity which suggests madmen at work. Yet it's all so enthralling, it stirs the blood and feeds on your response like an emotional vampire. It's almost as if those robes, adopted early on, have cast a relentless shadow upon the music, and vice versa.
“The image feeds into the music and the other way around,” agrees Milo. “Without an overview of what it was gonna end up like, this is how things have turned out and there are reasons for that and you can make those reasons up for yourself. We've just stuck to what excites us and just just tryied to be honest with ourselves. Stuff that excites us is gonna take priority over what anyone else thinks. If you stick to that then it will go in a certain direction.” Milo smiles wryly again. “We're trying to keep the essence of what we started with although we mostly lose it.”
Brad Barrett
Chrome Hoof are not just exceptional fun to listen to, but also fun to chat to and interview. This was tremendous fun to write perhaps because they were so good natured. Also they touch upon how it might be to craft as a writer, which is always interesting. Anyway, here it is. NB: no header or standfirst, perhaps because I was creatively tired out by this point.
As fellow music obsessives, there's one thing we can probably all agree on: that there is music out there demanding to be made against whatever odds are thrown at it and regardless of who will listen. Chrome Hoof are in a unique place. The core duo Leo Smee, bassist of UK doom metallers Cathedral, and his brother Milo, on drums, formed an electronic side-project which has gathered musicians, absorbed genres and adopted an indelible image of a collective adorned in disco/sci-fi hooded robes. On the day of their sit-down show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's Southbank as part of Ether Festival's programme of exploratory music, they number 22 including two guitarists, a violinist, lead vocalist Lola Olafisoye, a trumpeteer, a saxophonist, a synth player, a full choir and a harpist. It's an arresting sight, and that's before the eclectic dynamic force of their performance. With the sheer amount of troops they're leading though, it's no wonder Milo – ever smiling, ever so slightly amused – confesses to feeling a little anxious. “I'm never confident. Keeping on high alert throughout the day and getting ridiculously stressed on the day of a gig is normal for me and, hopefully, being like that raises my game by 1%. If it doesn't it's just wasting my time, which is an even more joyous thought,” he says good humouredly. It doesn't help that because of the awesome power of nature, or Eyjafjallajökul as most people are not calling it, prevented Milo flying from his home in Berlin to the UK for rehearsals.
“The new album is obviously quite epic with complex time changes and allthat nonsense,” says the softly spoken Leo. “So with only two days (rehearsal) we're gonna be a bit on the edge but I think that'll add to it. As long as 22 people start and stop at the same time it doesn't matter what happens in the middle.”
Self-deprecating to the last, Chrome Hoof undersell themselves dramatically. Their latest opus, Crush Depth, is their third official album since their 2004 self titled debut and follows the funkdiscometalorchestratronica of Pre-Emptive False Rapture. Straddling the entirety of music like some globe spinning titan, Crush Depth is an astonishing amalgamation of freeform ideas. Gutteral guitars stand alongside funk bass, warped disco synthesizers, demonic choral chants, hi-hat shuffles, cantankerous strings and all embellished with self-styled diva Lola's enigmatic vocal and lyrical bent. It's as hard to describe as it is to imagine. The only option is to listen. Milo at least attempts to explain how it all flows together.
“I actually think what these Chrome Hoof tracks end up sounding like is just an ongoing unconscious progress that everyone has. If you're a writer you'll have that going on and you'll sleep on stuff and a nice way of putting something will come to you. You don't have to sit and think how am I going to approach this one, shall we do it like this or this. It just starts unfolding you start doing stuff that subconsciously you've been working out in your head at other times.”
Working from jams, the very nature of a blueprint or formula seems alien to Chrome Hoof. That there's nothing here that could easily be distilled or co-opted by a lesser collective is tribute to the wild imaginations at work, as well as the decades of experience at the helm; although Milo confesses to a real lack of band experience, his kit skills belie that and Leo has spent his time in Cathedral since 1989. Despite this, Crush Depth was a real effort for everyone involved.
“It was pretty chaotic and quite high pressure actually. There's a little bit of a connection with the album title and the pressure of being deep under sea and things like that. Basically we've got a manager who has done a lot to make this happen because this is a massive undertaking especially for this band to create something like that. The amount of people we've had to rope in and ask favours from...”
“We've got zero budget really,” adds Leo. “Me and Milo's relationship has gone through some funny moments but we've had to stick together whatever happened. We've come out the other side. We're sponges for our life and the music we listen to, things we dig and the styles we like and it comes out, like all the bands, unconsciously, consciously and it's not until the end result when you can sit back and think 'oh, that's just happened!'. In a way, we quite ruthlessly plan something and at the same time we do jam around it. I think the album does show the year we've had through the music, through things that have happened. I don't want to sound too corny but that's how music comes out most of the time.”
It's difficult to reconcile the tough times with the glorious utopian funk soundtrack of Sea Hornet or the pounding symbiosis of Third Sun Descendent despite their fractured, schizophrenic fluidity which suggests madmen at work. Yet it's all so enthralling, it stirs the blood and feeds on your response like an emotional vampire. It's almost as if those robes, adopted early on, have cast a relentless shadow upon the music, and vice versa.
“The image feeds into the music and the other way around,” agrees Milo. “Without an overview of what it was gonna end up like, this is how things have turned out and there are reasons for that and you can make those reasons up for yourself. We've just stuck to what excites us and just just tryied to be honest with ourselves. Stuff that excites us is gonna take priority over what anyone else thinks. If you stick to that then it will go in a certain direction.” Milo smiles wryly again. “We're trying to keep the essence of what we started with although we mostly lose it.”
Brad Barrett
Friday 7 January 2011
Articles of 2010
Yep so Albums of 2010 went wrong because of a portable hard drive and floor collision. Damn. I could just reproduce my list of 75, but that would be boring and pointless and if there's two things I don't like to think I'm being, it's those.
However it's always nice to indulge myself in looking over my favourite band interview features of the last year. There's been some ace ones too. Cover wise I finally got my friend Frank on Playmusic Pickup, signalling only his second cover (after Kerrang!). I got to interview Deftones finally, giving them a cover, and there's been plenty of excellent insight from Marnie Stern, Baths, The National and Field Music.
So let's see what I got up to in 2010: in alphabetical order.
Baths AKA Will Wiesenfeld. A bright, enthusiastic and bluntly honest lad. Refreshing and fantastic and it's entirely reflected in his utterly brilliant music, best represented by Baths' debut album Cerulean. Of course, like all features, this has been edited from the original conversation - which was a blast, and very candid on both of our parts. This, however, is the unedited text before it hit Playmusic Pickup in the December 2010 issue.
Liquid Love
Baths is the solo project of 21 year old Will Wiesenfeld, Cleveland's shy electronic lothario. Once a classical music student, his past has helped fuel his desire to open his heart and pour it into music. He reveals all to Brad Barrett...
The emotional connection we have with music is why we engage with it. Any other reason is secondary, or at least should be in my opinion. Dance music of late, has tended towards the evocative where passionate embraces are perhaps more important than mere body movement conducted by cleverly-constructed beats. Will Wiesenfeld, AKA Baths, remains the pinnacle of this attitude as we head into the new year; his underrated homemade debut Cerulean, released earlier in 2010, proving a huge highlight of the last 12 months. It's a rapturous blur of clogged beats, echoing piano melodies, Will's disarming falsetto and unexpected clashes of hyper-tense electro melodies and ethereal instrumentation.
“In terms of using samples, I don't use any. Maybe a drum sample of a bass drum hit, for instance, but then I layer a hundred different things on top of it and make my own sound out of it and the construction of the actual rhythms is all my own,” he says. “The less I start out with, the more open ended it can be and the more comfortable I am. It's like I don't have to abide by any rules, I can do whatever I want. It's easier when I can throw a thousand ideas around and narrow it down to the right things,” explains Will at the City Arts and Music Bar above the basement venue he'll play a few hours later.
This open field he's bringing to our attention is a way of getting away from implied emotions. Rather than building a sad song from a minor key or a happy song from a major key, Will leaves ambiguity in his melodies and propels them to the desired emotional pitch with rhythms and textures which accentuate the sensual mood.
“I really wanted to make something easier to digest than my older material,” he says, referencing his band [post-foetus] and his Geotic side project. “but that is very, very positive and spirited and happy at the same time. That's the whole vibe of the album even though there's more personal and intense subject matter, it's told through a positive lens and feels more reminiscent than directly linked and depressing.”
Will manages to sum up his own music exquisitely. Describing Baths as “intentionally of the moment” and “what I actually want to put out in the world and my main artistic expression”, it's clear that it's a world away from his derivative, ambient Geotic material, which he creates almost purely to help him sleep.
“I used Digital Performer and Ableton Live and I just used a bunch of instruments. I'm lucky enough to have an upright piano in my bedroom, it's the family piano from when I was, like, four. I used an electric guitar, electric bass, my brother's acoustic guitar, a lot of singing, layers of vocals. With the construction of beats and stuff, there's a little bit of samples - maybe two or three percent across the whole album that's like actual drummer library samples - but the rest of those rhythms are all blurry with layers and sounds I put on top of it and the rest is stuff I did in my bedroom: snapping my fingers, clicking on the table, closing and opening doors. I'll record tonnes of layers of that type of stuff and then have to eliminate them. Trial and error and a lot of split second decision making.”
The incredible Hall, coincidentally a name I associate with love and joy in my life – something Will is happy to hear about and discuss, being the adorable chap that he is - begins a cut-up, aquatic burst of burbling voices before breaking into a loop-driven, modern gospel chorus that's more swan-dive beautiful than anything else you've heard in 2010. Plea, as well, is an otherworldly luminescence on the unexpectedly beautiful face of electronica, while You're My Excuse to Travel sprinkles that gorgeous family piano throughout in eloquent fashion. It's truly an album to grasp and hold tight. Considering his beginnings though, it could've turned out very different and perhaps sewn with far more blatant virtuosity.
“I was classically trained from the age of four until about 12 on piano and then I sort of had a falling out with classical music and couldn't stand it any more. The way I was playing piano was so rigid and robotic and completely devoid of emotion. I was playing music that, of course...the composers when they wrote it was a very, very emotional experience for them, but none of that was being communicated to me,” he explains, perhaps reflecting the lives of other kids whose parents urged them to be musical. “I took a break from that and when I started playing again, maybe a year and a half later, I only played my own music and only played what I wanted to play and I was like 'Oh music is thrilling!'” he says, adopting a gushing tone. “At that point in time it had become a horrible, tiresome thing but I wouldn't trade that experience. The spinal memory and the motion in my fingers is something I would never have had otherwise. I owe it all to the fact that I had that training and now I'm able to make ideas come out as fast as they do...because that's all it is. Technical proficiency is just a tool to make writing music easier.”
Will makes an amazing case for really learning your chosen instrument, though it's unlikely that without his revelation he would've embarked on an album which he hopes – rather sweetly - will help him “to look into someone who might be the right person.” He calls the album “crazy romantic” and it's in evidence not just in the lyrics - “Smile for me if you can/I wanna see that in my head” or “Boy you are every colour/How am I visible?/Please tell me you need me” - but in the scaling melodies, the cloudy and dream-like shimmering, the pulse-setting rhythms that occupy the core and prevent any deviation from the surging burst of feeling that erupts from within. Even the extraneous and playful noises throughout cross the lines between doubt and hope, anxiety and devotion. Cerulean sums love up in pure sound.
Certainly though, Will's ambition is to keep Baths consistently different and hearing a new song played later at Camp Basement in Old Street, the next Baths album will be crushing and oppressive or lustful and angry as opposed to tenderly hugging and kissing. But never again can you imagine his music being anything other than purely expressive and an extension of his very being, never becoming just a playground for his dormant expertise.
Brad Barrett
However it's always nice to indulge myself in looking over my favourite band interview features of the last year. There's been some ace ones too. Cover wise I finally got my friend Frank on Playmusic Pickup, signalling only his second cover (after Kerrang!). I got to interview Deftones finally, giving them a cover, and there's been plenty of excellent insight from Marnie Stern, Baths, The National and Field Music.
So let's see what I got up to in 2010: in alphabetical order.
Baths AKA Will Wiesenfeld. A bright, enthusiastic and bluntly honest lad. Refreshing and fantastic and it's entirely reflected in his utterly brilliant music, best represented by Baths' debut album Cerulean. Of course, like all features, this has been edited from the original conversation - which was a blast, and very candid on both of our parts. This, however, is the unedited text before it hit Playmusic Pickup in the December 2010 issue.
Liquid Love
Baths is the solo project of 21 year old Will Wiesenfeld, Cleveland's shy electronic lothario. Once a classical music student, his past has helped fuel his desire to open his heart and pour it into music. He reveals all to Brad Barrett...
The emotional connection we have with music is why we engage with it. Any other reason is secondary, or at least should be in my opinion. Dance music of late, has tended towards the evocative where passionate embraces are perhaps more important than mere body movement conducted by cleverly-constructed beats. Will Wiesenfeld, AKA Baths, remains the pinnacle of this attitude as we head into the new year; his underrated homemade debut Cerulean, released earlier in 2010, proving a huge highlight of the last 12 months. It's a rapturous blur of clogged beats, echoing piano melodies, Will's disarming falsetto and unexpected clashes of hyper-tense electro melodies and ethereal instrumentation.
“In terms of using samples, I don't use any. Maybe a drum sample of a bass drum hit, for instance, but then I layer a hundred different things on top of it and make my own sound out of it and the construction of the actual rhythms is all my own,” he says. “The less I start out with, the more open ended it can be and the more comfortable I am. It's like I don't have to abide by any rules, I can do whatever I want. It's easier when I can throw a thousand ideas around and narrow it down to the right things,” explains Will at the City Arts and Music Bar above the basement venue he'll play a few hours later.
This open field he's bringing to our attention is a way of getting away from implied emotions. Rather than building a sad song from a minor key or a happy song from a major key, Will leaves ambiguity in his melodies and propels them to the desired emotional pitch with rhythms and textures which accentuate the sensual mood.
“I really wanted to make something easier to digest than my older material,” he says, referencing his band [post-foetus] and his Geotic side project. “but that is very, very positive and spirited and happy at the same time. That's the whole vibe of the album even though there's more personal and intense subject matter, it's told through a positive lens and feels more reminiscent than directly linked and depressing.”
Will manages to sum up his own music exquisitely. Describing Baths as “intentionally of the moment” and “what I actually want to put out in the world and my main artistic expression”, it's clear that it's a world away from his derivative, ambient Geotic material, which he creates almost purely to help him sleep.
“I used Digital Performer and Ableton Live and I just used a bunch of instruments. I'm lucky enough to have an upright piano in my bedroom, it's the family piano from when I was, like, four. I used an electric guitar, electric bass, my brother's acoustic guitar, a lot of singing, layers of vocals. With the construction of beats and stuff, there's a little bit of samples - maybe two or three percent across the whole album that's like actual drummer library samples - but the rest of those rhythms are all blurry with layers and sounds I put on top of it and the rest is stuff I did in my bedroom: snapping my fingers, clicking on the table, closing and opening doors. I'll record tonnes of layers of that type of stuff and then have to eliminate them. Trial and error and a lot of split second decision making.”
The incredible Hall, coincidentally a name I associate with love and joy in my life – something Will is happy to hear about and discuss, being the adorable chap that he is - begins a cut-up, aquatic burst of burbling voices before breaking into a loop-driven, modern gospel chorus that's more swan-dive beautiful than anything else you've heard in 2010. Plea, as well, is an otherworldly luminescence on the unexpectedly beautiful face of electronica, while You're My Excuse to Travel sprinkles that gorgeous family piano throughout in eloquent fashion. It's truly an album to grasp and hold tight. Considering his beginnings though, it could've turned out very different and perhaps sewn with far more blatant virtuosity.
“I was classically trained from the age of four until about 12 on piano and then I sort of had a falling out with classical music and couldn't stand it any more. The way I was playing piano was so rigid and robotic and completely devoid of emotion. I was playing music that, of course...the composers when they wrote it was a very, very emotional experience for them, but none of that was being communicated to me,” he explains, perhaps reflecting the lives of other kids whose parents urged them to be musical. “I took a break from that and when I started playing again, maybe a year and a half later, I only played my own music and only played what I wanted to play and I was like 'Oh music is thrilling!'” he says, adopting a gushing tone. “At that point in time it had become a horrible, tiresome thing but I wouldn't trade that experience. The spinal memory and the motion in my fingers is something I would never have had otherwise. I owe it all to the fact that I had that training and now I'm able to make ideas come out as fast as they do...because that's all it is. Technical proficiency is just a tool to make writing music easier.”
Will makes an amazing case for really learning your chosen instrument, though it's unlikely that without his revelation he would've embarked on an album which he hopes – rather sweetly - will help him “to look into someone who might be the right person.” He calls the album “crazy romantic” and it's in evidence not just in the lyrics - “Smile for me if you can/I wanna see that in my head” or “Boy you are every colour/How am I visible?/Please tell me you need me” - but in the scaling melodies, the cloudy and dream-like shimmering, the pulse-setting rhythms that occupy the core and prevent any deviation from the surging burst of feeling that erupts from within. Even the extraneous and playful noises throughout cross the lines between doubt and hope, anxiety and devotion. Cerulean sums love up in pure sound.
Certainly though, Will's ambition is to keep Baths consistently different and hearing a new song played later at Camp Basement in Old Street, the next Baths album will be crushing and oppressive or lustful and angry as opposed to tenderly hugging and kissing. But never again can you imagine his music being anything other than purely expressive and an extension of his very being, never becoming just a playground for his dormant expertise.
Brad Barrett
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