Before the Internet hype machine became all-encompassing, before album artwork became an incorporeal arrangement of pixels, in the days when people frequently had physical encounters with a record sleeve or a CD case before they’d even heard – or heard of – any of the music contained within, there was a time when album cover art really mattered. When there were still record shops for us to walk in to and physical records for us to chance upon, artwork was an advert, a statement of intent, even a manifesto.

I can still remember the first time, almost ten years ago to the day, that I picked up British Sea Power‘s debut album The Decline of British Sea Power in York’s now sadly defunct Track Records. I can still remember the momentary consternation it caused my tiny 14-year-old mind, with the artwork’s declaration that this new release from a young band was “British Sea Power’s Classic…”; I remember feeling almost affronted by such confidence. That confidence spread, of course, to the album’s title, a title that felt destined to become an ever-more tedious joke as it was rolled out with the advent of every subsequent BSP release. The mysterious quote, “We ourselves may be loved only for a brief time… Even so, that will suffice… There is a land for the living and there is a land for the dead” which sits below the title, attributed to no-one, seems with hindsight to echo the atmosphere and themes of the band’s music (elegiac, enigmatic, harkening back to a mythologised past). At the time though, it was just as enticing and inscrutable as the rest of what I was looking at. This was, defiantly, artwork as an advert, a statement of intent, and a manifesto.

That year I bought two copies of The Decline of British Sea Power, the second after destroying the first by sitting on my Sony Discman with the CD inside, because I took that album everywhere with me, physically and figuratively. It soundtracked the summer and probably most of the winter too, it tapped into my consciousness. When you’re 14 years old, albums come along every other month that change your life, that leave an indelible mark upon you. The Decline of British Sea Power was, undoubtedly, one of those albums. It is hard to believe that I have now lived with it for a decade, that it is ten years since that bizarre openingtrack, forty seconds of Gregorian chanting, made me wonder just what the hell it was I’d bought.

In the present, my tiny 24-year-old mind is trying to deal with the fact that on the other end of the phone line is Martin Noble, one of British Sea Power’s four founding members. “I’m still in Brighton, just at the shop, collecting some supplies,” Noble tells me. “We’re out on tour tomorrow so I’ve got a bit to sort out before then.” I can’t help but laugh at this homely image. The first ten years of British Sea Power have seen festivals at the highest pub in Britain, a live performance from the Great Wall of China, a US stadium tour with The Killers, an attack from a Geordie in a bearsuit wielding a broken bottle strapped to each paw, and drunken motorboating on a Norwegian lake. I imagine their lives as a crazy rock’n'roll sitcom; I don’t picture them pottering down to the shops while taking phonecalls from over-eager journalists.

“We certainly like to live it up, and that dramatic, crazy side of things is part of what we love about being in this band, but as we’ve grown up with it, we’ve kind of been forced to become normal,” Noble says. “The first time we went on tour to the states, I think we were all drunk for three months before we even realised how long it had been. At some point we had to stop that and slow down to an extent, or I don’t think there’d have been a ‘decade of BSP’ article being written about us.”

The rock’n'roll sitcom image was partly gleaned from the band’s portrayal in the excellent semi-biography Do It For You Mum, which was written by Roy Wilkinson, the elder brother of lead songwriters Yan and Hamilton. The book deals candidly with the trio’s youth and their relationships with one another, which is another factor Noble attributes to the band’s stability. “We’ve never really had any major fallings out. Obviously there’s two brothers in the band, so they argue, but the thing about that is they can say what they like to each other but they’re always going to make up. I think that’s sometimes helped diffuse any tensions we might have had, because they end up taking their little frustrations out on each other rather than on the rest of us. We just keep our heads down,” he says with a wry smile.

Anyone who has ever seen British Sea Power perform live will be well inclined to believe Noble about the band’s relative placidity. It’s not that they are placid on stage – far from it – but that few bands look as overwhelmed with happiness at the sheer exhilaration of performing their songs, few bands create such an intimate connection with their audience.

Likewise, few bands celebrate the launch of a new album in quite such style. On a freezing April evening, I crammed onto a boat on the Thames with British Sea Power and about one hundred of their biggest fans, including Gavin and Stacey actor Matthew Horne, to listen to a Bulgarian a cappella band, followed by a “quiz” hosted by 6Music DJ Shaun Keavney (which consisted of him shouting a mixture of real and made-up German words in an incredibly bad accent and BSP member Phil Sumner playing French horn versions of ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘The Boys are Back in Town’). We then all shuffled off the boat and onto an old fashioned red London ‘Routemaster’ bus where the ticket inspector was mad performance poet Jock Scot, and the bus’ terminus was the 100 Club on Oxford Street, where we played ping-pong and had a raffle and watched some girls dressed as Julius Caesar dance. Then British Sea Power played a set and were joined on stage by Jehnny Beth from current Best Fit favourite Savages and their customary giant polar bear friend, and then only after the headline act did the support band, Bo Ningen, come on to play. One day in the future I will tell people this story, and they will insist that it was a dream, or that I have gone mad. But it was not a dream, and I have not gone made; British Sea Power made it happen. Like I said, few bands launch their records so brilliantly. The whole night feels like an example par excellence in what has made this band so special across their first decade.

Electro-pop duo MS MR are children of the ’10s (is that the right terminology?), soaked in Tumblr, the Internet and sounds so vogue you’ll be zapped onto the cover of Nylon just by listening to them.

They couldn’t have appeared at a better time. Adorned with boutique threads and neon hair, my MS of the pair, fashionista Lizzy Plapinger is a star in the making – Florence + The Machine had a similar introduction to icon-dom. Max Hershenow, the MR, produces their sound – self-described as ‘Tumblr Glitch Pop, Soul Fuzz, Electroshock’ – giving the act the aural flair to back up bolshy claims and outrageous statements. They’re razor sharp in every department (they probably even smell fantastic), and poised to take the world by storm. And with that natural segue…

“We’re really inspired by impending doom and inclement weather.” Says Max. “2012 was the year shrouded in apocalypse and we got together to write out best songs in bad weather. ‘Hurricane’ is the perfect example of that. It was written in New York City and it couldn’t have been written anywhere else, that environment is unique. We identified a few other things that inspired us. One was media and our relationships with it and the opportunists and limitations of the world. We were very influenced by media and it has changed the way we write music.”

But it’s not just the rain and social networks that give the outfit their frenetic brand of slick synthery. Lizzy is keen to share her love of pop; there’s a wide-eyed eagerness in her voice: “We love all different genres and time periods. Our love of pop music has been proudly embraced. I think it’s such an overarching genre and means both everything and nothing at the same time. You can find pop in anything and it’s very open ended, it’s in country and rock and rap… we didn’t deliberately reference many specific bands while we were writing, but in hindsight we identify how the music we grew up with had an influence on us.”

As we approach the point of no return for MS MR and the release of their first long-player, Secondhand Rapture, there’s a giddy glint emanating from their eyes. “We’re more excited than nervous. Really ready for people to hear,” says Max like a child who’s been fed an espresso. “We are working on a celebration. Definitely working on it and we want to do something… we’re definitely going to do something…” he rambles, before Lizzy cuts across: “I mean it’ll probably be us drinking 40oz beers and eating pizza. That’s all we need!”

As the dust begins to settle after the creation of Secondhand Rapture, they reflect. “It was a very collaborative process, very fifty-fifty. It happened one of two ways: either Max would write something for me to sing over, or I’d do an a cappella track for him to write over. It was ultimately a really shared process that we didn’t want just one person dominating. We wanted to feel like we’ve both put in the same amount,” recalls Lizzy. “It was recorded at Max’s apartment on just keys and laptop and a few mics – that’s all still in the mix. Tom Elmhirst [Adele/Amy Winehouse producer] was in the studio and added more elements to give it some life, so it wasn’t so confined by stringency of home recordings… but we were also proud that it has come from a place like that. I mean the vocals were recorded in a spare bedroom!”

The time they spent crafting sonic art was infinitely valuable. “I think the key ethos is that we need to stay open to experimentation, continue to let the process be our our guide and not over analyse, let the music out and then go back to think about what is our ‘sound’. Nothing was predetermined, it just happened, and we went back and found the connecting pieces of our musical identity. It’s important to maintain a curiosity.” It was as much a soul-search for them as a recording process, but it was something that was memorable nonetheless. “We loved it. It’s what we love doing the most. It was an adjustment from tour life, which we’d been doing for a while, but it’s obviously something we love and embrace, so we were both happy when were in the studio,” says Lizzy, before Max tacks on: “I think that moment when you realise how everything has come together is great. There a high for creating more.”

‘Fantasy’ is arguably the biggest cut from the record – though ‘Hurricane’ is a major contender. “It was an a cappella track. We are drawn to the organ sound, something so dark and sinister. And I loved making an upbeat, dancey pop song using something so heavy. It’s about a relationship that didn’t go exactly to plan. It’s about the reality being harsher than the dream might be.” It’s a whirlwind of menacing synth flourishes and elegant vocal hooks, tribal drums and massive choruses. So enticing is the track, that Kele Okereke of Bloc Party whipped up a house remix. “That was pretty awesome. We’re big fans, and it’s incredible to have his twist. We’re always interested in hearing different interpretations of our music. We’re solid in our identity, and we love different views of our music, but what he did was certainly new!” Max gushes. Lizzy pipes in: “We really appreciate it. Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was one of my favourite records of all time, so knowing that he just listens to us is insane!”

But MS MR aren’t just about their recorded noises. They’ve built a solid reputation for exuberant, engaging and raucous live shows. “We’re pretty wild. Things get loose, it’s high energy… maybe people would expect chill and electronica, but I think there’s a rockier vibe to us. We have a live drummer and other live musicians with strange instruments, and we loop stuff through pedals to add a warping glitch. We play off one another. It’s really fun to have the freedom in a live setup to just let go.” They have a busy, busy schedule ahead of them, with festival slots around the world. “We love playing festivals. It’s a fun counterbalance to the smaller club shows. My highlights will be Glastonbury, as it’s Lizzy’s favourite festival but I’ve never been before. Also Splendour In The Grass in Australia – it’s supposed to be on a really beautiful beach. I’m excited for Lollapalooza in Chicago too.” Max is more thoughtful, but Lizzy jumps right in: “Governor’s Ball is up there! It has the best line-up, a tonne of our friends are coming from all over the States, it’s going to be such an epic weekend…”

MS MR have heaps of energy – that’s obvious in their music – and they’re open about intentions. It’s refreshing, in the midst of a wave of mysterious producers, to have an act transparent about themselves and their hopes and dreams. However, they are still coy about what we can expect from their shows this summer: “It wouldn’t be a surprise if we told you…”

It’s the song ‘Sea of Love’ that provides the title of The National’s sixth record; during a sudden lull in the music, Matt Berninger rumbles “If I stay here / Trouble will find me” – a classic National-esque line full of worry and dread.

Yet Trouble Will Find Me often comes across as the least worry-heavy album the band’s produced so far. It’d be quite a stretch to say it’s The National reborn as a carefree act full of the joys of spring, but there’s a lightness of touch – lyrically and sonically – and a variety and depth that make it possibly their best work, alongside 2005’s Alligator (my all-time favourite record, probably. Should that sort of thing matter to you). Trouble Will Find Me is a record that mixes the typically gnomic lyrics of Berninger with much more direct and personal writing, and finds the brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner (along with the other set of brothers, Bryan and Scott Devendorf, the best rhythm section at work in music today) at the height of their musical powers, crafting complex melodies that have both depth and directness across thirteen excellent tracks. It’s the sound of a band, as Aaron Dessner put it, “freewheeling” again.

The Line of Best Fit recently had the opportunity to chat to bassist Scott Devendorf – a man who has been part of The National’s DNA right from the point he and Berninger first formed a band together back in 1991 – about the writing and recording of Trouble Will Find Me, about how the band finds it difficult to part with some songs, and always being tempted to take things that little bit darker.

At the end of the High Violet tour, I saw The National play a show at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange, a performance that saw the band free of the last of their promotional shackles and delving into some rarely-played tracks from their back catalogue. It looked like they were having fun doing what they wanted to after close to two years of playing the songs from that claustrophobic album. So, it came as no surprise to read that there was no immediate intention to write a follow-up record – but then something changed. Well, not changed exactly; more that The National couldn’t stay away from what they seem to enjoy doing most. Scott explains more: “Basically we wanted to take some time off, because we’d done a lot of touring for two years or so… but we’re also kinda workaholics, I guess.”

“We don’t like sitting around so sometimes our ‘leisure’ is to work on other projects, so Aaron and Bryce are always doing something either with the band or other projects, or producing records so I think Aaron just started writing sketches for Matt…” Many bands might partake in such practices, but it’s often nothing more than throwing ideas around, ideas that might not make it to the demo stage, but for The National, it yielded some surprising results. “Y’know, we weren’t really expecting anything because we know our recording process always takes a long time,” says Scott, “and our writing process longer still! But Aaron was home a lot, he just had a new baby who was born in September 2011, so he was home and up really early, and up all night sometimes, so he was writing but not really expecting anything to happen right away. Then he sent different things to Matt, and Matt started to react and find some good ideas really quickly”. The exchanges between Dessner and Berninger led to the opening track on Trouble Will Find Me: “The first song on the record [‘I Should Live In Salt’, a song about the relationship between Berninger and his brother Tom] came out really quick, and soon as that came together we realised we were right in the process of writing a new record.”

It seems that out of all the inter-band relationships, it’s the connection between the Dessners and Berninger that drives The National forward, and it was the surprising reserves of energy found by the singer post-tour that led to the creation of the new album. “Matt was really just so focused; I think he had a lot of energy,” notes Devendorf. “The end of High Violet touring had given us a fresh perspective – we all felt good about how it ended up. We played six shows in New York and the band was playing really well. Things were going – I mean, we were happy to be done touring – well and we had ended in a good place. The record had done well, Matt was energised and thought about starting on new stuff… and so we did!” Is it the case, then, that with Trouble Will Find Me the band finds itself a little bit ahead of schedule? Scott disagrees. “In the end we’re kind of on the same schedule we’ve always been on, like three years between every record, two years or a year and a half or so of touring. I guess we’re on schedule but I don’t think we expected to be here, we probably thought we’d take another half a year or so off to get ready, but things progressed.”

What stands out most about Trouble…, certainly compared to the dense and sonically similar tracks on High Violet, is the variety on show. There’s never any doubt that you’re listening to The National, but at the same time the record goes places the band’s not really visited in the past; from the finger-picking quasi-folk of ’Fireproof’ to the motorik drive of ‘Don’t Swallow the Cap’, to the piano-and-trumpet woozy waltz of ‘Pink Rabbits’, it’s the sound of The National freeing up and being willing to experiment a little with their trademark sound. I ask Scott if he agrees with this take, and whether or not this was the intention: “Yeah I think that was definitely a conscious-slash-subconscious idea; basically when we write we try and write a lot of songs knowing that probably only a third will make it to the final record.” So how many songs would the band write and then discard before getting to the final track listing? “I think we started with about 30 different ideas or so, and then got it down to 20, then to 15, then to what’s on the record,” says Scott.  “Through that process we’re always really bad about throwing songs away; we get really attached to certain aspects of them… almost to an unhealthy degree sometimes.”

“We try and ‘leave no song behind’ and focus on that whole group of songs in the recording process and sometimes that leaves us with a lot of variety,” Scott continues. ‘There’s really quiet songs like ‘Slipped’, which is basically the demo version of the song, and this time around there were a lot of songs like that, where there was something about the initial idea or initial sound was recorded in such a way that we really liked it and kept that.” Is there any song that particularly stands out for the band and shows how successful the original version was? “The synthesiser sounds on ‘I Should Live In Salt’ that you can hear doing their little dance in the background,” he begins, “that was there in the original recording. It was hard to recapture, so we kept that aspect. So things like that, from our perspective, give some variety but also some lift… or lilt… a quality.”

Andrew Wyatt, better known to most as the front man of electro-pop trio Miike Snow, is here today to discuss his first solo project, Descender – described as a “32 minute meditation into the darker side of Andrew Wyatt, not seen on his latest endeavours”.

Along with Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg – the Swedish writing and production team Bloodshy and Avant who’ve penned for the likes of Britney, Madonna and Kylie – Miike Snow’s eponymous 2009 debut long-player became an underground hit earning Andrew and the band a cult following.

Descender is certainly an ambitious solo project for Wyatt, marking the first time he has written, produced and orchestrated an entire album, using the 75-piece Prague Philharmonic. “I basically worked 16 hours a day for about 25 straight days. I would literally get up at 10am and work all day until 2am. Working non-stop and chain smoking.”

Although the record is a far cry from the alt-pop of Miike Snow, working with the production duo significantly changed how Wyatt approached orchestration: “There’s a song on the record called ‘It Won’t Let You Go’. There’s an instrumental melody that comes in the chorus that is first played on flute and violin and then it moves to the trumpet. It’s something that is very Miike Snow – to take a melody and just move it up to a different instrument. It feels unique and contemporary”.

The record has since been granted a seal of approval by his colleagues – “Yeah, they love it”. Don’t expect another Miike Snow album, however. The album is a haunting and romantic series of soundscapes, showcasing a previously unseen vulnerability to Wyatt. “I wanted the orchestration to be beautiful but somehow skewed and cracked. So I would play things in unusual keys – almost like a scribble.”

Describing the intensity of making this album, I ask if it was, in a way, therapeutic, to be so focused on one specific task. “It was very rewarding. But you don’t realise what’s happening at the time. You’re so concerned about the outcome when you’ve already spent all this money. You’re in crisis mode, so you can’t actually enjoy what’s going on around you.” No wonder, then, that Wyatt is pleased that a video was made for VICE documenting the making of the album. It means he can look back and appreciate the experience for what it was.

If we were to compile a list of bands whose music doesn’t match their name, the original incarnation of Austin, Texas three-piece Pure X would be quite far up there. The name Pure Ecstasy suggests MDMA-heavy nights of loved-up bliss, maybe some euphoria … but that never fit the sound this lot made. Pure X are the comedown side of any drug experience: a hazy, claustrophobic and often not a lot of fun.

Their 2011 debut Pleasure, while at times a nocturnal, sensual experience, was layered with a fog of isolation and some bad times. The sound of that album was located in the 90s; there was a bit of shoe gaze, some slowcore, loads of reverb, pedal-heavy and astonishingly good guitar work and mumbled vocals, courtesy of de facto front man Nate Grace. It was recorded live in the studio with no production trickery (the product of having no cash) and remains a loud, uncompromising (yet still a bit mellow) listen.

Cycle forward a couple of years and Grace, bassist and co-vocalist Jesse Jenkins and drummer Austin Youngblood are preparing to release their second album Crawling Up the Stairs. Recorded amidst medical and personal issues, and with money problems still dogging the band, this record is more of an uncompromising listen than Pleasure ever was.

Influenced as much by psych rock and shoegaze as it is by heartbreaking country music, Crawling Up the Stairs is Pure X’s dark night of the soul, an honest and raw musical experience and an often agonizing look at Grace and Jenkins’ personal issues. This time around there’s some musical clarity: again, the record sounds great turned up loud, but with a little more time in the studio we can actually hear Grace and Jenkins sing a bit in their cracked-yet-wonderful way, and those guitars – while still draped in a cloak of reverb a lot of the time – have an added crystalline edge. You can hear this confidence in two of the tracks we’ve heard so far: the organ and guitar strum of ‘Things In My Head’ and the wracked and powerful ‘Someone Else’. The rest of the album is just as good, setting it up to be one of the essential listens of 2013.

After some failed phone calls while the band had no reception on a west-coast tour we finally managed to get a word or two with Nate Grace and Jesse Jenkins to talk us through the creation of Crawling Up the Stairs.

So if Pleasure was the hazy, sexy one, is Crawling Up the Stairs the comedown and the sound of the cold light of day?

Jesse Jenkins:  To me Crawling Up the Stairs is even more of a night time listen than Pleasure. It intentionally has the same arch as a dusk that leads you down into darkness then slowly lets the light pull you back up. I also think it has some sexier moments than the last record. Maybe a different kind of sex though.

Where does the title come from, is it a nod to the troubles leading up to the recording of the album, but also a positive note – about slowly ascending towards something better?

Nate Grace: The album title and song with the same name came from a vision I had. It’s a long story but the short of it is that I was laid up for almost 6 months with a bad leg injury. One night I had a true battle with what Jung called the “shadow self” and what I would call a demon. After it I fell into a dream vision where I was in hell crawling up infinite stairs amidst the worst fear and torment possible.

It’s a very honest record, maybe agonizing and very dark in places – was the album ever likely to sound any different given the personal problems?

JJ: Well the record is a product of a complex series of events and circumstances just like everything else, so in that sense, if one of those minute circumstances was changed in any way, the record could be completely different. Each of our evolving tastes, evolving musicianship, and subconscious minds impacted the sound just as much as any problems we were working through.

How close did it come to not being made, given the issues with injury and medical insurance?

JJ:  There’s never been any doubt. Making records is what we do. Those issues helped us stay locked away and obsessed, possessed even, with/by this record.

How hard was it to write an album, or get the motivation, after the money problems and illness?

JJ:  Money doesn’t motivate people to create; it provides comfort which is the enemy. NOT having money helped us write this record. Money is nothing but paper. Its not even paper anymore, it’s almost completely imaginary.

What was the recording process like compared to the first album? Did you have more time and money to experiment a bit more, given you’ve said the first album was recorded in the way it was due to a lack of funds?

JJ: There was no sense of urgency this time around. We didn’t have any more time or money – we TOOK it. We did not want to go in and make another record the same way we made Pleasure. We won’t make the next record the same way we made CUTS.

Are there any records or musicians that influenced the sound of Crawling Up the Stairs?

JJ:  Desperate country music had a big influence. People like Johnny Paycheck and Gary Stewart that can make you FEEL. Golden era Nashville production aspects were big for us too. Like making acoustic guitars sound like glass knives slicing though your eardrum – in a way that feels good.

The vocals are more upfront this time around; was this conscious due to the personal nature of some of the songs?

JJ: Everything is more up front. This is mostly due to the types of music that we were all listening to at the time. We just wanted to make a really good sounding record and we made production decisions based on what each song told us to do.

How is the song writing divided up between you – how does the band work generally?

JJ:  For this record, we did a lot more collaborative writing in the studio, a lot more experimenting. We both had some fully written songs that we brought in, but several of the songs on the record came out of nowhere in the studio.

You’ve been touring since SXSW – how has the record been received by the crowds? Are you still working out any kinks in the music as you go along?

JJ:  It’s fun to play songs live that no one has heard before. It’s a lot more challenging for us and for the audience. The best response I’ve heard so far is people being like “wow you guys actually sing!” We try at least.

What’s next – is it touring for the foreseeable future? Are you keen to keep writing and get new music out there while you can?

JJ:  Yes definitely a lot of touring, which is great. We’ll always be writing though.

“I never thought I’d make it past thirty, man.” It sounds astonishing, but Bobby Gillespie has fronted Primal Scream for the past thirty-one years. To suggest that he’s enjoyed, during that time, some of the traditional trappings of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle would be an outrageous understatement.

After emerging from Glasgow as one of the earliest members of Alan McGee’s Creation Records stable, Gillespie put an early dalliance with The Jesus and Mary Chain to bed to lead his band through, in order: their acid house heyday on Screamadelica, the infamous, heroin-hampered sessions for Give Out But Don’t Give Up, continued experimentation on Vanishing Point, the politically-fuelled aggression of XTRMNTR and Evil Heat and back-to-basics rock reformation with Riot City Blues and Beautiful Future. So diverse has Gillespie’s musical output been over the course of ten Primal Scream records, the only real constant has been his spectacularly-sharp appetite for hedonism. “I can’t really believe we’re still here.”

More Light is the band’s first album in five years, and is underscored by an adventurousness they’ve seldom displayed since the turn of the century. “I think if you look at any artist’s career, you’re going to see they’ve done all kinds of different stuff. Nobody – not Neil Young, not Miles Davis, nobody made every album great. The genuine artists are always going down different avenues, exploring different routes to try and make something worthwhile. That’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning.”

“We wanted to make a freer, more experimental, more psychedelic record than the last two [Riot City Blues and Beautiful Future], which were both about very straightforward, three-minute pop rock songs that were just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-guitar solo; they were all about traditional songwriting structures. It was fun doing that stuff as well; before that we’d done Evil Heat and XTRMNTR, which were pretty fucking out there, and you reach a point when you’re so far out of the ordinary that you want to do something normalised, something structured. I think the last two records were a reaction to what came before, and now the new one is too; we were ready to do something really free again, something creatively satisfying.”

There’s little timestamps on More Light that reveal it’s been a while in the making – a collaboration with Sun Ra Arkestra came about as far back as 2010, when the Icelandic ash cloud left them stranded in London – but Gillespie’s recollections of the process are already hazy. “I’m at an age now where my sense of time has gotten so stretched out that it’s pretty much non-existent,” he laughs. “But in this band, everything’s a constant process. You’re sort of absorbing by osmosis everything that might inspire you; you’re subconsciously stocking up ideas. We never really stop writing.”

What has ground to a halt, though, is the legendary propensity for debauchery for which Gillespie, and Primal Scream as a whole, were notorious; now six years married and with two young sons, his lifestyle is considerably more settled. The linear nature of those last two albums seemed understandable put into context, with their lack of adventurousness mirrored by Gillespie’s newly-sedate approach to other areas of his life, which makes you wonder how much harder it must be to write as experimentally as he has on More Light.

“It’s a lot fucking easier! The brain’s a lot more sensitive and receptive now; I feel more. I think if I was using I’d be desensitised, disconnected, emotionally cut off – I think that’s the reason you take drugs or drink, to disconnect yourself and cut yourself off from other people, but really all you’re doing is cutting yourself off from yourself, you know. As an artist, you need to feel everything. You can’t cut yourself off from your own creativity. Since I’ve been clean, those walls inside me have disappeared – I’ve got complete access to myself now, and complete access to the outside world. I’m more receptive to new stimuli, new ideas.”

“He seemed like a mysterious, black-clad and unknowable figure to me – a beautiful boy — almost unreal,” recalls Vashti Bunyan when asked about her memories of Nick Drake.

The meeting she speaks of, which took place several decades ago, was brought about by Bunyan and Drake’s mutual producer, Joe Boyd, who had hoped the two artists might come together in the spirit of collaboration. The session proved to be fruitless, Bunyan soon retreated from her career in music, and Drake, tragically, withdrew from the world altogether.

Of course, while their music initially faded into obscurity, it was slowly absorbed into the essential fabric of folk as we now know it, and the reputation of both artists has gradually, steadily blossomed over the decades. By the time Bunyan was finding kindred spirits and eager collaborators in Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart during the mid-2000s, Drake’s status as one of the most hallowed songwriters of his time was already long cemented.

And their legacies are now intertwining in a very tangible way. This is thanks in large part to Boyd, who made his name by producing an almost mythical list of albums from the psychedelic era, including Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day and Drake’s first two full-lengths. A longtime champion of Drake’s work, Boyd has envisioned a tribute to the late singer-songwriter that is as organic as the music it is meant to honor. Boyd organized a series of concerts in London and Melbourne, and enlisted an impressive selection of musicians, including Bunyan and Robyn Hitchcock, to cover Drake’s songs in a live setting. Rather than constrain the participating artists in studios, Boyd recorded the performances, spaced out over a period of several years, then edited the results into the newly released album, Way To Blue. Furthering the gravity and authenticity of the affair, Boyd also enlisted Robert Kirby, a string arranger who previously worked with both Bunyan and Drake, to help reimagine a set of originals that have become so deeply ingrained in the minds of listeners.

Though Kirby sadly passed away before Way To Blue was completed, it was his very presence that helped draw Bunyan to the project to cover the majestic ‘Which Will.’ She remembers Kirby as “kind, generous and wonderfully irreverent,” calls his reworking of the Pink Moon classic “beautiful,” and admits that performing the song live after the arranger’s death “had a bitter-sweetness to it.” While her remarks speak to the communal spirit that made Way To Blue possible, it’s strange to contemplate the role that isolation played in the creation of Diamond Day and Nick Drake’s three albums.

These works were born out of an intimacy that, from a modern perspective, is difficult to envision. While it’s unnecessary to recount Drake’s notoriously hermetic qualities, it’s worth noting that Bunyan wrote and recorded her 1970 effort with little knowledge of then-contemporary trends. In fact, she even concedes that at the time Diamond Day was unfolding, she had yet to hear Drake’s albums. “I didn’t know Nick well – mostly just in passing in Joe’s office. Both being shy we hardly spoke a word to each other. At one meeting he turned to the wall rather than speak,“ she explains, adding, “Neither of us knew the other’s music. I had no record player and I had been on the road with no access to radio or music papers or anything for some time — so I had no idea who Nick was when we were both first working with Joe.”

And the same goes for the circle of notables that orbited around Boyd, an in-demand producer who worked with everyone from the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd of the late-‘60s to the Incredible String Band, the Fairport Convention and Nico. “I had no connection myself to any other musicians at the time and so I don’t really know,” says Bunyan, after being asked about the folk scene of the era that birthed Diamond Day. “I do know a lot of the other people who worked with Joe had enormous respect and liking for Nick – but at the time I myself knew none of them. I was a very solitary musician and sought no others out.”

If this spirit of seclusion and independence potentially informed the work of Bunyan and Drake, it also almost certainly derailed the possibility of a joint effort between them. Boyd may have sensed a sort of affinity between them, and Bunyan herself acknowledges that she and Drake shared “a similar background and maybe a similar musical sensibility in a lot of ways.” The producer arranged for the two to meet, and Bunyan’s recollection of the event does nothing to dispel the aura of mystery that continues to shroud Drake’s life and work.

If anything, her memories of the meeting only support the romantic image of an impenetrable artist: “I remember it very well. Joe asked me to go to Nick’s house where I found him sitting at an upright piano – again quite wordless. I had a tiny baby by then who cried whenever I put him down to pick up my guitar. Nick’s shoulders went higher and higher and it became quite clear that writing together was just not going to happen. And – looking back — we were both too individual to actually work together.”

Undoubtedly, this revelation will provide even more “what if?” scenarios for Drake fans, the sort of questions that always seem to trail artists who disappeared while still in their prime. One can’t help but wonder what might have come from a more bountiful session between these artists – and how Drake might have reacted to the belated success of his work.

In recent years, it has been genuinely touching to see Bunyan graciously welcomed into and applauded by a community of musicians she has deeply influenced, and her palpable joy that came from collaborating with latter-day troubadours is equally moving. Bunyan humbly remarks of the artists she has worked with over the last decade, “they have all been very different in their approach to music – and I have learned a lot from them.”

She even hinted at the tantalizing possibility of a follow-up to her excellent 2005 comeback effort, Lookaftering.“I haven’t played live with my band for a couple of years now – feeling that I need to have something different to go out with again. So I am recording some new songs that I have written over the last five years, recording mostly at home. Hopefully it will all find its way onto an album in the not too distant future,” she tells us.

Heartening as the thought of new music from Bunyan is, it also brings to mind a few more of those lingering questions regarding the ways things might have turned out differently for Drake. Bunyan fondly remarks, “I have so loved being able to work with and know other musicians in the way that I did not do when I was young,” but, had he lived to see his music cherished by succeeding generations, would Nick Drake have sought a similar path? Would he, too, have found enthusiastic young artists to work with? And, perhaps most pressingly, why did it take so long for the world to listen in the first place? “It is interesting to ponder on why this kind of music has at last found an audience and why it didn’t in the first place, but I have no fixed ideas for why – especially Nick’s beautiful music,” concludes Bunyan. “Nick was a genius and I’m sure knew it – and that must have caused so much of his pain.”

As for her own strange and storied history as a musician, Bunyan is able to reflect on it more positively. “It is a wonder to me that Diamond Day has found its way to more people over the years – something I could never have imagined happening,” she marvels after being queried about the ever-expanding legacy of her lone ‘70s album. Fitting that someone who has so eloquently extolled the simple virtues of glow worms, lily ponds and misfit dogs would see this beguiling phenomenon through such a succinctly lovely, awe-struck prism.

A remastered, vinyl edition of Bryter Later and the Joe Boyd directed tribute album Way to Blue are both available now. 

Photo by: Andreas Öhlund

Best Fit last spoke to Miranda and Elektra Kilbey back in December. At the time they were called Saint Lou Lou and were riding high on a wave of universal love for their debut single, ‘Maybe You’.

Six months later – it’s all change! A passing-off action from an act with a prior claim to a similar name saw them defending a Cease and Desist and has resulted in the Scandipodean twins (yes, we’re still trying to make ‘Scandipodean’ happen – get involved!) having to go back to the drawing board.

Choosing not to stir too far from the original, the Kilbeys recently resurfaced as Say Lou Lou and accompanied their name-change news with the announcement of a new single, the nothing-short-of-tremendous, ‘Julian’.

The new single and the girls’ forthcoming show for Best Fit at London’s Madame JoJo’s is a good excuse to have another chat with them, so we caught up with the duo for a Skype-rendezvous during their recent visit to Japan. “It’s a good thing we’re not doing video chat”, Elektra says with a giggle. “We’re here in kimonos that we got from our hotel and we’re lying on the bed”. Having arrived in Tokyo only a couple of hours earlier, they are trying to stay up for as long as possible in an attempt to get their body clocks in order. “We’re half-sleeping”, says Miranda. “We’re jet-lagged. We don’t want to fall asleep!”

Although the sisters are used to sharing their time between Sweden and Australia, the burgeoning amount of travel they’re having to take on as their music career takes off poses a bigger challenge to healthy slumber habits. Are they coping ok? “It’s become more normalised so I haven’t reflected on it, really”, says Elektra. Miranda adds: “I think sleep, to us, has become a thing you do whenever you can”. So they seize the moment as and when they can. “If you see that you can have half an hour here and there, you go and do it”. “Go! Go! Go!”, Elektra pipes up. “We try and catch up on it all the time. But it’s also so much fun that I think –“ [here Miranda chimes in:] “It’s never boring – we’re always going somewhere and doing things that we think are so much fun”. “And we’re still so young, Doron!”, Elektra interjects. The use of my name here, coupled with her tone of voice, ensures that if, per chance, I erroneously thought that I was chatting to a pair of old pensioners, I should think again. “We’re so young”, she repeats, “we’re only twenty-one!”

Well, in any event, all this extensive travel must surely be good for their air-miles. “Yeah”, Elektra says with a hint of realisation in her voice. “We hope someone is keeping a tab on our Frequent Flyers”. That should be the primary function of a manager, I suggest. Miranda agrees. “I’m going to ask him, actually, when he gets back”.

So what about this name change, then? “Well, another artist had a similar name and didn’t allow us to keep ours”, Elektra says. I ask whether this came as a big blow to them. They consider this for a moment. “It was the first big difficult thing for us to go through because of all the legal trouble –“ [here Miranda interrupts Elektra – they often complete each other’s sentences, as twins are prone to do] – “we felt that our identity was much more about the music than the name or anything else, I mean obviously we were connected to the name but the blow was more to the time and money and our energy, just because it took so much out of us fighting the lawsuit”. After a small pause Miranda continues: “It was the first big obstacle for us in our career. Yes, it was really hard and really upsetting but changing the name wasn’t as hard as we initially thought. People were, like, “Ok!”. As long as you don’t make it into a big deal it’s not going to be a big deal”.

They kept the ‘Lou Lou’ part of the name out of deference to a formidable great aunt. In interviews, the twins often portray her as a bit of a scary character. “Poor Lou Lou”, Elektra says in mock-pity. “She’s got a bad rep because of us. I was scared our Nana was going to be like, “you’ve crossed the line, girls!”. But, instead, she was like, “yeah, she deserves it”.

Debut single ‘Maybe You’ came out via Parisian label Kitsuné in 2012, but the twins have since set up their own record label, appropriately named à Deux. “When you’re making music, the scariest bit is to give it away to someone”, says Miranda. “It’s like you give birth to a baby and then you have to give it away to someone else to raise it. And you’re sitting by and watching someone else with it and we were scared of giving it away”. Creating their own label gives them the chance to do things their own way. “It allows you to call the shots”, Elektra explains. “It’s going to be really exciting to be creative director of your own career”.

At the time of our first interview last year, it was too early in the recording process for the girls to be able to give us a real indication of its sound. A few weeks ago they released their Sounds of Spring mixtape which brought together haunting mid-tempo cinematic soundscapes and dramatic grooves, featuring the likes of Rhye, Tame Impala, the Cardigans and Kate Bush. I ask them whether the mixtape is reflective of the album’s mood. Elektra is first to reply: “Yeah, I think it is. I don’t think our music is necessarily similar, but I think that’s our inspiration”. Miranda adds: “Our inspiration for the record will be a combination of Swedish harder-pop like The Cardigans – so, Swedish vibes, combined with more quirky, airy Kate Bush sounds. There are definitely vibes in the mixtape that are common to our sound but I can’t say that our record will end up being anything like it”.

“On Ghost Blonde, all we had was our practice space and some cheap mics. You can hear the Metallica cover band practicing next door on some tracks. Things were different this time.”

Laura Lloyd, guitarist with No Joy, is recalling the recording process for their debut full-length. She’s speaking, via Skype, from the band’s hometown of Montreal; it was a similar Internet platform that served as the breeding ground for No Joy, when geographic distance prevented her from collaborating with bandmate Jasamine White-Gluz in person. “She was living out in LA and I was here, in Montreal. We would send each other really badly recorded MP3s via email and work that way. Ironically, we still do it that way despite living fifteen minutes from each other now.”

Performing live as a four-piece, I suggest I’d found it difficult to find any conclusive evidence on just how many members comprise No Joy. “I’d say we’re a trio. Our drummer, Garland Hastings, has been with us for a while now and he has a lot of input in the songs, and writes some as well. I think at first it was more of a duo thing because we didn’t have any solid members in the band – they couldn’t tour, or were ‘creatively unavailable’, but now that Garland’s been part of the set up consistently, it’s a natural progression that he would write with us as well.”

After signing to Mexican Summer in 2010 – and having immediately been given a tight deadline to turn in Ghost Blonde – the band embarked on an exhaustive touring schedule, with high-profile support slots to Wavves and Best Coast alongside their own shows (Bethany Cosentino having declared them “the best band ever” on Twitter). It was a process, though, that left them creatively wrung-out; an entire record, written and recorded in late 2011 in New York with Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, was scrapped, with the band going back to the drawing board for Wait to Pleasure.

“I guess we were just sort of burnt out and depressed; we weren’t really in our right minds. We recorded [the aborted LP] after a year of touring for Ghost Blonde. I suppose we sort of felt that we needed to keep going, but after having it mixed and sitting with it, we kind of all agreed that we didn’t really like it. It gave me a feeling of dread thinking that we were going to put it out; knowing that I didn’t put my best work forward, and feeling just totally creatively empty. It wasn’t a good feeling – the songs themselves aren’t terrible, but I can’t really separate them from how I felt at that time. Fortunately, no one pushed us to put it out, so we didn’t. Our label offered us their beautiful studio to start over and that’s exactly what we did.”

The making of the new effort wasn’t any less pain-staking than before, though. “We had two straight weeks at the studio in Brooklyn, which we were in for a minimum of ten hours a day. A lot of the songs on the record only had somewhat loose sketches before entering the studio, so we definitely spent a lot of time forming them there. I never really thought of it as a quick process, considering we spent at least a hundred and sixty hours recording. It was more of a dense process, which I think worked in our favour.”

Having already abandoned material they were unhappy with – and ending up with more time on their hands as a result – I wondered whether the tracks that ended up on Wait to Pleasure came about as the result of an intentional change in direction. “We definitely had some new ideas, but I wouldn’t say I’m one of those people that sets out to deliberately change things up, and I don’t think we did;  we just presented another aspect to our sound that we were probably kind of lightly hinting at before anyway. I think it might be more obvious now because we had access to a full studio with tons of instruments, so where we couldn’t have bongos on our first record, we could on this one. To an extent, you are a product of your environment. That said, I also know that Jas and I were both listening to a lot of Primal Scream and baggy era bands and going into the studio and having a producer was exciting because there were definitely some things we were inspired to try (drum machines, samples etc) but didn’t really have the means or technical expertise to execute before. I think that’s the key difference on Wait to Pleasure.”

No Joy’s signature is their incredibly dense, layered guitar sound, drenched in reverb; Laura recently commented on Twitter that “you could literally listen to [new single] ‘Hare Tarot Lies’ on loop and not know when it starts/ends.” That huge wall of noise, though, has to start somewhere. “It’s usually just a riff or a beat. Jas and I still like to write riffs, record them and send to each other, so a lot of songs are built that way. I think once you have a process it’s kind of hard to change the way you do things. Now that the record is finished and we lived that experience out in the studio, we might have a different approach in future, but that remains to be seen I suppose. I’ve recently purchased a MIDI keyboard and am teaching myself how to use Ableton, but so far I’m only capable of writing R&B so who knows what’s next.”

With the guitar very much at the forefront for No Joy, Jasamine’s vocals are, for all intents and purposes, treated as just another instrument in the mix, distorted and often drowned out. As a result, I suggest, are the often-unintelligible lyrics given less consideration than if the listener was hearing them crystal clear? “She’s very careful with the lyrics she writes, but not too keen on sharing them. The vocals just aren’t the voice or core of our songs; it’s just that, aesthetically, Jasamine and I both prefer songs where you can’t really understand the vocals or hear them all the time. I appreciate the ambiguity of that, and I like it even more when people try to decipher the lyrics and post them online, if only for own personal amusement. They’re always wrong, by the way.”

The foreseeable future is going to see No Joy pretty much permanently on the road, with Laura hoping to reach the UK and “as many new places as possible.” It’s an opportunity for me to pick a bone with the band, with their last show in my native Manchester having been called off at the last minute a couple of years back, with no explanation given. I was hoping for as rock and roll as possible an excuse – maybe they’d set fire to all their instruments in a drug-fuelled craze the night before, or drank so much whisky that they’d passed out and couldn’t play, or just some kind of similar tale of excess and debauchery. “I remember that! That sucked. There was a power failure at the venue, so we ended up going to Wagamama instead.” No joy.

Wait to Pleasure will be available on 23 April via Mexican Summer

Nashville’s William Tyler is an excellent guitar player.

His guitar work is heard on some of the finest American indie records of the past 10 years, he was the sideman for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Silver Jews and Lambchop. “A lot of the process of doing my own music has been learning how to step away from a sideman mentality, to be comfortable in my own musical skin,” he says, leading to Tyler’s second album, Impossible Truth, an instrumental guitar album that you might actually want to listen to. Joe Satriani this ain’t.

He reflects upon the influence of his contemporaries, the people he has played for in his career, and interweaves them with social and political themes of modern American life. That may sound like a difficult thing to achieve on an instrumental record, but Tyler manages it.

“I guess it’s somewhat presumptuous to say ‘This is an album about the end of the world and the decline of the American empire through the eyes of someone who is simultaneously daydreaming about the end of the 1970s and terrified of the future, with a redemptive love story in there as well’ – and then not provide any lyrics. I think it’s enough to just be explicit with intent, to explain things in interviews like this or to conjure emotions through the titles.”

One song title, ‘Geography of Nowhere’ is also the name of a book by American author and social critic James Kunstler. His books on American suburban history, poorly planned civic areas and peak oil take on great meaning to Tyler. The book itself takes a pretty grim look at a declining landscape. Vacuous malls, hypermarkets, empty buildings, civic spaces declining in function. It becomes part the thematic tapestry of Impossible Truth.

“I knew I wanted it to be essentially about the end of the world, peak oil, vanishing water, dead cities, perhaps even a nuclear cataclysm at the end. And I also wanted it to be reflective, to be about some kind of innocence and cultural clarity we lost at the end of the seventies, not just in politics, but in film and music too.”

“The failure of the film ‘Heaven’s Gate’ had a lot to do with it [a western film starring Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken that flopped at the box office]. It was released right around the same time that Reagan was elected and John Lennon was shot; 1980 was this huge paradigm shift for America and my parents’ generation, and it happened to be the year I was born.”

How do you write an instrumental song, it must be difficult to formulate structure with no words to guide you? “It’s very difficult and it takes me a while to finish compositions,” Tyler responds. “I guess in some abstract way when I feel all of the colours in the room refract the light the right way, or the story seems to have a proper coda etc, some part of me just knows it’s finished.”

To understand the themes of Impossible Truth doesn’t take much undertaking, but an interest in the great American culture of the 70′s and 80′s is key. The album’s title is a reference to an early Saturday Night Live sketch by comedian Albert Brooks. The influence of Laurel Canyon, the L.A. neighbourhood which housed Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is a huge motif of Tyler’s work. It seems to be Tyler’s bag; unambiguous, (somewhat) universal influences presented in an ambiguous way.

Impossible Truth sounds like a stereotypical Laurel Canyon record, more than a lot of records from the era. Tyler says there was intent behind this, but I suggest that his view of the era is romanticised; “I’m not sure if my view of that era is romanticised per se. There is something undeniably fascinating and compelling about that moment in American musical history. For a long time it seemed so utterly naïve and cynical at the same time. All the drugs and hedonism and this smooth music coming out of this small, insular world.”

Laurel Canyon helped form this record in more than a stylistic sense, as Tyler’s girlfriend was once married to someone from the Canyon scene at the time.

“When she and I met, I was aware of who he [the ex-husband] was and I think I projected a lot into that. I felt as I might be standing in the shadow of this older singer songwriter guy from this bygone era that I had daydreamed about. I think I gave that too much power, as a lot of people do when they feel insecure about new relationships. I channeled that angst into the making of this record.

“A lot of it was a purging, a catharsis. I didn’t want to feel as if I was standing in the shadow of anyone, a past love, a lost era. It gave birth to a phrase that I use to describe a mood in this record, ‘the tyranny of nostalgia’. We shouldn’t let the past, the ghosts steer us too much. They should be acknowledged, honoured even, but they aren’t necessarily relevant to the present. A lot of this album is me laying all these existential ghosts to rest and walking off into the sunset with my lady.”

Impossible Truth will be released on 06 May via Merge Records and William Tyler will be laying the following UK/IE tour dates:

May
03 Brighton, The Palmeira
04 Edinburgh, Red Lecture Hall
05 Manchester, The New Oxford
06 Cork, Crane Lane Theatre
07 Belfast, McHughs
08 Dublin, Whelan’s
09 Cardiff, 10ft Tall
10 Falmouth, Beerfwolf
12 Winchester, The Railway
13 London, Cafe Oto

Mudhoney’s fine recent LP Vanishing Point is a milestone not only for the band, but their label Sub Pop too – it represents the 25th anniversary of a pairing that has yielded some of the best guitar music arguably since punk rock’s first wave fizzled out in the early Eighties (or earlier, depending on how puritanical you’re feeling). 

As this discussion with Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner proves, neither are showing any signs of slowing down. Turner – the man perhaps most responsible for defining the band’s gritty, visceral sound – explains how he’s never usually a huge fan of their records immediately after completion, yet has this time retained a desire to get straight out on the road and bash the hell out of the new songs. The only thing preferable would be to write and record a bunch of even fresher ones, immediately.  He’s nearly 50.  Here, he discusses everything from the band’s early days as Sub Pop’s flagship band, via their mid Nineties stint on a major label and the deaths of much beloved contemporaries, to what seems to be the most exciting bit – whatever comes next.

It’s been five years since the last Mudhoney record, which is the longest gap in your back catalogue. What took you guys longer this time?

“That’s weird, because it seems like we’ve been doing it [Mudhoney] constantly, with all the shows and stuff. I honestly thought it was four years, which tells you something. Recording for us generally goes quickly. It was basically two weekends last year; one was in April, one in September. Then we finished up overdubbing and putting some fairy dust on it in December. We cut the basic tracks pretty quickly, but this time (singer/guitarist) Mark [Arm] messed around with more things after the fact. I was in Portland, so I skipped some of the overdubbing days where the synthesiser was put on and things like that.  None of us are really particularly engineer minded or too interested in the knob twiddling itself, but of course, we have a pretty good idea of what we want.”

What with having known each other as friends and musicians for so long, do you have to make an effort not to fall in to familiar grooves? Or are they the things that make Mudhoney distinct?

“This one to me was more relaxed, we just let it flow. Especially after The Lucky Ones, which was a definite departure for us in that Mark didn’t play any guitar on it – it stands out to me as a different sounding record because of that. We did it very quickly; it was raw, kind of a punk rock mid life crisis! I love that record though. I was happier with that record than most. There are always songs where I think, “oh, that’s not quite fleshed out all the way”, or songs I just don’t like. I’m never totally pleased with any record. But The Lucky Ones came closer to pleasing me than the ones previous. With Vanishing Point, I tried not to even really value judge it whilst we were doing it, just to let it go.  We kept it pretty loose, but we knew we weren’t just going to make a screaming punk rock record again. Actually, what it kept reminding me of was something that we can all relate to from our youth, which was the SST catalogue, post Black Flag’s My War, where they threw the rulebook out. They were throwing a lot of weird bands at us – some of them didn’t work, some did, but it was all a U.S. underground version of post punk. Husker Du, Minutemen, Black Flag, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth – the only thing they had in common was that they were coming out of punk rock and searching for other places to go. To me, Vanishing Point sounds like that stuff. In my mind there was that same theme of ‘what do you do after punk rock?’”

How long does it take you to get some distance on a record, to be able to judge it as good or bad, or know where it sits in your catalogue? Can you do that the minute you press ‘stop’?

“I’m never in love with the thing we just recorded. A lot of people just get excited because it’s the newest thing, I’ve never thought that. I defer to friends, and more people across the board people seem to be saying good things about this record, which is interesting.”

What makes Vanishing Point different from The Lucky Ones, or indeed anything you’ve done previously?

“I think we were paying attention to each other more. We didn’t know what we were trying to do, so it seems like we were playing off each other better and with less preconceived ideas. There’s an eleventh song we recorded that didn’t make it on the record. It was just a little too far out there. Mark didn’t think it fit on the record – which is fine, we got ourselves a seven inch – but that was even weirder, the guitar was all flanged and super affected which we don’t usually do.”

The chorus of children coming in really made me laugh.

“We thought that was funny too! That’s a perfect Mudhoney joke to us, it’s a song called ‘I Like It Small’, and there we are just adding more and more crap to the end. We think that’s really funny and clever. It’s pretty obvious though, right? We’re not very subtle! We’re pretty obvious.”

You mentioned a lot of SST bands, and of course it’s Sub Pop’s 25^th anniversary this year too.  It occurred to me that you’re probably the only ones still going from around that time. You’ve even outlived Sonic Youth!

“[Laughs] They’ve got more years on us though, they started earlier than we did! But that’s kinda true I guess, huh.”

Why do you think you survived when your contemporaries are no longer with us for one reason or another?

“It’s our relaxed attitude. If we didn’t want to do it for a while, we didn’t do it for a while. I mean, how many times have people thought we broke up? We never actually said we broke up, but it’s assumed that we broke up when Matt [Lukin, original bassist] quit, or it’s assumed that we broke up when I went back to college in 1990. We always just said, why break up? If we don’t want to do it, we don’t do it. But that said, after Matt quit we took a solid year off, and once we started doing it again we realised we liked doing it. We realised it wasn’t our job anymore, and that we didn’t owe anybody anything with it. It’s harder to schedule in now, but it’s important to us, so whatever we can do, we do. We don’t get on anybody’s back – if one of us can’t do something, we all have to say no.”

Photo by Doug Schwarz

Cameron Neal is a tad outside the box of the contemporary American music scene. Despite being in his early twenties, his mind is stuck somewhere between 1970 and ’72.

He’s got a modern take on life and realises he’s in an indie band in 2013, but musically Jerry Garcia is still alive and Neil Young wasn’t yet the target of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Best Fit recently held a phone conversation with Neal, the lead singer and guitarist for Oklahoma’s Horse Thief. After all, Best Fit ain’t about today’s American Top 40.

And, as it turns out, Neal isn’t  either. “That’s one of my biggest problems with Top 40 – it’s all about the same thing,” he states. “There’s a way to talk about love and a way to talk about depression and not make it sound cheesy. You can make it sound real where somebody listening to it can actually feel an emotion and feel connected to you in some way. If you’re not writing about emotions, or you’re not writing about something that people can connect to, I don’t understand how people could connect to your music.”

Feeling a connection to music is one of the two keys to understanding Horse Thief. Like any songwriter striving to create some sort of lasting impact, Neal understands having an emotional relationship with songs is why you listen to music in the first place – even if it means having a bond with Taylor Swift. “Music is music,” he says, “and if someone connects to [her] songs, then they should listen to them. I hope people feel the same way about us.”

As to whether Taylor Swift (as a microcosm of commercialized music) is something he’d consider ‘bad music,’ he replies, “My definition of bad music? I mean, I don’t necessarily know if there is. To my taste, there is bad music, but that’s with everyone. But I can appreciate what they’re doing, their hard work, their art. And if there’s an emotional impact that’s being caused by it, then there is true inspiration that’s making them do it. But I don’t think it’s bad music necessarily.” So, while Neal doesn’t exactly find a great source of solace in Billboard-ready composition, he does at least appreciate its value to others. That is to say, at a minimum he’s open to differing interpretations of life.

Which brings us to the other key to understanding Horse Thief: interpretation. Let’s start with the band’s name.  “When we went up to Colorado to write and record [Grow Deep, Grow Wild], we pulled out this big map of all these local hiking trails and we went through all these different names,” recalls Neal. “Horse Thief was one of the names that we saw first, and it kind of just stuck and beat everything else out.” When asked what the name means, he answers, “It kinda puts an image into your head. The name sounds like a country/western band, but I think it’s beyond that as far as the music goes.”

Going beyond expectations (and interpretations) is what seems to make Neal tick. He states early on that he wants Oklahoma to be known for more than the stereotypical image of and cowboy boots and tumbleweeds. Not only that, Neal believes Oklahoma to be the next big music scene: “That’s what’s growing. There aren’t a million bands playing (here), and the bands that are playing are all friends with each other. It doesn’t matter what type of music it is. We’re supporting what everyone is doing as far as art.”

You might notice that when Neal speaks of Oklahoma, it’s almost pure adoration – much like the way you’d talk about a loving mother. Which is noteworthy given that the three original members of Horse Thief aren’t from the Sooner State, but from Texas. Formed under the Tellavators, the band played for three years in the area before deciding to make the move to Oklahoma in order to attend the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma(ACM@UCO). The band, then a trio, was lucky enough to be able to move together to the same place. When the band left Texas, they also left their name. “We were young when we named ourselves the Tellavators, and I don’t think that’s what we all wanted to stick with,” Neal reflects. Thus, Horse Thief was (re)born – so much so that if you them ask where the band is from, they will respond with Oklahoma. I then ask if Neal considers Oklahoma to be the band’s home now. He replies, “Yes, I think so. At first, when we moved up there, we didn’t know what to expect. In the few years we’ve lived here, Oklahoma’s kind of adopted us.”

Adoption is a good word for the band, not only with regard to their home, but in their sound, as well. The band themselves state that they play “psychedelic folk rock.” The adoption part comes in when you begin to spot influences that aren’t exactly current. The two most obvious influences are Neil Young and American Beauty-era Grateful Dead. Says Neal, “I definitely grew up in a very ‘hippy’ atmosphere. It’s just a natural influence. I mean, I was into that before I was even born, in the womb. So, as my life progressed, I really understood it and latched onto it because it felt like me. And I hope we can bring a modern-day version of that.”

It’s clear from the interview, as well as performance footage, that Neal is speaking about the band beyond the recording studio. In fact, Neal believes HT are truly in their element on stage. “[T]hat’s one of the main things we’re focusing on: trying to capture the way we do it live and get the same emotion people are feeling at our shows,” he offers. “That’s how we all feel – we all just wanna be on the road 250 days of the year. That’s what we’re shooting for right now.”

Photo by Doug Schwarz

But there’s more to it than just enjoying the thrill of being on the road. There’s also a different ambiance live, not only because it’s in-person but also because interpretation of the songs changes slightly. “You make a record and you play that record live – people don’t want to hear it that way,” Neal explains. “They wanna hear something a little bit different, and that’s why they come to see you live. There are so many bands I go see and I’m like, ‘If I wanted to pay $15 to come see you, I woulda just turned your record up louder.’” He chuckles at his own joke for a moment, then continues. “If someone paid $15 for the record and then paid $15 for the show, I wanna give ‘em another experience to take home with them […] The difference is the atmosphere that you’re adding. If you’re not feeling your own music, people can tell that in a live setting. The more you’re willing to put into a live show, the more people are willing to let go.”

This is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that a career-oriented band like Horse Thief needs the road to survive financially – a reality that Neal recognizes all too well. Indeed, he readily acknowledges that Horse Thief won’t make enough money to pay bills from record sales, both because of the current attitude towards rock music in America, and because most indie bands “aren’t making money off records.” Instead, Neal argues that even the biggest indie bands are only “making good money from playing festivals, being on the road and from merchandise.” He believes that Horse Thief face the same situation, but he looks at it with optimism: “We’ll play where anyone wants us to play. We just want to be able to do this as a living. If we have to do it by playing on the road, that’s great.”

After all, it’s that we-belong-on-the-road mentality that landed them a release deal with Bella Union. Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde caught Horse Thief’s set at SXSW last year, took them on the road and then offered them a deal to release their forthcoming EP, as well as a full-length in the future. Landing a deal with the London-based record company is only the beginning for Horse Thief’s European excursions, though. After they release their EP this spring, which is essentially a reworking of Grow Deep, the band plans to tour Europe this coming fall, then put out a full-length early next year and tour Europe again. They might even try to fit a U.S. tour in there, as well.

If you happen to catch Horse Thief live, hopefully they will have better luck with the police in foreign lands than they do at home. In the U.S., Horse Thief have a reputation for being shut down by the cops. “We actually just got shut down twice in Austin [Texas, for SXSW]. It’s so random,” Neal comments. “And when it happens in Oklahoma, it’s always when we’re playing ‘Warrior,’ which is a song about Oklahoma.” If you don’t quite understand how a band that plays ‘70s folk rock could be a target for the authorities, Neal’s right there with you: “I don’t know, maybe it’s the circumstances, maybe it’s the people at the house parties. It just always seems to happen. And I think our live show is a little bit more aggressive than the record is. That’s something that we’re working for the next album – trying to capture the intensity of the live show.”

Grow Deep, Grow Wild is available now through Bella Union.

There are plenty of bands out there playing psych music or garage rock – more than since the heyday of the Sixties you could argue – but there are few as instantly recognisable as the Texan quartet of The Black Angels.

Since 2006’s debut album Passover Alex Maas, Christian Bland, Stephanie Bailey and Kyle Hunt have been providing us with dark, intense psychedelic experiences that rather than being trippy excursions, pack a real garage punch. Whether it’s the politicised viscera of that first record, the controlled, acid-fried stomp of sophomore effort Directions to See a Ghost or the surprisingly clear-headed grooves of Phosphene Dream, there’s a certain aesthetic that marks each down as being quintessentially a Black Angels record. It could be the vocal incantations of singer Maas, the locked-in keyboard drones or the solid, unwavering percussion… it’s probably all of this, but there’s also the clear passion for the genre that really makes it count. While acts like The Warlocks and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club fade from memory, The Black Angels continue to go strong.

The band dropped its fourth album Indigo Meadow this month and it’s probably their best record to date. Lean, mean and focused, recorded as a four-piece following the departure of bassist Nate Ryan, it’s the sound of The Black Angels completely in the zone and sounding better than ever. There’s even a playful tone – heard already on lead single ‘Don’t Play with Guns – that’s maybe not been present before. We were lucky enough to speak to singer Alex Maas about the new record while he was at home in Austin, Texas, and we found a man who, while happy to discuss his band and the new album, was more than willing to expand on his love of psychedelic music.

Given the band are Austin natives, how could I not begin by asking about their SXSW experience in 2013? Maas reveals that they don’t play quite as much as they used to: “Yeah we played a couple of shows… a couple of strategic shows! Six or seven years ago we played like, nine or ten times, so we just cut it down this year, and it was really fun.” And was it a chance to play Indigo Meadow to a home crowd and road test the new tunes? “We played a lot of the new record, kind of trying to cut our teeth a little, and the festival was a great time to do it,” he says. “It was fun; we worked out some kinks and saw how people reacted to the songs for the very first time.”

I suggest that Indigo Meadow is the sound of The Black Angels honed, focused and lean – did this come from stripping down to a four-piece prior to recording? “I dunno, I think it’s just the evolution of the band,” counters Maas. “I mean, it still sounds like The Black Angels but I think ‘focused’ is an appropriate way to put it. You know, it’s like shooting a documentary film – you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until after you get done with all the footage. You get back and you’re like ‘oh, there’s a new story here, what makes sense out of all this, what songs am I gonna pull out?’ So we did that: we documented loads of songs, took all the different perspectives and made a record.” And there also seems to have been a clinical element to the recording, as Maas reveals some stuff didn’t make the cut: “We have songs that didn’t make it; for us, we wanted to keep the record under 44/45 minutes. We didn’t want to lose fidelity, it had to be greater than that – the quality gets squashed [otherwise]”

For this recording, the band returned to Texas after recording Phosphene Dream in Los Angeles with Dave Sardy. This time around, the chose John Congleton as producer, but I want to know if place plays a big part in how a Black Angels record feels? Maas says it does, to some extent: “Yeah, I think it does. Again, I don’t think it’s something you go into realising or thinking. It’s like shooting the documentary, you don’t say ‘oh I think this has a Texas feel to it’ but I definitely think it’s a product of the environment and that comes into the record and the recording process.” Perhaps a bigger influence was the time available to the band. Recorded over the course of a year, Indigo Meadow isn’t an album constructed on the road, and I think that shows in just how good a record it is: “One thing that was interesting about this record was that we had a lot of time to do it,” reveals Maas. “We took a musical alchemist approach: we took all the songs down to the studio and we were able to, like, do whatever we wanted, after we tracked them. We had tons of time to go and explore sounds and that sonic alchemy – it’s good to have the time to do that, and we made a very ‘free’ record.” So is writing on the road something to avoid? “I think a lot of ideas come out on the road, but it’s hard to fully realise them. We’re always writing, all the time, and it’s a total collaboration between the four of us… it’s beautiful.”

From the Breeders and Oasis to the Kinks and First Aid Kit, musical siblings are more common than one would think. And Emily, Camilla and Jessica Staveley-Taylor, otherwise known as The Staves, are the latest family band to join the group.

Hailing from Watford, the acoustic folk trio have been building a growing fan base not only in the UK but also around the world with their debut album Dead & Born & Grown. Their combination of simple yet seamless melodies and honest lyrics has grabbed the attention of critics, as well as the bands that they look up to themselves, such as Bon Iver. But despite the praise they’ve been getting, they admit that the band’s creative process is still something they working on. “We basically don’t know what we’re doing,” Emily Staveley-Taylor reveals with a laugh, “and we’re still trying to figure it out.”

Emily’s light approach to the band’s work ethic mirrors the sisters’ outlook on how the Staves came to fruition. Singing together since they were young, Emily, Camilia and Jessica would participate in weekly open mic nights and perform acapella covers of their favourite songs. Previously referred to collectively by their surname, a late addition to a gig at one of their local pubs pushed them to shorten it to ‘The Staves’. “A friend just wrote it on the chalkboard that night,” Emily admits. “We said that we’d change it one day, but it just never happened.”

Once they had their name set and started to garner a fan base, the sisters started thinking more seriously about pursuing music as a career. However it was not something they originally considered. “I don’t think we ever sat down and said, ‘Right. Let’s be a band. We want to sound like this,’ she says. “I don’t think it was anything we had to sort out. We’ve kind of been singing our way, really.”

“But it was always that we wanted to sing together,” Emily continues. “So when we started, we were learning covers and stuff. We would sing the guitar solo or the string section of a particular song or kind of try and use our voices instead of the instruments we can play. And that stuck and has stuck for a long time. And I think that whole singer-songwriter, kind of 60s and 70s [style], what we grew up with… you can really have a rich sound with not much instrumentation at all. “

Soon after they started venturing down the music route, Camilla picked up the guitar whilst Jessica learned how to play the ukulele. And once that happened, their album’s title track was written. “Millie was learning how to play guitar, and she could only play two strings so she could play a 2-finger rag before she could play the main bit,” Emily states. “That’s why you hear the [sounds out introduction to ‘Dead Born and Grown’] because she couldn’t play anything else. She just wrote these lyrics, and she could have been 15 or something. I really like that it’s ‘Dead and Born and Grown’ rather than ‘Born and Grown and Dead.’ I like when [songs] make you see something fresh. I love performing that one, especially because it’s just the three of us.“

As was mentioned previously, The Staves are still working on their songwriting process. “When we started [writing], we just started arranging it and then rearranging it,” she says. “Then it would change and become something all of us created. Sometimes songs are written completely individually and then brought to the table almost fully formed. And then it’s a case of sitting around and starting to play, and then realising something sounds really nice… then words start coming. It’s a time when all of us are in the room until the song is done. Some of them take years and some of them take hours.”

With three strong voices, who gets to sing lead? It’s pretty simple. Whoever wrote most of the song gets to lead the vocals – unless there is a sibling who really wants to take the lead. ”The general rule is if someone has particularly written the bulk of the song, they should sing the lead since it feels natural for them to do that,” she says. “Maybe the lyrics are a bit more personal. It’s something they really want to sing. But it can also be someone else [who didn’t write] singing it, and then it sounds different. And it opens up a different flavour and it’s for the good of the song if a particular tone sings it.“

When it comes to bands, the ones that are a bit sheltered often end up coming off as the most genuine. Such is the case with Copenhagen punk band Iceage.

The band have just released their second full-length album You’re Nothing on Matador – an album which does more than just give the finger to authority, it tells a story – a very relatable story. Instead of building a narrative around characters, vocalist Elias Rønnenfelt’s hard pressed lips breathe raspy poems into the microphone with the few audible words that we can make out seeming to be the only words that matter. Guitar progressions spell out the phrases that the record’s listeners so desperately wanted to say, while emotion rips through pensive air, exploring much more ground than just punk rock.

The real beauty of it all lies in the album’s carefully crafted ambiguity. Iceage are a band who leave a lot up to the listener. They make music the way they know how – they don’t ask you to care or understand how they feel, instead they place a very real experience in our hands and let us decide what we want to do with it. It’s probably the most punk rock thing a band can do.

If you’re looking for a revival, or a dawning of a new punk scene, you’ve got Iceage all wrong. Their brilliance lies in their insularity. They embody the ideology more than a style of music made popular in the 80s – they didn’t even know punk was dead, because it never died to them. Best Fit sits down with frontman Elias Rønnenfelt to find out more about the story of the band, as well as how their new album You’re Nothing came to life.

Your first release was in 2009, a 4 song self-titled EP – fast forward to 2013, and you’ve just released your second album, You’re Nothing. What’s changed?

Lots of things have changed. We were four kids playing together, going to school in Copenhagen and hating it. Then we dropped out and started touring and now we are kind of living in our band, if that makes sense.

And going from your 2011 album New Brigade to your latest release – what would you say has marked the biggest change? Do you feel you have grown as a band? 

Well it’s not a radical shift or change in style, but more that we expanded on what we had before. The process of writing is pretty much  the same, but I guess we have gotten better at what we are trying to do. I don’t even know, I just write songs.

One of the aspects that makes Iceage the band that it is – one that continues to produce great music – is that you don’t overcomplicate the process. You have a system of writing and recording that works and you don’t fuck with it. Speaking of, I read you recorded this album on an island off the coast of Denmark. What was that experience like?

We built a studio in this old farm, and it was pretty cheap, so went there and didn’t really know what to expect, but it was nice because we were just pretty much in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing to do but record. Everything became very focused. I think we were done after five days.

You’re Nothing is a mix of woozy, drunk feeling and raw energy. Like you were saying, you’re not trying to make punk music. It feels like there are no rules when it comes to Iceage’s music.

Well the energy is different here because some people expect a hardcore band to think like this too, but it’s about other things.

As much as there are no rules, there is restraint. Can you talk about how you approached the writing and recording of You’re Nothing?

We just try to go with our intuition, we never really say we’re going to write this kind of song, we take a little mix of this and a little mix of that and we just write.

And do you all write together?

We don’t jam together. Mostly we will have a sketch for a song, written by one person, and we all work it out together, what needs to be changed and try to improve it. The lyrics I write mostly, but the music, we all contribute.

How would you describe the music scene that you grew up around in Denmark?

What’s it like? Well us, we have been friends for a long time, even before we started making music. And the scene is based around this warehouse space called Mayhem. Everybody pretty much goes there. I guess it all started when we formed this band, and we met some other guys in bands, and at the time we didn’t really know a lot of other bands making music that we connected with on a personal level.  These bands started becoming friends and aware of each other. Then this new warehouse space, Mayhem appeared, which kind of adopted us, because everyone was doing this industrial and punk music at the time, and from there more and more bands have popped up.

Do you ever sing in Danish at your shows?

No. There is one song in Danish on the album, but that’s it.

How would you describe an Iceage live performance? What does it feel like when you’re on stage performing?

Sometimes it’s horrible and the sound is shitty, and other times we play together really well. Then sometimes it’s a big release and I can kind of lose myself and not really know who I am anymore, it’s a kind of feeling of ecstasy. And sometimes it’s in between those two, it can be a lot of things.

Do you have a favourite venue or festival to play when you’re on the road?

I really like Munoz Gym in Bakersfield, California, which is a boxing ring. I’m not sure if I have any particular favourite venues, but I like smaller venues more.

What do you like to listen to when you’re on tour?

We like all sorts of music. We like a lot of punk but also soul music, classical music and soundtracks, everything. We don’t listen to music in particular genres.

Do you think punk is the same today as it was when bands like The Misfits and Black Flag were playing?

Yeah of course it’s changed. You have different people doing different things all over the world, and a lot of punk bands don’t have anything in common with each other. With Iceage, I don’t particularly try to be a punk band, I just write music and people call it punk.

Iceage’s second album You’re Nothing is out now on Matador. 

The cerebral loop based music of Glasgow based duo Conquering Animal Sound has little to do with the animal world, but is instead fuelled by the tension between human and machine.

On their stunning 2011 Scottish Album of the Year nominated debut Kammerspiel the machines were very much in the driving seat, their clicks and hums forging a path towards some semblance of melody with the gossamer vocals of Anneke Kampman trailing in their wake. With their new record On Floating Bodies there is a marked difference as Kampman and her co-conspirator James Scott wrestle back control of their tools and manipulate them into gorgeous ghostly contortions of very human emotions.

This shift towards a more identifiably human core actually coincides with a less intimate recording process, as their acclaim has led them to take their home spun sounds to join the ranks of Scottish label and indie institution Chemikal Underground (responsible for records from Arab Strap, Mogwai and Aereogramme to name a few). As James says “We had a great time working with Rich at Gizeh, and with Anneke’s solo stuff on his label, we’ve maintained the dialogue. But working with Chemikal has been a step forward, especially getting to mix the new album with Paul Savage in Chem19 studios, which I think has had a major influence on how our recorded sound has evolved from the last record.”

It’s quite clear that the duo were eager to retain this space for focusing ideas whilst being able to push their sound; “It was recorded in the flat we were sharing, but we were keen to record some of it in the studio, and mix it properly as well. I think with the music we make, which takes a lot of time to shape and craft, that we could bankrupt the entire nation recording it all in a studio, but it was good to end it in a studio and improve the overall sound.” Anneke adds, “This was an excellent experience. We have a little bit of hardware in our studio but we don’t have anything like the lovely compressors and distressors that we had access to in Chem19.”

This improved equipment is perhaps clearest from the focus which is now drawn to the looped intricacies of their sounds, even more so than Kammerspiel which itself was hardly made up of broad strokes. That attention to minutia sits comfortably alongside a more polished finish and a far more melodic pop sensibility, especially on the vocal hooks, which Anneke says was not their original intention; “I think we both wanted to make a much more direct and ’3 dimensional’ sounding record this time. Kammerspiel was quite an ambient piece of work and personally I wanted to try and move away from that kind of sound. I don’t really listen to that much ambient music, I listen to Jeff Mills and Erykah Badu and weird world dance music.”

It’s probably not a reference I would have recognised myself but there is something of Badu’s influence in the vocals here, they are now filled with soul and cadence rather than the mechanical syllabics which were present before. James points out that “our intentions were to create something more percussive, more rhythmic, with a more electronic influence. It just happened that on certain songs, that Anneke would come up with a really catchy vocal melody or we’d structure it with a verse-chorus template, but that was how the song came out and we were happy to work with that.”

It’s not hard to understand just how overwhelmed Autre Ne Veut appears to be with the reception that his recent album Anxiety has received. Just last year, he was most well known for following up his debut self-titled album with an EP that was notorious mostly for its cover apparently resembling female genitalia.

That it was in fact an oiled-up hand didn’t get in the way of the male tendency to assume that anything fleshy and lubricated is probably the female reproductive organ. In 2013, however, people seem much more willing to talk about his music after the deeply unsettling subject matter of Anxiety resonated with enough people to bring in a smattering of gushing reviews for its unconstrained eccentricity, all nailed in place by a seam of pop stylings.

Its boundary-battering neurosis seemed popular enough that each report of SXSW seemed to have an obligatory report of Autre Ne Veut (real name Arthur Ashin) embedded somewhere, but although Arthur was aware that eyes were on him (“It’s a lot,” as he bluntly puts it), he was grateful to be there at all after past experiences. “I got grounded and wasn’t allowed to go when I was like 13 or 14 and so in my head it’s always associated with not seeing Pavement.” The longer we speak, in fact, the more you get the sense that he’s grateful just to be in the position that he is in, as he energetically races through incredibly detailed answers to any question directed his way. He sums up his approach very neatly by simply expressing that “when your job’s something like this, you don’t have the right to complain.”

Still, that’s not to say that he doesn’t feel uneasy about being thrown into the glare of the media, and suddenly having people dissecting the meanings of his songs and, by extension, Ashin’s own psyche. “Yeah, it’s not my comfort zone at all,” he agrees, “but I have mixed feelings about it. It makes me feel self conscious and weird, but also it’s like a weird combination where the narcissist side of me has its ego stroked, because people care.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise for somebody who wrote an entire album that centred on the concept of anxiety in relation to romance, death and social situations, but the sudden intensity of analysis that him and his music are being subjected to has been tough to deal with. He admits “my baseline has become surreal in the past few months.  I kind of wonder as somebody who’s painfully self aware whether I can handle living in this surreal context for much longer, and also if the surreality ever stops being surreal and starts redefining what reality is.”

It’s exactly the sort of remorseless self-reflection that you’d expect from an ex-psychology student, as Ashin is, and he sums up his position by adding that “it’s definitely more attention than I’ve ever had on me at any time in my entire life, period. I’m the type of person who prefers to be a set of eyes in space, watching the world, so it’s weird to have that sense of people looking back.”

Given his introspective character, I can’t help asking Ashin whether he had any reservations about making such a stark and cathartic record that is the musical approximation of his deepest emotions being ripped from his grasp and being placed under a magnifying glass. But perhaps importantly, he dismisses that idea by explaining that “when I’m writing, I’m alone,” and without any knowledge of his record’s future audience, the self-consciousness didn’t arrive until after Anxiety had been written.

It’s central to Anxiety’s raw appeal that it was written in this honest way. Of course, given that the record was released by Software Recording Co. and Mexican Summer, there were a few people around during recording. But these people were Daniel Lopatin (of Oneohtrix Point Never, who also happens to be Ashin’s ex-roommate) and Joel Ford, who both helped out with all of the technical stuff that you’d expect them to be experts in. As Ashin says, even though he was working with them he wasn’t worried about laying his emotions down completely unedited: “I have the benefit of having really great people that I’m close to who know all my problems anyway working with me in the studio, so they’re not the people that I’m embarrassed around.”

In the opening line of his forthcoming record Waking on a Pretty Daze, Kurt Vile sings: “I gotta think about what I wanna say.” I don’t buy it. Over a transatlantic call from London to his home in Philadelphia, Vile seems like a man who knows exactly what he wants to say, and he doesn’t like having words put in his mouth.

“Sometimes I get asked that question, ‘what are your influences’, and I just want to scream, because there’s so much, you know, I’m listening to new stuff all the time and it all influences me. But I mentioned Tusk to someone last year and suddenly it’s all over the Internet: ‘Kurt Vile is writing the new Tusk’, so I don’t wanna say too much about that kind of thing. Everything’s an influence.”

I suddenly feel a bit guilty. Vile assures me that I “asked it well”, but we both know how tedious a line of enquiry it can be. Nevertheless, it seems particularly appropriate here – anyone who has never listened to Vile’s music could be forgiven for assuming they know exactly what he’ll sound like simply through reading the popular press about him. When Vile is mentioned, the names of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen are rarely far behind. No American musician could feel aggrieved by these comparisons, but they do something of a disservice to the idiosyncrasies of Vile’s work, which is at once both personal and stadium-worthy. This dichotomy is more apparent than ever with Waking on a Pretty Daze.

“Around the time of Smoke Ring [for My Halo, Vile’s 2011 album] I was getting into [Bert] Jansch and those guys, and there is some of that on the new one”, Vile tells me by way of explaining that intimate, personal element. “But I was listening to some really disparate stuff while writing it, like there was this one Gary Numan song, ‘Are “Friends” Electric’, and some other weird early-80s stuff, that I think worked its way in there.”

That electronic influence is not apparent on an initial listen to Pretty Daze. The overriding aesthetic is still undeniably Vile-esque, with his deceptively complex guitar work complementing a laconic approach to lyrics. “I’ve always played around with long songs,” he states. “I think most of my records have had songs around the six-minute mark, but this time I was more willing to let things run. I was more comfortable writing longer songs, and when I was playing them to John [Agnello, Vile’s producer since Smoke Ring] going ‘it’s another seven minute one!’ at first he’d kinda laugh, and then by the end, it was like ‘another one, seriously?!’ I don’t sit down to write a long song, it’s just how long it takes, and I didn’t start this record thinking it was going to be a double album.”

…Pretty Daze is, technically, a double album. At pushing 70 minutes long, it’s 20 minutes longer than Vile’s previous longest record, 2009’s Childish Prodigy, and as he tells me, he “still thinks of anything that comes on two discs as a double.” But it doesn’t flow like a double album, and it certainly doesn’t feel as long as some doubles have the tendency to. “Sure, and when I think of the double albums that I love, you know, Blonde on Blonde, The River, Exile on Main Street… most of them, really, they all divide into two parts, you can stop listening halfway through and come back to it, and I don’t know if you’d do that with mine.” The opening song, ‘Wakin on a Pretty Day,’ works as a microcosm for the whole album – a  time-machine of a nine-minute rocker that flows like a perfect three-minute pop song. “That song follows a pretty familiar structure”, explains Vile. “It starts with that riff, which really is just based on a simple chord structure, and then you’ve got verse, couple of verses, before the chorus, and then that bridgey-bit… It’s not complicated like you sometimes expect longer songs to be.”

The pattern holds for the whole album, which features four tracks that break the seven-minute mark, none of which outstay their welcome. Vile takes a quasi-classical approach to some of the longer compositions, building variations of the same repeating motifs. Though Vile has written longer songs before, they never felt quite so assured as these, nor has he ever come across as such a mature and complex musician.

2012, I remind him, was the first year since 2007 that saw no new Kurt Vile material released. Between releasing albums, EPs, singles, and work with his former band, The War On Drugs, Vile has built up a reputation as one of the most prolific men in rock. This despite being the man behind the lyric “I don’t wanna work, but I don’t wanna sit around all day frowning / I don’t wanna give up but I kinda wanna lie down, but not sleep, just rest.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t really about being lazy toward music, it was just about, you know, not wanting to go to work”, he tells me with a laugh. “I toured the hell out of [Smoke Ring]. I think I went to London three times on the back of that album. I just wanted as many people as possible to hear it. So it wasn’t slowing down, I just didn’t have the time to put anything out last year!” Plus, he has recently become a father for the second time. “Yeah, so that takes up time when I’m here. I have so many different commitments aside from music when I’m here now, and so does everyone else, that it’s hard to not be busy. Like with Adam [Granduciel, lead singer of The War on Drugs and a some-time Violator], he’s one of my really good friends, but we barely see each other, with being on the road and having families. You know, I’m 33 years old now, I’m maybe starting to settle down a bit.”

Nevertheless, Vile seems at ease with his lifestyle. On Smoke Ring, Vile sang of his desire to “hide in my baby’s arms”; the sense of introspection made it easy to picture Vile holing himself up away from the world. …Pretty Daze sounds like a party to which we’re all invited, and has been the perfect antidote to the recent unseasonable cold in London. “The record was written all over the place, on tour, and recorded in different places,” says Vile. “We put some of it down, like that first track, in California, and I think some of that sunny vibe got in there. I wanted to brighten up a bit.”

It also, for the first time, sounds like Violators record as much as a Kurt Vile solo effort. “One day I’d like to make a record that is credited to ‘Kurt Vile and the Violators’, but so far in my career all my albums have felt like solo albums that we then take on tour with the band, but you’re right, on this one I think everyone contributed a bit more. Everyone usually has their say once we’re in the studio anyway,” he says, with what sounds like a wry smile. “And I made sure that it says ‘The Violators’ on the back of the cover art, I did the graffiti for that myself.” The artwork for the album was designed by graffiti artist Steve Powers, who created the vast mural on a wall near Vile’s Philadelphia home. A good reason to buy the LP version, then, to see Vile’s own contribution to the piece? “For sure. Well, obviously I’d tell you buy it on all formats.”

At one stage I find myself quoting Vile’s lyrics back at him to make a point, something for which I apologise, before quickly pointing out that he is fond of quoting himself as well. ‘Runner Ups’ cribbed lyrics from ‘Red Apples’, a cut from his 2009 record God Is Saying This To You, and here he borrows from Smoke Ring stand-out ‘Jesus Fever’. “The thing is all those songs were actually written around the same time, it’s weird, but they’ve been kicking around since 2003, 2004. So it wasn’t really ‘quoting myself’ back then, I just had these lyrics I thought sounded good and used them in different places, and they’ve just stuck.” I find this impressive, given the clear line of development from one Kurt Vile album to the next. Vile, it seems, is equally surprised. “I’m not sure I’ve really changed my approach at all. I don’t really feel like I have. I just keep working like I always have.” Long may it continue.

Walking On A Pretty Daze will be released on 08 April through Matador Records.

As a music fan there can be few experiences more gratifying than witnessing a band blossom from humble beginnings and growing into something you had never anticipated when you first came to love their music. It’s the positive flip-side to the disappointing second album, the stagnating imagination and ‘I preferred their earlier stuff’ snobbery – yet the thrilling return of a band with lots of new ideas is rarely dissected in as much detail.

One of the more recent experiences I’ve had with this delight was Shapeshifting – the third album from Canadian quintet Young Galaxy, released in 2011. I had long been an admirer of their elegant and understated take on shoegaze filtered dream-pop, having properly fallen for a handful of songs from each of their preceding records. This was something different though, as I enthusiastically proclaimed in my review at the time they seemed to be “enamoured by the whole idea of reinvention” and this was really quite exciting to witness an almost real-time evolution. Unlike most, the vagaries of time were taking kindly to the band; having weathered a storm of frustrating critical indifference through their early releases they were now emerging stronger than before, and it was clear to hear from the boldness of their new songs. Gone were the sighing rhythms and melodramatic lyrics of before (beautiful though they often were) and in its place were big booming bass-lines, crystal guitar licks without a hint of distortion and tropical synths, not to mention words filled with optimism and hope rather than heartbreak.

Instrumental to that shift in style was the band’s new-found connection with Swedish producer and one half of influential electronic duo Studio, Dan Lissvik. Thankfully this relationship has been carried over and solidified, along with a refinement of those developments, on the forthcoming fourth record Ultramarine (released worldwide on 23 April). Vocalist Catherine McCandless was kind enough to answer a few questions about the process of their transformation, how vital Lissvik has become and what drives to them continue making music.

In an unusual production technique, for Shapeshifting the band held their Canadian base and recorded all of the songs themselves before emailing the tracks over to Lissvik in Gothenburg and allowing him to dismantle and re-build them in whatever way he saw fit. The results were hypnotically warm but occasionally retained the kind of emotional detachment which you might expect from such a construction process. However the band took a different approach this time, decamping to Gothenburg. As Catherine says, “we were in the room with [him] this time rather than doing it all over the Skype machine, so we could see him move his sexy hips when explaining how to capture the groove of a song. Everything on the record is continuous takes – none of that cut and paste bullshit”.

The fluidity of this studio approach is audible on the new record as well, that sense of aloof detachment has vanished and these resulting songs are alive with a radiance and sense of purpose. There is a deeply ingrained energy which she says is largely due to the input of the producer, “he’s insanely musical and very groovy – he feels music deep within and works extremely hard at it. I think he’s a wonderful producer, because he can articulate his musical perspective in a very intellectual but visceral way”.

It is undeniably a funkier record as well (whether or not the true source of that is the producer’s hips is open to debate), and even more so than the last there is an increased sensuality in these ten songs. Not in some tasteless explicit way, but the lithe rhythmic ways in which the songs evolve – often echoing like a suggestive movement of briefly visible shadows. ‘Out The Gate Backwards’ glides elegantly like a soft caress while ‘What We Want’ shakes like an 80′s disco-pop behemoth, and it’s impossible not to warm to the attitude they eminate. Part of this is certainly down to the switch in vocal duties, which used to be shared between McCandless and her partner and band co-founder Stephen Ramsay but which she has taken over completely now, something which they believe to be a very natural decision as “Stephen has less of an interest in singing generally – he likes to focus on the production and arrangements and I like to focus on the lyrics and vocal parts. It’s very symbiotic, as a couple we naturally fill in the spaces the other creates”.

It definitely doesn’t feel an unnatural switch to have occurred, in fact it’s barely noticeable in the context of the band’s overall sound progression from those earlier records, her smooth vocals a far better fit here. There has been a gradual move away from the fuzzy shoegaze influenced ballads they started with towards a more uplifting optimistic and melodic sound, which prompts me to ask if there was a point when the band decided they wanted to be doing something which moved closer to being pop music than it did rock. “We thought we wanted to be a heavier psychedelic band when we made our first record, but had never played live shows at that point – so it wasn’t until after we had played live that we realized we feed off the kinetic energy of the live environment, which I suppose led us to a more dance-y, pop sound overall. It feels right when we play the material live, which is the most telling thing you can feel as a band”.

In today’s musical landscape,  there is little room for development among the transience of mp3 blogs and hype machines gobbling up most of the opportunities for bands to develop without the pressure to capture an ever moving zeitgeist, and the band are rightly weary of this. Catherine discusses the relative freedom with which they have been able to find themselves as a band; “most people expect bands to know what they want to do when they start doing it, which I think is rarely the case. You have to learn your own musical language, you know? Plus we live in an era of pop music unlike any before it, whereby bands are not given infrastructure to develop, yet are expected to understand themselves immediately. If it doesn’t take off, too bad for you – everyone moves on,” she says, striking on a point which seems frustratingly accurate for most new bands these days. It’s something they were fortunate to avoid, “For us, we were seekers – we’ve always made music that felt right at that moment in time. I wish bands were able to do that more often nowadays. Too much modern music isn’t risky or ambitious, it’s just angling for success – which makes it dull, dull, dull”. It’s a tough sentiment to argue with.

The band are certainly keen to keep things fresh and try new things, and four albums in they’re keenly aware that this is a stage which a lot of bands are never given the opportunity to reach. For them it’s about keeping themselves motivated to continue doing new things; “We simply don’t care about being famous, and we have the nagging suspicion that the longer we do this the better we get, so we are still driven by something essential I’d say…” She goes on to add what that might be, and it’s an admirable sentiment, the kind of which perhaps not enough bands are clear about these days. Paraphrasing Nile Rodgers she says that “one of the greatest motivators is professional jealousy – when you hear a brilliant piece of music, you feel compelled to respond to it, to try to up the ante. That’s why it’s so important to be a fan of music first – you can never forget what a conversation music making is”.

This keen sense of what they’re doing is more crucial than ever before for the band as McCandless and Ramsay are now a family as well, and her response is typically pragmatic when I ask if this has made it more difficult to balance day to day life with band life. “Yes, we have a son, Fergus, who’s almost 2 years old… we keep telling ourselves that our choice to follow our dreams will make him happier in the long run, knowing his parents are content in what they do. You have to fight to balance the feeling of being self-indulgent vs. doing what’s best for your child…” Honestly though, the way in which Young Galaxy are going about their craft of late, I can’t help but think that they are set for a higher level of success before  long. Even if they might not know it, as Catherine humbly states “We live in fear of it being taken away at any moment, it is in part what fuels our ambitions… it’s not exactly a stable profession!”

Ultramarine will be released on 29 April via Paper Bag Records.

Admittedly, of all the coffee-brewing establishments London’s Fitzrovia has to offer, taking Swedish singer-songwriter, Beatrice Eli, to Scandinavian Kitchen for our interview is hardly going to win the Genius Decision of the Year Award. After all, you wouldn’t take a visiting Italian out for a pizza, would you?

My ridiculous choice of venue notwithstanding, it does prompt Eli to confirm that the food available at the Nordic emporium indeed looks “like real Swedish food” and with this verbal certification of authenticity, we proceed to shelter from London’s renewed efforts at snowing. Dressed in black, Eli is donning a Croydon facelift, and somehow makes it work and look cool. She is, at all times, smiley, attentive and doesn’t shy away from eye contact. This may have something to do with the fact that she is very excited to be talking about her new music, which is finally seeing the light of day in the UK, following a soft release in her native Sweden.

The EP she is about to unleash here, It’s Over, is a ‘no fillers, no shit’ endeavour, containing four diverse and bravo-worthy tracks. Last year’s buzz maker, ‘The Conqueror’, is on it as well as three new potential greatest hits.

We start off by talking about when she first started making music. “After I quit high school – is it high school here when you’re 19?”, she asks, but we don’t dwell on the intricacies of Sixth Form. “I’d been to music school in Stockholm”, she continues, “and I didn’t have a band or play the guitar or the piano at the time but I wanted to make music. So I just bought this little home studio type of thing and started learning to produce. I just wanted to make my own music so I took some time to work on that and especially work on the beats. The beats are really important to me. I don’t want stuff to pass by unnoticed, I like weird and dramatic sounds”. The next step was putting some of her home recordings up on Myspace. “An A&R guy in the UK found me on Myspace”, she says, “and I started working with EMI in Sweden and with professional producers. I co-produced a lot of the demos”.

At music school Eli mainly studied soul singing. “I learned to play the guitar a bit too but not very well”, she giggles. I ask whether she found music school to be beneficial. She takes a moment to think about this and then shakes her head. “Not really, to be honest,” she says. “After school I realised that the technique I was taught really messed up my voice. I don’t know if I was doing it wrong or something but it really hurt my voice. And I think what got me to sing better and write better and perform better was just me being in the studio all the time and just singing and working on it. But I guess at least I had the chance to do something that I was interested in studying”.

‘The Conqueror’ came to Eli a couple of years ago. “I wrote it on the piano”, she says. “This made it very open in terms of what we could do with the song and, at the time, I just got into the UK sound and I was really inspired by dubstep and grime and all that and I wanted to do my own take on it”. The idea behind ‘The Conqueror’ came from wanting to be that someone special in another person’s life but “it doesn’t have to be about you actually loving that person that much, you know”, she clarifies. “It’s an ego thing. That’s a common theme with me and my friends – like, oh, I don’t like him or her anymore, we’ve broken up and I don’t want to be with that person anymore but I actually still want to have some sort of effect on them. I don’t want to see that person with someone else. This kind of ugly thing within us that a lot of people have and that I’ve experienced myself”.

I put it to her that this admission is rather honest. Does she not mind being so open, especially on her very first release? “That’s the only way for me to write”, she says. “So there are songs on the album that are beyond ‘The Conqueror’ in that respect. I guess it’s a good thing for me to get that one out there first as a taster of what’s coming because it’s going to be a personal experience. Also, I guess you have your own feeling when you write something but then when other people listen to it they might not see it in the same way you did when you were writing it. So, a lot of people thought it was a song about heartache but for me it was about ownership”.

Whilst ‘The Conqueror’ was only intended as an introductory hype-creator and was not, until now, made available for legal procurement over here, Eli made an initial promotional push in the UK last year and enjoyed very favourable blog murmurings. Throughout our conversation you get a real sense of Eli being an anglophile. She mentions her love of London often. “I’d absolutely love to be able to work in the UK”, she says. “It’s very close to home and the culture is quite similar. I adore London and I think the music that comes from here is really, really good. So to be able to have a little space of mine here in the music world would be amazing”. Eli previously lived in London for a month and cherished that experience. “I didn’t wanna go back to Stockholm”, she exclaims. For her it’s all about the vibe and the tempo of the city, she tells me. “It’s just very energetic and for someone who is in the music business, there’s a lot of people to work with, a lot of creative people. Also, I know you guys don’t think the weather here is good but if you compare it to Sweden, trust me – it’s good”, she laughs.

We move on to discuss her new single and the title track of the EP, ‘It’s Over’. Where ‘The Conqueror’ had a ballady essence to it, ‘It’s Over’ swallows a dextrose tablet and instantly turns on the sass. The song was started off by Astma & Rocwell of Swedish band (and Best Fit Recordings family members) NONONO, who also co-wrote and produced ‘The Conqueror’. “I was just like, wow I love this track. I love the vibe of it. I had a couple of lines that I had written on my phone a couple of days before and they just fit perfectly on their track. We recorded it the next day and there it was. It fit. I tend to instinctively go for ballads so it was really refreshing to have something that was much more upbeat”.

Descriptions of Devendra Banhart’s music are likely to include the words ‘freaky folk’. Two words that seem somewhat oxymoronic if you look back at the etymology of them; ‘freaky’ meaning something strange or unusual, and ‘folk’ meaning something widespread and traditional. But through conducting this interview, they have now become two words that have come to very surely describe Devendra Banhart. An embodiment of oxymoron, as sweet-sounding and endearing as he may be.

The interview begins and I first fulfil my customary duties; “how are you?” I ask. “I’m ok – I’m walking around New York. I’m looking for apartments with my fiancée right now in a part of town I’ve never been. So I’m talking to you as I go to look for apartments.” If old reruns of ‘Location, Location, Location’ are anything to go by, the task of house hunting is not something to be done without full concentration. But rather than being concerned about the quality of our encounter, as the interview continues, I’ll be assured that he can juggle the interviewee-househunter dualism with abundant ease.

Should you mention Banhart’s name to a seasoned folk music listener, their response will oscillate between talented musician and bearded, arty neo-hippy. But ask the E! News watcher and he’ll be the former flame of Natalie Portman and since cutting his hair, it’s not surprising that he’s been ushered into the world of glossy-magazine fashion modelling courtesy of Kooples. It’d be difficult to say he wasn’t canon fodder for the ‘sell-out’ brigade with all this considered, but this would an easy and auspicious jab, and one that, as Banhart’s new album Mala shows, is irrelevant when considered alongside his knowledge and work as an artist.

“Mala will be your eighth album, I believe?” I ask, pre-empting a quick affirmative response from Banhart. “Hmm, I don’t know let me think…” The seconds pass… “I think it may be the seventh”. Which is true, if you discount his unofficial 25-track demo The Charles C. Leary released before his official debut album Oh Me, Oh My. Devendra has always treated his art with a meticulous seriousness, a mentality that seems insoluble with his glossy-mag alter ego, but is there with a potent force nonetheless.

Still, this kind of awareness of one’s own work can be intimidating as a third party attempting to attain more understanding on things that appear so obvious to the artist. Three years on since the last release of a Banhart LP, I ask what has changed in the space of this time that has perhaps affected the record, “far too much to discuss right now, and far too little that would be of interest.” Was it difficult to keep the album focused, with regards to the amount of influences that would have appeared in those three years? “I don’t know…” he responds, “what do you think?” What I think is that Mala is indeed a more focused album, in very literal sense. His shortest album to date clocking at 14 songs, it manages to successfully draw upon disparate influences but produce a full sounding, structured body of work, while still managing to sound effortless. But the original question would never receive a response; instead the conversation is transported to a cyber-galactic parallel universe. Attempting to engage in oblique responses is made much more difficult with an oblique telephone line. “Um, it’s so strange I keep hearing something…” he says, “are you saying Neptune or Neptunes…? I’m hearing something about mythology… Neptune.” I assure him that Neptune isn’t being discussed and, as the phrase goes, move swiftly on.

“I’ve been a visual artist for the same amount of time that I’ve been a musician,” he replies when asked about his creative methodology, “it’s been parallel with my musical career. Literally to a T – the first solo show I had in New York was the same month as the first record came out. I divide my time between those two disciplines. For the last three years, I haven’t been writing this record. I wrote it a month before recording. The times prior to that I was working on visual art – and those are the two things that I do.” For a moment, the interview is, as suspected it would be at some stage, relegated to second position as Banhart graciously thanks someone who I imagine to be a landlord for their ‘understanding’, before expertly refocussing on the question. “So that’s it, my process changes all the time – it’s one of pain and trauma [laughs] but it’s all right…”

“I’ve just had an interview request from Farming Today on Radio 4. That’s a new one.” Billy Bragg, it seems, is prepared to go down some pretty unorthodox routes to promote his new record. “It’s on at five in the morning,” he groans. “They want me to talk about the Agricultural Wages Board. It’s all in a day’s work for me, I suppose. I’m actually talking to Zoo magazine tomorrow.” I respond with an unintelligible squeal that’s equal parts shock and indignation. “Nah, fuck off. I wouldn’t touch that lot with a bargepole.”

It’s a pretty neat summation of the Billy Bragg we’ve gotten to know in the years since his last original studio album Mr. Love and Justice was released back in 2007. Since then, he’s spent far more time in the spotlight for political reasons than for his music, campaigning against the rise of the BNP, getting involved in the student protests and, now, writing to his MP to complain about plans to abolish the minimum wage for farmers. Even the handful of songs he’s released on his website in that period have been topically-driven; ‘Never Buy the Sun’ and ‘Last Flight to Abu Dhabi’ serve as examples. Tooth and Nail represents a long-overdue return to the studio; in a YouTube preview, he admits that he’s spent the past few years “keeping the record industry at arm’s length.”

“I think they’ve probably been keeping me at arm’s length,” he laughs. “I have been putting material out there. I put a compilation of free downloads out in 2011 called Fight Songs, and last year I put out the complete Mermaid Avenue sessions, so I’ve not been rejecting it, but I don’t really know if there’s a place for Billy Bragg in the record industry at the moment. We’ll find out when Tooth and Nail comes out.”

The main problem, it seems, has been one of financial concern. “If I really wanted to do things without the industry, I’d have to self-fund the record. I make my living playing gigs, and the last thing I’d want would be to get to the end of a long campaign travelling round the world only to find that I’d painted myself into a corner financially, because the album had been so expensive to make. I was just reading an interview with Emmylou Harris in The Guardian, talking about when she used to play with the Hot Band. She said she’d worked with the most amazing musicians, and ended up a quarter of a million pounds in debt at the end of it all. There’s a lot of practical things like that to consider – that’s what I meant by keeping the industry at arm’s length.”

The impetus to finally throw himself back into the writing and recording process was provided by the death of his mother two years ago. “When you lose someone close to you, it’s bound to make you think about what you’re doing with your own life,” he says. “Suddenly, I realised I was the oldest member of my family left, and I won’t pretend there wasn’t a void I needed to fill. I’d been putting off making a proper record for a while, and I had an offer on the table from my friend, Joe Henry, to make an album in five days.”

It was an offer he ended up accepting, despite the fact that such a swift recording process was anything but the norm on past efforts. “Put it this way; on Mr. Love and Justice I did two songs in six weeks, than we had a break for six months, then another six songs in two weeks. After that, half the tracks still didn’t have lyrics. By the time I was finished, I ended up with a record on which I’d spent far too much for far too few copies sold. I couldn’t afford to go down that path again. It was my money on the line again, and I had to make this quick process work, otherwise I might’ve ended up with the most expensive demos I’d ever made.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming, then, that the songs were all finished and ready to go before day one of five began. Not so, says Billy. “I wrote the lyrics for ‘Handyman Blues’ in the taxi on the way to the airport, and I didn’t write ‘January Song’ til the last day of recording. I had a few others that were very much still in the flatpack, as it were, that needed assembling when I got there.”

Sonically, Tooth and Nail is tinged with the kind of Americana that Bragg has clearly been fascinated with for a while now; a number of his past works have focused on folk hero Woody Guthrie, including the aforementioned Mermaid Avenue sessions, which saw him team up with Wilco to set Guthrie’s lyrics to their own new compositions. “Those sessions opened me up to a lot of new people; the younger audience that Wilco brought me, and then Woody’s older fans, too. The influence of American roots music has always been there to some degree, but I never followed it up after Mermaid Avenue. It wasn’t until I was working on stuff for Woody’s centenary last year that I really reconnected with that. It’s always been there, as far back as an old B-side from the eighties called ‘There Is Power in a Union’, that was just an acoustic guitar and a banjo. Pre-Mumford banjo, I should add.”

In a strikingly austere modernist theatre in the Mitte district of Berlin, Yoann Lemoine stands triumphant onstage, arms outstretched messianicaly, egging on the adulations of a mid-week crowd. There’s near-hysteria in the auditorium for the man better known as Woodkid and it’s not difficult to see why.

Lemoine has earned acclaim and gongs (including a Cannes Lion) for his work with the likes of Lana Del Rey, Drake, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift but tonight finds the hirsute Frenchman fully transformed into a musical prodigy with a body of songs the equal of his video work and a show that transcends the everyday without ever becoming obtuse.

The child of advertising creatives, Lemoine was born in Lyon thirty years ago. After an education that took him from his native France to London – and covered everything from stop-motion animation to photography, collage and film – he followed his parents into the world of ads for a time before finding his feet as an in-demand videographer with style that immediately set him apart. In 2011, he stepped out from behind the camera to showcase his musical talent with the arresting ‘Iron‘, which introduced a sound that clashes baroque, anthemic orchestrals against a heavy beat-driven punch referencing warehouse raves and film soundtracks as much concert halls.

We’re in Berlin to talk with Lemoine about The Golden Age, his debut long-player which drops via Island this week. Three years in the making, it’s a magnificent multi-sensory opus with a coming-of-age concept that spreads beyond just the music – there’s an illustrated novella and massive live visuals that all carry a unifying poetic. The project is centred on the movement from adolescence to adulthood and the concept of that hallowed time when innocence reigns and we’re shielded from the war, corruption and horrors of the adult world.

Lemoine’s an ambitious soul. If he were ten years younger, the confidence and intellectual gusto that accompanies our conversation might seem arrogant or misplaced but there’s little doubt of the workmanlike skill that underlies his efforts across so many different mediums (not to mention their subsequent success). The Golden Age simply couldn’t have been made by someone in their late teens or early twenties; it’s a mature debut with emotional heft.

The Golden Age is an incredibly bold statement and I was wondering how you managed to work across several different mediums and still retain a sense of thematic unity.

I work in very instinctive way. It’s like I do internal archaeology somehow, I dig for fragments of visions, sound textures, lyrical elements, moods, scenes and I stick them together like a puzzle. Sometimes I come up with ideas that are too influenced so I kill those fragments. I only keep the very honest ones. When I did ‘Iron‘ I had this aggression in me that was very genuine that I translated into this massive horn hook, half digital/half organic. Then I translated that back into a visual and then I found this texture of a meteorite, of black smoke that was a good translation of that horn sound. I don’t come up into a treatment on paper for the whole project, for every song.

It’s constantly evolving but the more I advance in the project, the more I know where I’m going. I now know what the next video is going to be about, I know how everything will fit together, I’ve known that since the ‘Run Boy Run‘ video but when I did ‘Iron’ I was still discovering the story as I was making it.

It’s a good process, it’s almost like psychoanalysis and I answered a lot of questions about my emotions and what I wanted to do in my life as an artist. It’s the opposite of screen-writing something and sticking to it.

“It’s just kind of happened. I know it’s twenty years, but it doesn’t feel that way.” Low’s Mimi Parker is looking back on twenty years as one third of America’s favourite miserabilists. This month’s The Invisible Way is their tenth full-length release amidst a discography that also includes a slew of EPs and a couple of live records, each a milestone along a career trajectory marked with intrigue.

“You know, it’s just like life, really. There’s milestones along the way, obviously, and you remember them, but for the most part you’re just getting on with it and watching it go by.” Equating the band’s career with the natural progression of life is an obvious touchstone for Parker, something that she brings up throughout our conversation. “Obviously we still love making music, but the truth is, at this point, this band is our living. If the records still sound like they have some sense of urgency, it’s because this is what we do day to day to pay the bills and take care of ourselves. We don’t have an office to go to or a computer to sit in front of all day, and this is what we do instead; the band is still our life.”

The new record comes a little less than two years after the release of their last effort, C’mon, and marks a return to prolific output for the band; there was a four-year gap between C’mon and 2007′s Drums and Guns. “I guess we’ve been slowed down in the past by things outside of the music;  obviously Alan [Sparhawk, singer-guitarist and Parker's husband] had some issues and we struggled to work on music for a while.” She’s referring, of course, to Sparhawk’s well-documented nervous breakdown back in 2005. “But I think it’s mainly that we’ve become much more efficient songwriters recently, I think we’ve become a little bit more methodical.”

This new focus allowed the band to finally make good on something they’d wanted to do for a while; work on new music with Wilco‘s Jeff Tweedy, who produced The Invisible Way. “We had this very gradual introduction to Jeff, and Wilco in general; we worked with [Wilco guitarist] Nels Cline for the first time four or five years ago, and then he played with us on C’mon. It seems like he really got those guys into what we do, so we’d been waiting for a while for our schedules to align so that we could work on something, whatever it turned out to be.”

With Tweedy himself a veteran of nine Wilco records on the musician’s side of the recording desk, you’d surely be forgiven for wondering how easy he found the transition to the role of producer. “Going into the studio, he’d already heard the demos we’d sent him, which were pretty fleshed-out; it was like he knew the record better than we did,” laughs Parker. “I think he just kind of wanted to hold us true to that original vision for the songs; he didn’t try to second guess us too much. He was an incredible listener. He really wanted all of the focus to be on us.”

Part of Tweedy’s plan for the album involved recording it at breakneck speed, at least by previous Low standards. “The whole thing was tracked in five days – straight in and out,” says Parker. Again, she brings the practical considerations of everyday life sharply back into the discussion; “if nothing else, you’ve gotta think about how much everything’s costing you. Studios are expensive. If you go in knowing you can get everything done in a certain space of time, then that’s a big plus financially. We put the work in early and took these nearly-finished demos into the studio – I guess that’s the Minnesota work ethic coming out.”

C’mon and Drums and Guns had marked a period of sonic expansion for a band previously best known for their signature minimalist style. The Invisible Way, though, sees Low retreating into more familiar, less bombastic territory. “We worked with Matt Beckley on C’mon; he’s an LA guy, so I guess that record was always going to sound bigger, and lusher,” says Parker. “I think we’d grown a little bit tired of the restraint that we’d had in our sound for so long. It’s not really that we’ve gone back to that on The Invisible Way; it’s just that Alan doesn’t want to repeat himself. We’ve brought in acoustic guitars and we’ve never really focused on the piano like we have on this record, so we’re still experimenting.

Twenty years on, Low are still endeavouring to make their live sets as career-spanning as possible, but with those two decades encompassing marriage, births and lineup changes, surely the passage of time has changed the nature of the band’s relationship with their older material? “We think of songs like we think of friends; some you hold dear and never fall out of touch with, and others you drift away from over time,” says Parker, again bringing the band-as-life metaphor back into play. “Some of those older songs, we’d have to go back and re-learn the lyrics and how to play them again; others, we’ve never really stopped playing. I don’t think there’s anything we’ve done that we feel truly disconnected from now.”

Lyrically, Parker hasn’t strayed too far from her time-honed approach on The Invisible Way. “Lyrics are so weird; I think I’ve learned to stop worrying about them by now. I think my best lyrics have been very much stream of consciousness; that way, whatever’s on your mind is gonna make its way out, whether you know it or not. You shouldn’t have to try too hard, I don’t think.”

It’s difficult, of course, to speak with Low and not touch upon the spiritual aspect of their lives; Sparhawk and Parker’s devotion to their Mormon faith is well-documented, although it’s not something that typically seems to emerge in a particularly obvious fashion  in their songs. “I think it probably pops up every now and again. It’s very personal to us, but we’ve never wanted to really put it out there in the music; maybe on some level, we worried people might think we were trying to force it on them, I don’t know.”

The Invisible Way is the fourth release on Sub Pop since they signed with the legendary Seattle label back in 2004, although it might be their last on this imprint; “our contract’s up now, so we’re not sure what’s coming next,” Parker says, with a nervous laughter that’s refreshingly self-effacing. “I’d like to think they’ll want to keep us on. You can’t take anything for granted.”

Whether they’re on Sub Pop or not, Low have a relatively clear view of what the future holds. “I think we’ll always make records and we’ll always want to experiment. The core of this band is Alan and I doing what we love; singing and playing. I don’t think that’s ever gonna change.”

The Invisible Way is out on March 18 via Sub Pop.

The Mary Onettes

Music is, more often than not, a family affair. It’s a craft which places artists within circles of like minded souls, and provides a way of creating links between people that may not have stumbled upon each other otherwise. From bands and collectives through to festivals and labels, connections are forged based upon a shared passion, and at Sweden’s Labrador Records, these connections are often more apparent than elsewhere.

Featuring a roster of wide eyed new artists alongside the talents of more established musicians, Labrador Records is one of the most engaging labels to be heard in Sweden at the moment. To understand their family vibe a bit better, we got two of the label’s artists to sit down and discuss each other’s opinion on questions that they find interesting. So, in the week that they release their third album Hit The Waves, we asked The Mary Onettes to catch up with Gothenburg natives and Labrador label mates Sambassadeur. Here’s what happened.

Sambassadeur vs. Philip of The Mary Onettes:

Sambassadeur: Philip, when did you first start playing music?

Philip: I was 11 years old. It was old school hard rock like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Metallica, The name of the band was Young Boyz. I was really into Cliff Burton in Metallica.

Your older brother Henrik is in The Mary Onettes with you, have you always played together?

Philip: I started playing with Henrik when I was 12 years old. He had a punk band called The Beerbellys and I got to play with them. I really looked up to my brother. When he was not around I ran into his room and listened to his records, I never forget listening to Nevermind by Nirvana for the first time, it was amazing. Every band I listened to then came from him.

How is it to be in the same band as your brother?

Philip: It can be hard and somewhat complicated. We’re brothers and get into fights and say unnecessary things to each other, I imagine that it could be tiresome for the other guys sometimes. For the most part it’s amazing being on tour. We laugh a lot and do silly things. I think a lot of people have this preconceived notion about us being very serious and melancholic, they should see us on tour!

We’re not only labelmates, we also share a somewhat skeptical attitude towards travelling by plane. How has this flight anxiety affected your band? Touring etc.

Philip: Not so much really. We had a couple of tours cancelled due to this, but I try to go by plane if I can. I try to read a lot about flying, different planes and engines, statistics, everything! Understanding how flying and airplanes work really helps… Alcohol helps as well!

I used to watch plane crashes on YouTube before a flight, which is extremely unhelpful, that never happens to you?

Philip: Of course I’ve done that. I even listened to the black box recordings that you find on the Internet. That was a huge mistake, I was miserable for weeks after that.

On our latest tour to Brazil, our father decided to come with us, which is strange since he is very afraid of flying. It was so much fun watching him on the plane, all quiet, drinking vodka and coke, starring into the seat in front of him!

Do you like playing live?

Philip: Absolutely, we love playing live and consider ourselves as a live band. There’s no better feeling than after a really good show.

And in the studio recording songs?

Philip: I’m quite stubborn when it comes to recording songs and I know exactly how I want us to sound so it can be quite hard working with a producer, especially if the producer is as determined as we are.

I don’t think working with well known producers is the best option for a band. It’s easy to be disappointed due to high expectations and so on. I think working with a unknown producer is more exciting. My favourite producers often made their best albums early in their careers, when they weren’t as famous and well respected.

Insofar as the oft-daunting world of “post-classical” music is concerned, it’s not unreasonable to claim few contemporary solo artists possess an improvisational or compositional knack as downright resourceful or inspired as Hauschka, the alias of Düsseldorf-based musician Volker Bertelmann.

Having released a steady stream of increasingly ingenuous “prepared piano” records over the last few years, last May he delivered Silfra, an entirely improvised, altogether inspired collaborative effort with American violinist Hilary Hahn. Ahead of his imminent London performance on 15 March at the Bishopsgate Institute, we learn how the forty-seven year old went about breaking yet more ground on his latest release.

Prior to embarking on his latest exploration, quite a few people were already of the opinion that Hauschka effortlessly commanded a defiantly singular approach, one altogether unrestrained by self-enforced limitations or prospective self-doubt. His grasp of improvisational fluctuations in solo performance equally exuded an air of the academic and the frivolous; a deep-rooted mischievousness underpinned by an utterly fascinating flair in the ever-broadened realms of the John Cage-coined act of ‘prepared piano’, i.e. altering the tonality and timbre of solo piano performance by placing objects (otherwise known as “preparations”) between or on top of the piano’s strings, dampers or hammers, thereby yielding endless permutations of sound.

How did originally teaming up with Hahn, an established concert violinist otherwise schooled in Bach and Tchaikovsky, come about? “Hilary and I met the first time in Dusseldorf after one of her concerts,” recalls Bertelmann. “We got introduced by [fellow Fat Cat Records artist] Tom Brosseau and it was the first time that I heard a concert of hers. Then we played on the same show in San Francisco, a show also featuring Brosseau. Hilary and I decided that she could improvise with the string quartet and I at the end of the performance and it proved to be a lot of fun. Then we decided to move onwards and meet frequently to rehearse and find out what kind of music we could do together. After two years we decided to do our recordings [for Silfra] in Iceland.”

Seeking out the multi-talented Valgeir Sigurðsson – an accomplished musician in his own right and producer of the likes of Björk – Bertlemann and Hahn set about excavating what would eventually result in twelve tracks of instinctive musicality gushing urgency, playfulness and charming intelligence. “It was a lot of fun,” recalls Bertlemann. “Valgeir is a very laid back person and it was a pleasure to discuss things with him. He also added some electronic sounds to it, which was great.” This allowance for Sigurðsson himself to contribute to the project’s overall presence and “scope” reflects, just as much as anything else, the wonderfully open-ended nature of the project in itself.

Straddling the flux and form of the avant-garde and electronic music, Bertelmann’s forays into the limits of prepared piano down the years have lead to some hugely entertaining results. Even in terms of titular classification of its varying, dozen pieces, Silfra was no exception: “During the recording process we already started making long lists of words, names and phrases that came in our mind as titles,” reveals Bertelmann. “It was like a game to find out the strongest words and pair them with the strongest compositions. We had a lot of fun doing this.” Indeed, rather than bestowing upon his works an almost half-expected air of intellect, it would seem that “fun” is very much irremovable from how Bertelmann’s seeks to express himself musically.

For a record so cunningly accomplished – from the initial ruptures of ‘Stillness’ to the concluding grandiosity of ‘Rift’ – one wonders to what extent premeditation or discussion played a part in the record’s making. “We mainly discussed feelings and tempos we want to start with and also remembered references from our rehearsals,” says Bertelmann. “The discussion process started after we recorded many improvised pieces as we had to decide which are the strongest pieces. “The only pre-conceived idea was the piece ‘Krakow’, where the piano recording is from the very first session Hilary and me did at my house. We used the piano part and Hilary recorded a new violin part to it.” And what about experimenting with new objects/techniques during the recording? “I actually mainly used the objects that I often use but I prepared parts of the piano more specifically,” Bertelmann says, obliquely.

Sitting in an ornate carved wooden chair in the rear of the balcony of London’s St. Pancras Old Church, tendrils of incense smoke drifting lightly overhead, Matthew Houck carries a strangely priest like aura with him. Houck – better known as the rudder of the ship that is Phosphorescent – is shortly to play a spellbinding, hushed set to a tiny congregation in this intimate North London venue, but right now, using language a more devout man would shudder at, he’s discussing the process of recording Muchacho, his upcoming sixth album under the Phosphorescent moniker.

“I got this old analogue console and an old tape machine and stuff,” he says. “A lot of it was just about knowing how to get the sound that I wanted out of those machines, then it was about applying those sounds to recording Muchacho.”

The “sounds” themselves? A product of several months of experimentation, “not knowing what I was working toward, just kind of playing around,” as the Brooklyn-based singer puts it. Those months were also partially spent wondering if, after the gruelling and lengthy tour cycle of previous LP Here’s To Taking it Easy, there was a future for Phosphorescent at all: “I put Phosphorescent on hold, outside of on tour… for about a year. I don’t think it’s normal to shut down from record to record, but I wanted to do that. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make another Phosphorescent record at that time.”

Were he to retire the name, it would surely prompt howls of discontent from thousands of fans; Houck has been working under this alias for a decade since debut album A Hundred Times or More (before that he recorded and toured under the name Fillup Shack) and in that time has amassed no small following. The aforementioned Here’s To Taking it Easy, possibly the most complete and rich of his offerings to date, contains a sun-dappled Southern warmth so tangible you can almost feel your skin tingle. Add this to the haunting ‘Wolves’ and incantatory ‘My Dove, My Lamb’ from Pride or the roaring country blues of Willie Nelson covers album To Willie, and you have a back-catalogue filled with diversity and ingenuity.

Now, pensively rocking on his oaken seat with beer in hand and leather jacket on, Houck ruffles his untameable blonde-brown curls and considers the transient tribulations he went through in the process of making Muchacho. “I had to move out of my studio, I had been there for like four or five years, which was really really hard. It took about a month to even find another place, and my life was kind of getting messy right around the same time. And so I ended up just checking out for a little while, and specifically writing.”

The combination of this period of more formal, get-pen-to-paper writing, along with the aforementioned, slightly more chaotic creative process created the songs for Muchacho almost by accident: “I ended up with a handful of songs that seemed like Phosphorescent songs within a very quick timeframe,” reveals the Alabama-born songwriter, “and so I just figured ‘well shit, I’ll make this record!’ But then I ended up using a lot of the sounds I’d been playing around with: a new arena of sound for me.”

In the end, however, this unorthodox elixir of the myriad sounds Houck teased from both his guitar and his “DIY” studio setup contributed towards the spectral depth that Muchacho’s first single ‘Song For Zula’ possesses. Reverb drums echo through it as if being played directly into a starry sky, mingling with the ebb and flow of strings and wistful guitar notes; listening to it, one can easily picture “racing out on the desert plains all night” as the song’s refrain depicts. How did its release as the lead single come about – a gut feeling, a special sense of pride about the song, or a sonic platform to preview what Muchacho has to offer?

Strangely, it was none of the above. “Actually the label chose that. I liked it, and I was like ‘sure!’ but I thought they might pick another one. I kind of just stepped out on this one, allowed other people [to choose], because I had lived with this record for six straight months.” The upshot of this cohabitation, we’re told, was that “you start developing weird ideas. Like I might be really excited about one weird guitar lick in the background of one song – I’ll think ‘yeah, that’s the sound!’ – but you realise you’re crazy at that point, so I don’t think you have any objectivity about what would be a proper single.

My interview with John Grant could have started better. For someone with a dislike for being woken up suddenly, I manage to offend against my own pet hate: it’s midday on a typically rainy London Sunday and Grant, in town on a brief promo trip, is asleep in his hotel. My call wakes him up and there are, patently, some cross-wires, as he is not aware that we’re supposed to be having a conversation.

A hastily re-scheduled attempt 15 minutes later finds Grant scrambling to check out of the hotel and arrange for a taxi. He apologises for the inconvenience and we agree to try again in another 45 minutes when he is – hopefully – safely installed in a cab. I look at some of the more personal questions I have planned on asking and worry that they may not be appropriate for what increasingly looks like it is going to be a rushed job, on the phone, in the back of a hackney carriage. As it turns out, I needn’t worry. The setting is immaterial. John Grant can be honest, interesting and engaging even in circumstances such as these.

A little over a year ago, Grant found himself unexpectedly relocating to Iceland. An alumnus of Denverite thoughtful-rock outfit, The Czars,  Grant’s original plan was to make the follow-up to his 2010 solo album, Queen of Denmark, in Texas again. But a quick jaunt to Reykjavik for the Iceland Airwaves festival in 2011 resulted in a chance meeting with Gus Gus co-founder, Biggi Veira. Suddenly, plans were changing.

I open our conversation proper by asking Grant at what point he thought, right – I’ve got to stay here. “I think it was while we were recording the song ‘Pale Green Ghosts’,” he says. “There was a moment when I was sitting in the studio, letting the enormity of this track wash over me, listening to Biggi make the sounds for it and I just realised that he and I had to make this record together. That was the last week of January 2012. We were basically just meeting up, ostensibly, to make some sounds for me to use on my record in Texas and then at the end of that week we had ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ and ‘Blackbelt’ almost done. They still needed work doing but the base skeletons of the tracks were there and I realised I needed to take advantage of this opportunity to work with him and he was clearly into it as well. Of course, that was a big part of the equation – whether he would have the time and the desire to continue working on it and he was really excited about it too. It was with a sort of horror that I realised that I would have to change my plans and upset a bunch of people and stay in Iceland and do the whole thing there”.

This bunch of people he refers to included two members of Midlake, with whom he’d previously worked on Queen of Denmark. “I was going to do the rhythm section with McKenzie and Paul and I was going to work with the producer John Congleton, who works with St Vincent”, Grant explains. “It wasn’t as much about me not thinking I could do the record with them, because I know that we would have come up with something great too, albeit different. But I felt that I had to do it with Biggi”. Was it a difficult decision to make? “Oh yeah, of course”, he says. “But everybody was fine after a while. It was just the shock, I guess, because nobody really knew what was going on with me. It was like, why is he freaking out and staying in Iceland all of a sudden? But I think – them being artists as well – I think they understood that these things happen, you know?”

I ask Grant whether the majority of the songs that ended up on the record had already been written by the time he decided to stay in Iceland and record it with Veira. “Well, most of them had a skeletal form”, he confirms. “Like the idea for the lyrical content. A lot of the time, I have an idea of what the chorus is going to be like and then I go about structuring the song in the studio. So, I’d say a little more than half of the album was basically formed in my head and just had to be recorded. And the rest of it Biggi and I worked on in the studio”.

We then turn to discuss whether, if The Czars, were still together, there is a possibility that the band’s sound would eventually have progressed towards the electronica of Pale Green Ghosts.  After considering this for a moment, Grant is decisive: “It would have had to, you know? Because it’s just something that I always wanted with The Czars, anyway. But the thing was, I never had any money. I was always wasting my money on booze and such things so I never had the money to figure out how to make all these sounds that I wanted to make. It took me a lot longer to get there. Even now I chose to work with Biggi because he was a seasoned pro at making these types of sounds. It was a huge learning experience for me”.

We’ve been keeping tabs on Norway’s Young Dreams for a while here at Best Fit, waiting expectedly for a debut which never seemed to arrive. At long last, the kaleidoscopic record Between Places has made its much anticipated appearance – a grandiose record where the richness of sound is only rivalled by the ambition of the group.

Young Dreams are a band who aren’t shy in acknowledging the wide variety of influences that have had an impact on them, listing confidently: “Steve Reich, Waldo de Los Rios, Rachmaninov, Hudson Mohawke, The Avalanches and Isolée,” as some notable acts. The Beach Boys are another major name, clearly inferring wisdom upon the Bergen-based tribe, whose numbers have grown from originally seven to about twelve. If you thought that twelve sounded a bit excessive for a band that isn’t Broken Social Scene, just you wait… “Twenty people were involved [when recording the album]! There’s tons of instruments and voices and it was all done in Bergen. Luckily the city has a strong community of musicians, and everyone helps each other out. Also, we worked with Gareth Jones, who is a genius, to make sense of the sound we were trying to achieve on the album. The album is a mix of different things. It’s a blend of our ideals in music. A lot of organised and arranged information.” And their favourite part of the whole thing? “The beginning, the end and the part in the middle.”

The band do bear relation to bustling Canadian collectives like Broken Social Scene in their fusing of various genres and orchestral qualities, which has been generally proven to create very interesting music. “We pretty much tried to bring back a universe of chords, melodies and songwriting that we think has been lost, and put a lot of thought and effort into the production, arrangements and the composing of music and lyrics. In the studio we really tried to insert details onto the tracks and to stretch things as far as possible without exiting the genre-label known as pop music. We did things such as imagining at the start of the making of the album what Edvard Grieg’s lyrical pieces would sound like if they had been sung with lyrics and with a more modern instrumentation.”

But weaving a sonic tapestry with such a wealth of majesty, combined with the meticulous care they take over every detail, takes a lot of time. We may have been on the edge of our seats waiting for a release date, but the band knew that the album could take some time to make. “It didn’t take longer to write, record, mix and master than we expected it to. We’re all musicians who’ve been in other bands for a while, but it’s the first time, for a few of us, that we’ve recorded and produced the entire thing ourselves. We’ve learned patience.”

Their sound is both grand in nature and grand in design. They’ve created their signature timbre with a bit of planning, but a lot of spontaneity. “We have consciously tried to create a sound that is unique and different, and have played a lot around to generate happy accidents. Like “Hmm, what happens if I do this and put this other thing on and then run it through this and then chop it up and then put it back together through this”. Sometimes you end up with a three legged and five headed monster which is cool. And sometimes you end up with a normal, sort of proportioned thing. Which is not that cool.”

During this period of blueprints and awesome aural clumsiness, they’ve drawn upon countless influences, and describe their musical heroes as “anyone that tries his or her best, and that makes something not only for an audience but also him or herself. If it contributes in any way for the development and conservation of good ideals in art.” They’re also kind enough to give us some ideas and tips on burgeoning acts who made an impact on the record, including “Put Your Hands Up For Neo-Tokyo, Chris Holm, Bloody Beach, The Megaphonic Thrift, Verdensrommet and Giorgio Tuma.”

Hailing from Norway’s west coast, Young Dreams have grown to become one of the most exciting and inventive acts to have emerged from the thriving music scene. “Its cool to be in a band in Norway,” the band state. And the reason behind that? “We are lucky to live in one of the richest countries in the world. Our parents keep reminding us of that. Also everyone gets basic musical education in school.”

They’ve made a sizeable fanbase in their home nation, but have gradually been extending that aura of influence to the rest of the world and it’s evident when they play that they pour their hearts into every performance. “We try to play our songs as well as possible. We do four part harmonies and play a lot of instruments at the same time. Our aim is to bring musical pleasure.” Though unfortunately, things don’t always go to plan, referencing a recent performance that didn’t quite meet their personal standards. “We were really pumped up and excited about the Eurosonic 2013 show but one of the synthesizers wouldn’t work. That was a bummer. Now I have bought a new one. It is super cool and professional.”

The lead single from Between Places is ‘Fog Of War’, an orchestral indie-dance number with lush instrumentation and powerful vocals. “We wanted to make something inspired by classical music and opera and mix it up with ideas from trance, and also play around with the idea of making something bombastic. Since we’re a pop band, we ended up with something that we think is a really cool introduction to what the album is about.” Even though the music is sprawling and epic, the content matter is remarkably introspective. “The lyrics are something that we don’t feel comfortable discussing too much, but the song is about needing to find strength.” Though music isn’t the only thing they have their minds set on – “We would like to learn how to brew our own IPA!” – but of course, it is still a big part of the group, which should probably go without saying. “We’re already writing and composing new material. Maybe we’ll try it on tour. We’re also visiting the US for the first time. Only Chris has been there before with a band, so it’ll surely be a surreal experience for us. We’re also looking forward to getting to know the British Isles better. And a big hope is to play in Chile one day.”

But are there any shows lined up now? Well… “We aren’t sure if we are supposed to announce quite yet, so you’ll have to follow us on Facebook or our web page!” Way to plug boys!

Young Dreams’ debut album Between Places is available now through Modular.

Photo by Andrew Amorim

“I’ve just woken up, so I might be a bit slow,” apologises Laurent ‘Branco’ Brancowitz. But acting as a representative for his French indie group Phoenix, it soon becomes apparent that the rustiness can only be blamed on the stop-and-go Skype connection as we delve into the band’s upcoming fifth album Bankrupt! as well as the flesh and blood of France’s most surprising success story of the last decade.

“New York is dry and cold, but it’s nice”, says Branco in his thick French accent. For someone like me, raised on British pastures, it’s an accent impossible to ignore – simultaneously the butt of every post-WWII comic’s joke and object of affection for women and men alike. But at this moment, his accent isn’t something appreciated on a superficial level, but gives insight into what’s changed and what’s stayed the same since they released their last, hugely successful album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. “Nothing changed really, it’s a bit sad,” Branco reflects. “When it’s just the four of us it’s the same old thing, you know, and that’s what we like about it.”

The fabric of the band hasn’t change since finding international success with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – a record that spawned indie dance floor anthems like ‘1901’ and ‘Lisztomania’ – much to the joy of their seasoned fans. But nor did the band stagnate, instead using the worldwide success that bagged them a Grammy to ‘experiment’ – a word often met with both excitement and dismay. “This time, we knew that we’d have more possibilities to do crazy things, you know? We know that we can find things and that people will give us at least one chance; the pressure wasn’t a negative thing. This kind of pressure was a positive thing for us.”

Added pressure wasn’t the only thing that changed, but something that was more directly related to the band also became more apparent and important too. Spending their youths listening to British and American music and seeing French music and art as something inferior, they suddenly began to appreciate the art of their mother country for the first time while miles away from their home, in the very city that this interview took place. “I mean, I don’t know what exactly happened but we were in New York and suddenly this melancholy came over me and I watched all of Rohmer['s work] – I couldn’t stop. It was like falling in love with something we knew so well. I think it was related to the fact that we were living in China Town, something so different – and it was a bizarre loneliness.”

Sin Fang’s Sindri Már Sigfússon lives and breathes the rock and roll lifestyle.

So much so that he briefly disrupts our Skype interview to apologise: “Sorry my daughter just pulled the hair of my other daughter. Wait just one minute,” he says.

And he’s back. It might come as a surprise to learn that Sigfússon is 30, and has kids. From all visual accounts he looks young, though perhaps a little exhausted. “I also look like I’m [a] 17-year-old with a drug problem,” he says. “I have these bags under my eyes. It doesn’t matter if I sleep twelve hours a night or one.”

Sigfússon’s girlfriend is the sister of Jónsi, frontman of fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós. You’d think it would sound a little ignorant to ask Sigfússon whether he knows Sigur Rós, just because they both happen to hail from the same country; it’d be akin to asking the frontman of Arctic Monkeys if he knows The Beatles, but in this case it’s not a stretch. Jonsi actually lives right across the street from Sigfússon and the connection goes deeper than that too: Jónsi’s partner Alex produced Sin Fang’s latest record, this year’s incredible Flowers.

These are not chance encounters – Iceland is simply this small. “I probably know everyone you can think of in Iceland,” Sigfússon explains, “America has a big celebrity culture. It’s not like that in Iceland because it’s so small here. You also just see a famous person going to the store or whatever. That’s probably not like that in a society with millions. Iceland only has 300,000 people.”

There’s definitely a difference in the types of people he plays for: “Audiences in the US are a bit more enthusiastic when they meet you. You always feel like you’re Jon Bon Jovi when you meet people after the show. I wouldn’t say it’s quite like that here. I met people in America that have tattoos of [Sigfússon's other band] Seabear lyrics on them…That’s pretty funny, and kind of extreme.”

Iceland still has some common ground with the US. It’s only  five hours away by plane and Sigfússon acknowledges the westernization of his home country. “We used to have an American military base here in Iceland, which was here for like 40 years or something. They brought with them like movies and music and fast food restaurants, like Jack in the Box…M&Ms and Skittles.  They had their own radio station that played Elvis Presley and The Beatles. They are kind of like famous for bringing rock music to Iceland.”

There used to be a MacDonald’s in Iceland too, Sigfússon says, before it could no longer afford to keep up with meat quality standards, as they were importing their meat from Germany. “It’s okay,” he says, “I like to cook. I’m slicing some broccoli right now. We’re having roast chicken with potatoes and salad…Oh it’s so nice.  Super good.”

Traditional Icelandic foods – the kind eaten back when starvation was a real issue due to crops freezing over – are still around today, including the infamous Hákarl - fermented shark meat. “Normally you have that in little bites, and you have very strong alcohol with it to kill the smell.  And then there’s…a sheep’s head, which has been cooked. And then you have the ram’s testicles, that have been like pickled; pickled ram’s testicles.”

Familiar as he is with such delights, Sigfússon admits he’s never eaten any of them. “It’s like a tradition… My parents still have it and stuff like that.  It’s not like food that they eat every day, it’s like once a year. I don’t think many people like that stuff, except for like my grandparents.”

It isn’t every artist that returns after a gap of three years with a release recorded in just six hours. Yet that’s exactly what Ed Harcourt has done with Back Into the Woods, recording the entire album at Abbey Road over the course of one evening last year.

“I was in a funny place where I was making another album, which I’m still in the middle of doing” he explains when asked what led to making the record in such an unconventional way. “It’s a very different record – lots of found sounds, field recordings, samples and glitches. I was so in that world that I needed to take a break from it. I went and did some session work with Ryan Hadlock who produced Lustre, playing some blues piano. At the end of the session I got talking to Pete Hutchings, the engineer. We went into Studio One of Abbey Road and I started playing some songs unconnected to the album, that were more melancholy. He came up with this idea of doing a record in one night in Studio 2. It was like a challenge. I gave myself a month to write the record, locked myself indoors with a bottle of whisky – all the clichés – and wrote the album. I spent lots of time editing and singing the songs every day, so when I got there I knew the songs back to front and knew exactly what I wanted.”

It is clear that the challenge excited Harcourt; the constraints fuelling the creative processes and pushing things in different directions. Is it an approach that he would revisit for future records? “I’ve always been under the strong impression that songs are written as a sort of allergic reaction to whatever came before,” he responds. “I think I’d been lost in the more complex process of writing songs based on purely just production and sonic concepts. Back Into The Woods was something that seemed to come out of nowhere, forced itself out I guess. Various friends and peers had always bent my ear a little about recording a back to basics record so to speak, so I did. I wouldn’t change anything. The other record may take six months, it may take six years, who knows! I like to work quickly, but this next record is an entirely different beast. I’ll get there in the end hopefully.”

As for the one-session recording process itself, Harcourt seemed to enjoy it. “It was a lovely evening. I had the whole order ready, and it was all done live. We recorded using the celeste thats on the Harry Potter films, and we did a drinking song on the ‘Martha My Dear’ Mrs. Mills piano, that might come out at some point – it didn’t really fit with the mood of this album.” This isn’t the first time Harcourt has used ‘historic’ instruments of course. ‘The Storm is Coming’ from Strangers was recorded using the piano used on ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’, and the history of Abbey Road’s studios was certainly not lost on Harcourt. “The two things that have had an effect on me throughout my life are The Beatles and Tom Waits. They have this grip on me that I can’t really get free from, and I think they always will. Just being in [Abbey Road] is inspiring, and knowing the history of the room… It’s unusual and eerie.”

As well as working on his own records, the time that has passed since 2010′s Lustre has seen Harcourt write and collaborate with a vast array of artists across a variety of different genres, including work with Kristina Train, Paloma Faith and many more. Once again it seems to be the challenge of working on something different that seems to drive his creativity. “I will do stuff that seems like a challenge or interesting,” he says. “The other day I had Josh T Pearson in and recorded a couple of old gospel tunes with him, he’s a friend and someone who manages to retain his integrity and dignity – although I would add that he pilfered my jokes. They are terrible, but he got them from the master! The next day I had a couple of guys who had worked with Ne-Yo and Usher. I did wonder at times if there would be a way to bring the two genres together…” Later in the interview Harcourt returns to the idea of mixing genres, laying out his concept for clownstep, which seems to mostly involve “whacking clown shoes against a plank with shit loads of reverb” and “building a massive clown horn to generate a massive sub-noise like the band Earth”. Look out for a crossover album in the future, perhaps.

Before the concept of a ‘Josh T Pearson goes clownstep’ concept record begins to loom too large, we ask how working with other artists has changed the way he writes. “For some reason, I seem to work with a lot of female singers. I don’t know why, I guess they are just drawn to my animal magnetism… it’s a curse I have to bear…” he chuckles. “It’s interesting working with a different register. I like to work with people who have got something unique about them. The thing is to be a facilitator bringing out things they didn’t know they had in them, acting as a sort of musical exorcist in a way. It can be quite intense at times, but pouring any problems or tough times into a song is very satisfying and cathartic. Like all music or art, when you are in a bad situation you can turn it into a song or piece of work – there’s no bad thing about that.”

Building on all these experiences, and stripped of the layers and textures that have often accompanied Harcourt’s work, Back Into The Woods throws the focus onto Harcourt’s songwriting. Lyrically siding with the underdog, or positioning himself as the man that time forgot, the record is an emotionally open and honest piece of work. One of the album’s highlights is ‘Hey Little Bruiser’, which seems to be a companion piece to Lustre closer ‘Fears of the Father’. We ask if fatherhood has affected his writing. “I had to write ‘Hey Little Bruiser’ for my son because I’d written a track called ‘Caterpillar’ & ‘Fears Of A Father’ for my daughter. I was worried he might resent the fact I’d written some songs for her but not for him. I’m forever aware that it’s a fine line when it comes to songs about your offspring, being a little saccharine or cheesy, but I wanted to write a song that was more half love song to him, half warning about how dark and dangerous the future world may be. Something I think most people can relate to, feeling passionately protective and all that. I would say that the album is basically an apology/thank you letter to my wife for putting up with my shit over the years, with a few odd tangents along the way. I’m not always the easiest person to be with.”

Late last year Harcourt premiered the album at a show at London’s Cecil Sharp House. It turned out to be something of a family affair. Although the nature of the record means that the shows are mostly solo, Harcourt’s wife and her sisters came on to add vocals to one song. “I had four sisters singing and my mum in the front row. I used to get a bit uncomfortable when there were songs with swear words, looking at her sitting there. After shows she’ll sometimes comment that some of the songs are “a bit dark”. But then her favourite song is a b-side called ‘Here Be Monsters’, which is about a boy who gets trapped down a well, which isn’t really that cheery.”

Harcourt will be taking Back To The Woods out on the road again in late May and June, and in the meantime has returned to working on the new record, with hopes of completing it by the end of the year. “I’m hoping to work with lots of different people, some of my favourite composers and artists are going to be on it, I hope. I’m not going to divulge who just yet as I want it to be a surprise, although I can say I’ll be working with Van Dyke Parks.” Quite if either record will see Harcourt finally recognised by a wider audience, his songwriting talents richly deserve remains to be seen, but one thing is certain – his way with a melody, expressive playing and tender romanticism will continue to enchant those whose ears chance upon his music for a long time to come.

Back Into The Woods is available now through CCCLX Music.

Sadly, it wasn’t until late last year that we heard French Door, the second album from Cyrillic Typewriter, the latest project from Vancouver’s Jason Zumpano. We’ve been making up for lost time, however, as the record has been in constant rotation ever since. Released as a limited edition vinyl album on his own JAZ imprint, the record is packed full of insistent, playful melodies that call to mind the sweeter moments of the Elephant 6 canon.

Not often straying over the 3 minute mark, these songs rarely do what you expect: the lilting harmonies are just as likely to give way to piano drones, gently picked guitar, cello chugs or howling saxophones at any moment. The album also features collaborations with Zumpano’s former Destroyer bandmates Dan Bejar and Scott Morgan, as well as a mournful take on Devo’s ‘Gates of Steel’.

The last time we spoke to Zumpano, he had just begun work on the soundtrack to the movie Cartoon College, a movie documenting the students of the Centre for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, as they work their way to a Master Degree in fine art in the ramshackle town of White River Junction. However, it transpires that all did not go as initially planned, as he explains: “I didn’t know much about the film when I was asked to provide music for it. Just the basic premise. Therefore I submitted ‘cartoony’ music they described as “Peanuts-on-acid”.  I took that as a compliment and awaited their first edit. After several more of those edits they seemed to be at wit’s end. The tone of the movie was changing with every cut and it looked as though a reshoot was on the cards. With this development, the music previously provided either didn’t really fit or was reminding them of their artistic hardships. I was then asked for a new score. At their request it was a bit more pop oriented. Guitar, percussion, more keyboards. It was completely different. Well, as different as I could make it, as it still sounds like something I would record.”

The passion of the students in the film was something that Zumpano himself recognised – the process of writing, producing and releasing material out into the world for the enjoyment of others. “I didn’t go to school for [music] but I understand the drive and frustration of that way of life, not to mention the opinion from certain friends and family that such a career path is foolish as it is not always that lucrative. I didn’t always produce and release my own stuff, in fact it’s quite new, but it is extremely satisfying. I would hope the same could be said by the cartoon college students.”

The writing process for soundtracking differs minimally from his other projects. “It has to be spontaneous. As far as collaborating with directors, in this case, after supplying a bunch of material,  I was given further instruction for specific scenes with a tone or kind of music they were keen on. Will I do more film work? You’ll have to ask those future filmmakers, and mention to them that I am indeed interested in more of it. It’s a great way to write and have your work appreciated.”

Work on the Cartoon College soundtrack clearly fed into the production of latest album French Door. Having played drums in Zumpano (the band, signed to Sub Pop) and then released a series of more piano led records (as well as playing keyboards with Destroyer), French Door features a lot more guitar work than previous records. “I liked where I was going with the electric guitar for the film, not to mention the various keyboard parts. I thought that those two tracks from the film ['Vato’s Gold' and 'Costigan Manor') fit the record so I added some vocals so as to separate them from the movie. Basically everything I do influences what I do next.”

Many of the songs on the album build around repeated musical phrases, or drones, with Zumpano then layering or delayering around them to curate textures out of which harmonies burst. The result can be quite hypnotic. “It's hard to articulate exactly how my thought process works but essentially I will come up with layers in no particular order, whether that be a drone, phrase or melody. Once they are in place I do like to repeat them over and over, then stop, and then start up a different section altogether.” With much of the record coming in at under 3 minutes, I ask if he believes in the ‘three minute rule’ of pop (the idea that 3 minutes was the perfect length for a pop song), and whether he deliberatly tries to keep songs short. “Never. I just get anxious to finish up the initial first layer so I can get on with the rest. I guess at around 3 minutes I get bored. I should probably work on that.” Nothing if not honest.

Zumpano was a member of Destroyer during the Streethawk: A Seduction era, and two of his former bandmates appear on French Door : Scott Morgan and Dan Bejar. Zumpano has worked with Morgan frequently over the years, often contributing to Morgan’s Loscil project. Here, Morgan returns the favour on the sinister ‘Paris Churchyard’, built around heavy drums and swirling electronic drones. “When I work with Scott on Loscil material, it’s him giving me songs to play with or on top of. With this I gave him the percussion track and told him to come up with something droney. His speciality. I suppose it’s a similar dynamic to our Loscil collaborations, just reversed.” As for Bejar, he contributes vocals on the aforementioned ‘Paris Churchyard’, as well as ‘Visions of Daniel‘, the first time they have worked together since Streethawk. How was it working with hime again after such a long time? “It was pleasant. He’s a good sport and an old friend. However, any reluctance on his part can usually be manipulated into compliance with wine and olives.”

What does the future hold? No doubt Zumpano will continue to follow his own path, one that, like his music, will continue to take unexpected but ultimately rewarding turns along the way. “Right now I’m writing and recording a soundtrack album without an attached film. I think it’s a horror. It’s tricky. It has to have a movie-like feel without it relying on the context of a movie to keep it compelling. Another Cyrillic Typewriter album? We’ll see. I probably I have some more guitar picking in me. You think I should?”

On the evidence of French Door, the answer is an unqualified yes.

French Door is available now via JAZ records on limited edition LP or via Zunior for Digital.

In December last year Singing Adams released their second album Moves. Despite clocking in at just over half an hour, the album covers a lot of ground, both musically and lyrically, and is loaded with catchy little hooks and sing-along choruses, building on the foundations of their debut without ever over-complicating things. We met up with the band ahead of their London show with Teitur at King’s Place earlier this year.

“I’ve just come up with a new heavy metal band name today”, frontman Steven Adams informs me as I arrive at the venue. “Leather Bee.” He then proceeds to sing the band’s name, metal style, to the tune of ‘Let It Be’. It isn’t necessarily what you expect, given that a number of reviews of Moves have suggested that the new Singing Adams album is downbeat, or even dour and miserable. Yet while the record undoubtedly addresses some of the doubts and worries of modern life, Moves also seems to be more a record of acceptance. For every moment of struggle, worry about the future, or black cloud there is a moment of realistation of what really matters: being with friends, telling stories, enjoying yourself while you can. I suggest this to Adams and he smiles. “I’m glad you said that, because I never thought about it as being really dark. To me Moves is quite a chirpy and optimistic record.”

While he’s happy to talk about, well, pretty much anything, Adams confesses to having problems talking about the meanings and intentions behind songs. “I find it increasingly difficult to say anything interesting because I feel like I’ve already done the job by writing the words. A lot of the time if things aren’t obvious it’s deliberate – they have been left open for a reason. When we did the press release I said ‘London Trocadero’ was about the riots in London. Which it isn’t. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said that. LOL”. The “LOL” sets Adams and his bandmates Michael Wood, Melinda Bronstein and Matt Ashton into a fit of giggles, and leads to numerous stories about text speak, and some unfortunate misunderstandings between Laugh Out Loud and Lots of Love. Indeed, there is so much “LOL”-ing in the Singing Adams world that the phrase is even chanted on one of Moves’ standout tracks ‘Building A Wall’.

I ask Adams about the self-made video for ‘Dead End’, the first track to be released from Moves, with its insistent refrain of “Think of all the other things you could be doing…”. The video cuts together home footage taken from trains and on various trips to the countryside: a journey of escape from the city, and all of its numerous pulls and obligations. “When I made that I had in mind this aesthetic to what we do. We kind of get lumped in with the indie schmindie, but I don’t think that’s us. There is definitely a tension between rural and urban going on…”

“We’re all in our late 30s now.” Ashton interjects.

“…and we are hurtling towards our early fifties…” Adams continues. “But look how happy we are. I’ve got a drink. And a sandwich! Cheers!”

Drummer Melinda Bronstein sits down seriously. “There are certain things you need to know..” she begins. “Michael will sing sweetly. We do have a tour bin… Matt… do you iron any clothes? Do you like a crispy sock?” Ashton, it transpires isn’t a fan of rigid hosiery, but will own up to enjoying the feeling of a freshly ironed shirt. Meanwhile, Wood is applauded for unveiling the spotted shirt he intends to wear for the night’s performance. Laughter fills the room, and the fact that is does so is key to understanding the Singing Adams. The bond of friendship, and shared experiences permeates the whole venture, onstage and off. The band seems to exude an exuberant togetherness – seeming to enjoy every minute of being in a rock n’ roll gang with their own rules. It wouldn’t be a surprise to find that they had a secret handshake and it’s little wonder that the debut album was called Everybody Friends Now.

While Adams had originally released a solo album as The Singing Adams, Singing Adams the band formed over a period of time after he relocated from Cambridge to London. That isn’t to say that the members hadn’t played together before however. Guitarist Matt Ashton was paid £10 to get on stage and do handclaps by Adams at a long ago and (almost) forgotten show. “And it’s still the most i’ve been paid for a Singing Adams show” he smiles. Bassist Michael Wood had been approached first as a guitarist and then offered to play banjo and mandolin. “I was looking at the emails the other day,” Ashton says. “You sent us [Wood and Ashton] emails asking what else we could play”.

“At the time I had this thing that I wasn’t going to play any guitar – be like the guy from The National, wandering around the stage…” Adams confirms.

“I thought I was going to get to live out my Bernard Butler fantasies…” Wood begins, “but it didn’t end up that way. And then, of course, there was the Four Jolly Boys, which was a four part Lancashire harmony thing that we did. And only one of the four of us was actually from Lancashire.” At this point Adams and Wood burst out into the song, which seems to revolve around the easter tradition of “pace egging”, much to the delight of the rest of the band.

Drummer Bronstein has toured with Broken Family Band as part of Absentee, and even played as part of the wedding band at Adams wedding. “I was surprised he asked me to be in the band… I think he assumed that I wouldn’t want to do it.” Adams nods in confirmation. “I always wanted to be in a band with Melinda. If I knew then …”

It certainly feels like there is a lot of good will for the project one way or another, something Adams readily acknowledges. Yet the band have played just a handful of shows in support of the record, mostly in London. “You haven’t asked us why we aren’t on tour,” Adams points out, pretending to be put out. “No one ever asks that.” Dutifully, the question gets asked. And the answer? “No major reason, mostly just trying to get it to work domestically. Oh, and of course there is paternity leave going on… we’ll get back together later on in the year and hopefully play some more shows then.”

Whatever the future brings, Adams seems sure that the band will be ready for it. “One important thing that I try and tell people about the group is that it always seems to do what it is supposed to do. It hasn’t been disappointing and we haven’t had any lofty ambitions or anything. When we started I thought maybe we would have bigger shows, but then, the music didn’t really suit it. Maybe at some point we will become more ambitious. I think sometimes people have this opinion of us: “That’s never going to be huge, or enormous, thats not what they’re after”. It’s not like a willful thing. It’s not that we don’t want to sell lots of records or to play to big audiences or make money or whatever…but it isn’t really the main thing. The most important thing to us is that it is enjoyable and there isn’t some awful step that you have to go through. All that business and the logistics. Everything we do really is easy and fun.”

“Just meeting up, rehearsing and being together is my favourite bit.” Ashton concurs. “Some people might grumble about it but I possibly enjoy it more because you get to play for longer.”

“I also think you had all clocked something it took me a while to understand. I’m not really a musician- so for the longest time I was just like, lets learn it, then move on so we can play shows. But now we play, and mess around and sometimes its useful but the most important thing is to play for the joy of it.” Adams adds. “And of course, it doesn’t hurt that I’m always the loudest….”

Moves is available now through Records Records Records.

After talking to Robyn Hitchcock for a few minutes, you find yourself in a state of mind where nothing is quite as it seems; an engaging conversationalist, even while jetleagged, our discussion is less an interview than a much-needed catch-up with old Uncle Robyn.

In the wake of his dexterous speeches about getting older and travelling the world for a living, asking questions about the making of his eighteenth album seems insignificant. So, when Hitchcock asks me what I do for a living halfway into our hour-long chat, I all but give up on my planned route around his mind, before admitting that by day, I’m a typical office admin bod.

“Nothing happens without admin,” Hitchcock replies, in a strangely reassuring tone. “85% of my life is spent doing admin, and every so often I sneak off and pick up a guitar. I don’t know if that’s true for Tom Petty or Adele or Laura Marling, but if you get disconnected from admin, you get disconnected from reality. You go around thinking admin does itself, and then in a way, you start to become a floating head. You’re not necessarily connected to the ground. I think admin is what keeps me earthed.”

Earthed, in the context of Robyn Hitchcock, is a somewhat loose term. A unique character in popular music – he’s a perennial outsider, who takes his cues from “people very much on the fringes of the music industry – Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett, the Incredible String Band.” Yet, he’s skipped from major label to major label for decades with little commercial success, but a whole lot of cult appeal. This interview is his last of a long afternoon’s talking – “There’s always a danger of repeating yourself [in interviews]. You’re liable to, but it’s not very satisfying. Just like a form of interrogation where you’re giving the same answer until they withhold your porridge” – yet, while he frequently apologises for being in a sluggish state, you’d struggle to notice.

Indeed, the interview takes place the day after his return from America, the focal point of his trip being a series of benefit shows organised by Peter Buck for the Palapa Society, an educational establishment in Mexico. Robyn elaborates: “There’s a lovely bit where we all go round to the school and there’s seven grizzled indie rockers in a circle sitting there playing this music at point blank range to a bunch of seven year old Mexican kids who are sitting on the ground.”

More pressingly, March sees the release of his first album in three years, Love from London, and a sixtieth birthday celebration show takes place at London’s Village Underground later this month, where he’ll perform material from every one of his studio albums – “an accelerated 35 years in two and a half hours.” And, apparently, picking from his 250-odd-song catalogue hasn’t been that tricky.

“It’s [more] a question of rehearsing everybody, because I have different combinations of people on different songs. I wouldn’t normally impose this on people, but even with encores, we’re just about going to get it in a two and a quarter hours. I don’t like shows that are that long, but we’ll give people time to stop to breathe, and it’ll just be an interesting experiment. A time lapse, really.” He adds that the decision to play a show like this was inspired in part by shows performing albums in full, namely 1984’s I Often Dream of Trains album, and 1991’s Eye.

“I mean, if you’re Bob Dylan you can just turn up with whatever selection of songs you choose to play, and the audience will swallow that undiluted both good or ill. But I think generally if you look at the number of shows now where people are told what’s on the menu, either tribute bands, or people doing tributes to themselves, I think that way, people can at least they know they were different shows.”

Robyn offers a similar outlook on his back catalogue: “Once you’ve made a lot of records, you do need to be able to tell them apart. So whatever I do next, I need to make it sound different from at least the previous few.” In the case of Love from London, the more organic sounds of his Venus 3 records like Propellor Time and Olé! Tarantula has been replaced by what he calls a “subliminal tidiness,” courtesy of producer Paul Noble, who is more used to working with the likes of Gabrielle and Sugababes. According to Robyn, Noble’s idea for the album was to “give the record company something to work with… everything was click-tracked, all the drums are artificial.”

And, surprisingly, the gloss works wonders. Tracks like the dreamy ‘Strawberries Dress’, with its cooed female backing vocals flown straight in from Leonard Cohen’s best work, or the countryish stomp of ‘Be Still’ are remarkably well-suited to the high-production treatment, and just as well suited to the album’s working title, File Under Pop. “I think [that title] was more the ironic intention, but I didn’t really want to name it that. It was a slightly brutal title – not very romantic, y’know? It sort of sounds like something a Rough Trade band would have done in about 1979.”

So why Love from London? “In this business, you spend a lot of time being away from home, so twice a year I pass through every major city in Europe and America. But I’m actually from London, and I thought it would be good to send out love from London, rather than malice or some form of ill will.”

“I was born in Paddington sixty years ago,” he continues, “and I’ve lived here most of my adult life, without really thinking about it. The clock has ticked on and the calendar has shed its leaves and we all got older and slower and fatter and greyer and wax drips down our exteriors, and probably our insides too. If you looked at a time lapse film of us, we would appear to be giving birth to ourselves, and then kind of mulching down.”

One other thing that Hitchcock seems surprised by is the new lease of life accorded to vinyl, specifically the seven-inch single. He’s not released anything on the format since 1995, yet over the last few years, he’s released a series of ‘Phantom 45s’, available for download from his website and soon to be collected as a limited Record Store Day release. “My Phantom 45 concept was that I like the idea of making a single with an A and a B-side and a cover, but music, like money, seems to be physically dwindling before it disappears altogether. Coins nowadays are about a third of the size they were when I was a kid – when I was ten, you’d sleep under a five pound note, if you were lucky enough to find one. And now, it’s all dwindling away, so I thought let’s have singles, but not actually bother to manufacture them.”

“Are many people putting out seven-inches these days?” he asks. I assure him that it remains as vital as ever, though they’ve sometimes adopted an quasi-fashion accessory status with certain groups of people. “Well, that’s the beginning – you’ve got to look lovingly at it, and then maybe you’ll play it.”

And this rather avuncular statement leads neatly into my final question – one that really gets him thinking. Ever since his early days as a Soft Boy, Hitchcock has always been something of an elder statesman of rock and roll, having been adopted as a figurehead relatively soon into his career. I ask him why he thinks this is.

“That’s because I’m from a previous time. I see myself as the last egg to hatch out from the 1960s. I felt that music went the wrong direction in 1968: that people got too stoned, and they got boring and rambling and fell apart. And, the same movement that had brought insight and inspiration also left everybody dull and fumbling and the lighthouse in their mind had switched off, the beacon was intermittent and then dead. But I just thought that the musical attitude from 1966 and 67’s short, intense, rich, semi-psychotic songs had a lot going for it. I just felt that, as an aesthetic, when pop turned into rock in 66, 67, and it’s in all the history books, that was when it peaked. Around the time of ‘Eight Miles High’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ etc etc etc. So I think that’s why I’ve been an elder statesman for that era since I was 23.”

An elder statesman since he was my age; that’s quite a burden. “It’s a good time to become an elder statesman!” he assures me. I press the fifty-nine-year-old for any closing advice he may have for the new generation of aspiring younger statesmen.

“Find something that you really believe in, and think won’t harm anybody, and stick with it. It’s not what you think you ought to be championing, it’s what you can’t help championing. It might be trams, or it might be that there should be more branches of Harvey Nicks in Leeds apart from the small one in the middle, or that a huge monument to the Mekons and Gang of Four should be put up in the city centre.”

“[Whatever it is,] it’s probably in you already, you just have to locate it.”

Love from London is out on Yep Roc Records on o4 March. See Robyn live at one of the following shows:

February
28 London Village Underground

March
02 Cambridge, Junction 2
05 Brighton, Komedia
06 Exeter, Phoenix
07 Nottingham, Bodega
08 Kendal, The Brewery
09 Reading,  South Street Arts
10 Bristol, Thekla

Montréal ensemble Suuns are a band born of the darkest of parts; spawned of that increasingly intensely populated hinterland deep within the musical spectrum which ultimately dislocates the openly accessible from the eccentric. Aptly perhaps, we meet in the dingy labyrinthian backstage of the heavily industrialised Village Underground – a venue which occupies the oddly underdeveloped nether region to sit between East London’s Great Eastern Street and Bethnal Green Road. It is here where I encounter a disarmingly tranquil lead vocalist-slash-sometime guitarist Ben Shemie and a comparatively sedate Joe Yarmush.

The four-piece were initially alimented by “a climate of excitement, hope and frustration” and these prove primary features of their densely frequented show upstairs a little later on: there’s excitement provoked by the mere airing of material from their forthcoming sophomore Images Du Futur, great hope for this ’Futur given the unquestionable quality intrinsic to the likes of ‘Minor Work’ and album standout ‘Bambi’, and frustration both at the discombobulating restraint demonstrated as well as the show not attracting enough to be staged in the venue’s greater main room next door. Though Suuns dine also on intimacy – they’re best witnessed when the whites of Shemie’s eyes are plainly visible and as they frequently roll back in his skull, they glare piercingly like those of that now infamous wolf immortalised on the cover of Brand New’s Daisy. Shemie, or rather his semi-spoken though simultaneously quasi-sung vocal (which has “been very similar” but has “only gotten stronger with time”, Yarmush later proclaims), is their most emblematic hallmark. He, or perhaps it, is the crux of Suuns, and its every other component is a centripetal element orbiting about this core. Conversely, in conversation, he becomes unprecedentedly reticent.

It’s a symbiotic character composition – as though the beast within is only unleashed once Shemie is allowed onstage. Though to revert to the now for a moment, in person his gruff shush is just as disquieting as that almost passively aggressive hiss of his heard both live and on LP. He scares me a tad if I’m honest, though no more than Les Georges Leningrad, or Les Breastfeeders, or The Unicorns did. Maybe it’s just a Montréal thing?

“I think maybe to some extent [the band having been cultivated in such a fertile musical landscape influences their overall aesthetic] but for me, it’s hard to compare as I’ve never lived anywhere else”, Shemie proffers in a baritonal snarl. “I don’t know anything different: Chicago, London, or wherever.” Yarmush intervenes: “It’s really not, like, you know a jam-fest every weekend. It just so happens that a lot of musicians are concentrated in that same area, probably because it’s easy and cheap to live there. Otherwise, yeah, there really is no other reason for it. I don’t really feel like there’s any real community there, other than other musicians being the people I hang out with most of the time. But then we don’t really talk about music in those sorts of social situations. From the outside looking in, it perhaps seems as though there’s this crazy vibe going on, which is fuelling everyone around us but I really don’t think that happens. It is really well connected though, so if you need someone, or something then there are those resources readily available. Like there are a lot of venues to play, or places in which we can jam. There’s a lot of things that have been built up, because of the amount of active musicians out there so in that respect yeah, it’s pretty good and really easy. It’s not really a big city, and it just seems like a small town in a way ’cause a lot of people are really concentrated in a smaller area within it. But yeah, I mean whatever.”

As with Shemie’s almost schizophrenic vocal self portrayal, stark contrasts abound: there is no communal vibe, and yet the members of these miscellaneous Canuck bands hang; there are all these places to do just that, though they never natter musical nor wax lyrical over some of the world’s finer aural produce of recent times, much of which has been homegrown. Though in amongst Suuns, Shemie reckons music to be “probably the top thing we talk about. When you’re at home, and you’re with your best friends it’s different. Your best friends are not necessarily musicians, either, and they’re doing their own thing in their own lives. So when you’re at home, you know, it’s just a different space. And it might be boring! What can we say? I mean we’d definitely have to make up all these nonsensical tourist stories. Otherwise it’d just be like talking about work…”

It’s another turn of phrase upon which we get caught up. Surely the pair don’t regard Suuns as a pitch up, grind out only to eventually be ground down kinda setup? “I think it’s good to view it as work”, Yarmush sheepishly contends, “because then you approach it a little more seriously. ‘Cause there are a lot of things that are work-like when you go out on tour.” Pragmatic as per, Shemie picks up where his counterpart cuts out: “I mean you have to be smart about it from a business point of view, too, if you want the project to maintain some form of trajectory so you can’t treat it as being ‘all about the music’, as though it’s just some ideological thing. Going out on the road is a lot of work, and so as Joe says, you have to remain serious. I mean you wanna enjoy yourself obviously, but you’ve got to take it seriously if you wanna be taken seriously.”

It was only this time last year that Copenhagen native Soren Lokke Juul played his first gig under the name Indians. Before that, he’d spent the best part of a decade in Denmark playing in bands, always in the background, never up front.

But Juul finally tired of being a bit-part and began to write his own songs – one of these was the track ‘Magic Kids’, which quickly created some blog buzz, leading to British label 4AD hearing it and not hesitating in signing him up. That track, along with the rest of Indians’ debut album Somewhere Else confirms 4AD’s decision as the right one: an album of hazy, insistent and hard-to-pin-down pop music, a seamless combination of electronic and acoustic sounds, slightly psychedelic and with a beating, melodic heart. We caught up with Soren to talk about his journey so far.

We begin by discussing the tour so far; Soren, between swigs of beer and drawing on a cigarette, replies: “Really good! We’ve just started it; this is the third show. It’s always a weird thing getting started, but with the guys it’s so nice to actually think we’ll be playing a lot of concerts in a row. Given that Somewhere Else was played, produced and recorded entirely by Juul himself, was it hard to find the right people to get Indians working as a live band? “I always wanted this to be a band project, live especially,” says Soren, “and I’ve been playing with Jebbe and Emil for maybe six years – in other bands – so it was a natural choice to pick them to be onstage with me.”

It took some time for Juul to step out of the shadows and become the front man. He was playing in other Copenhagen bands for ten years before deciding to push ahead with his own music. He explains: “I used to be in the background playing keyboards and doing backing vocals – just being a keyboard player.” Was it case of being unfulfilled, then? “I always thought of myself as being like a ‘live producer’” says Juul. “When you play the keyboards you’re able to do all kinds of sound, the guitars and the drums, stuff like that. I did that for ten years, and in a way I got to a point where I wasn’t excited going out playing concerts any more. That made me feel really bad, because music is important. So first of all I just wanted to challenge myself; I had an opportunity after I moved into a new apartment. There was a small room so I built myself a studio so that whenever I felt like it I could record music.”

The Copenhagen scene seems a very tight knit community, whether it’s from the experienced acts like Mew and Efterklang, or the bonds between up-and coming acts like Shiny Darkly and Snake & Jet’s Amazing Bullit Band, so did Soren feel supported when he went it alone, or now that his record is out? He’s a little hesitant in his reply: “I think so… It’s really weird, it’s in a lot of newspapers… and I haven’t been home to Denmark in a lot of time this year, so I don’t have any feeling about whether people know my stuff or anything.” In general, though, the response to Somewhere Else has been terrific. Whether it’s here at Best Fit, or in other newspapers and magazines, there’s a lot of love for Indians. “Now the record is out, I’m quite surprised at how many newspapers want to write about me,” says Juul. “I think it’s never happened before – one guy, doing songs, in Denmark, and playing concerts in Europe and the US like I am at the moment… and it’s not to be like ‘hey, here I am, it’s fuckin’ cool’… it’s not a fairytale, it’s real and I’m doing it!”

When Juul says this, it’s clear he’s not being big-headed about what’s happened to him via Indians. Sure, he’s confident, but he’s genuinely delighted about the support and kind words. But is all this focus on Soren and his record is something he’s comfortable with, especially now that he’s out playing these songs live to crowds of people? “If I start thinking about that…’oh there’s so many important people here’… I would get too nervous, I can’t think about that.” He goes on to explain that he’s got to have some confidence in what he’s doing thanks to the support and interest shown by the legendary 4AD label. “The first point when I started making the record, I only had two songs at the point when 4AD contacted me,” he reveals. “If I’d thought at all about that I’d be a nervous wreck, you know? You have to take the decision within yourself and say ‘well they’ve obviously liked the two songs’, and you keep on doing what you’re doing as it’s obviously good enough.”

And does that confidence feed into how Indians perform in a live show? “Yeah, so when we’re playing live concerts I want to do the best that I can, and that’s really easy, in a way, because you have to focus before you go onstage, and you don’t think about the audience. You have to think about how to present the songs in the best way, and at least try to get back to the emotions that you had when you wrote the songs – and then you have the perfect expression of the song again.” But is that easy to replicate? It must be close to impossible to feel that emotion in the exact same way again? “It’s difficult; you record a song and that’s a special moment, but you can never do it the perfect way again. You can search for it every night, at least.” And it seems to take a physical toll as well as mentally. “I’m really tired after an hour of a concert; you spend all your time running around places you don’t know – you’re in a new city trying to find your way around, you’re looking out the window of your bus… but you have to actually concentrate on playing a concert. But, no, I don’t think it’s hard because that’s what I want, that’s why it’s funny! I don’t have anything to lose; I don’t think about what is this person going to think of this song, what is that person going to think? Are they bored right now? If you did that you’d destroy yourself.”

We move back to 4AD to discuss how the label got wind of his music and what led to Indians joining the company. “What happened was that I made the song ‘Magic Kids’, and I was really satisfied with the recording, the song and everything about it,” says Soren. “I wanted to share it, share it with my friends so I got a bunch of friends of mine to do a video for it and I just put it on my personal Facebook page. My friends liked it, and their friends liked it…and suddenly it was just on a journey. A music blog picked it up, and then another and I think 4AD saw the video on a blog somewhere.”

Indians seem to fit as a 4AD band thanks to the hazy and layered pop music they write and record; they sit well alongside Deerhunter and Blonde Redhead, and fellow Danes Efterklang, and there’s even perhaps a touch of nebulous, otherworldliness of the classic 4AD band, Cocteau Twins. Soren, though, disagrees: “No not at all! I never saw myself with a company like that,” he insists. “When I was told I was like ‘what the fuck am I doing there?’ in a company with Grimes, Bon Iver, St. Vincent… I couldn’t see myself there, the album is completely different to what else is on that label. I think that’s what’s great about 4AD – they want to take chances.” Are there any bands on the label that have influenced the sound of Indians? “I like music that is curious,” he says. “I like music when you don’t think about where it’s gonna go, and you just make music to satisfy yourself, in a way. I like Flaming Lips’ records, I like the songs and the way it’s produced… I like all kinds of different genres, you know?” Was there anything that influenced the recording of Somewhere Else? “In a way I never thought about anything when recording this album,” admits Juul, “I just wanted to satisfy myself and I’ve spent my time doing what I really like doing. Some people go fishing, or some people like playing football – I like sitting in front of a computer creating sounds and melodies.”

We end with a discussion on the name Indians, something Soren turns out to be extremely passionate about. “I liked the idea of music being part of nature; I think in the way we’re living now we’re on our way to destroying ourselves as human beings. I like the Indian world – it’s present in a lot of music, it’s honest. I’m scared this generation of people are forgetting each other and thinking of themselves all the time… but with Indians, we’re all natives and music is part of our nature. I just think Indians is a good description, like ‘let’s get this down to earth’, we’re all equal and part of nature… and music is a great way to get together and feel that. Bit cheesy, I know!”

Somewhere Else is available now through 4AD.

“There are fewer bands than in the past. There’s less money. Bedroom producers will become the norm and bands will sink into a niche.”

So reads the somewhat distressing worldview of Jack Bevan. The Foals drummer, whose band have “hopefully reminded some people that guitar music isn’t dead and buried” since the release of debut album Antidotes in 2008 (and there’s little doubt they’ve succeeded in doing so) has a wistful philosophy about what the band have witnessed in the past five years of their lifespan. “It would be nice to undo the effect the Internet has had on the business,” he ponders, “without losing the infinite amount of exposure it’s allowed new bands.” A chilly outlook, to be sure, but one ultimately based in the grim realities of the current industry landscape: you can rack up as many YouTube hits and SoundCloud plays as you like, but that alone, as they say, won’t stick bread on the table.

Foals themselves, of course, have certainly benefitted from the popularity and present prosperity of the web: like all savvy bands, they harness it not just as a tool to access and promote, but a means of interacting with a fanbase which has grown inexorably in the past half-decade. The title of Holy Fire, the Oxford five-piece’s upcoming release, was in fact revealed by the band on Facebook in October 2012: “dig it,” posted Edwin, “or don’t. Either way it’s coming soon.”

Soon is never soon enough to some, but the five-month gap between that announcement and the record’s release date was fairly brief, especially when contrasted with the two-year-plus long breaks between each of Foals’ three studio albums to date. Does a break make for better music? “It depends, I think,” muses Bevan. “The Beatles wrote a lot of the best music of all time over 13 records in just 7 or 8 years. However, some artists take forever [like] Dre. I’d be happy to start writing for album 4 right now.”

Indeed, this restlessness to get started on a new record seems to have been something which the group felt even after the phenomenal success of 2010′s superb sophomore album Total Life Forever. After all the tours and promotion on the album was finally done, Foals only had a break of “about a month or so. The urge to write builds throughout the touring cycle because we’re primarily performing rather than being creative.”

You never hear about the guy behind the scenes, the man pulling the levers behind the face of Oz. In the case of the sultry soft-pop duo Rhye, that man is Robin Hannibal – which would make his musical counterpart, Chris Milosh, Oz.

While it’s Milosh’s vocals we hear breathing so heavily into the microphone on tracks like ‘The Fall’ and who goes out on tour on behalf of Rhye, it’s Hannibal who opts to stay home and focus on his work as a studio producer. “The way it’s set up is I’m more of the silent partner in the process, and with creating the record, and Mike takes it out and tours with it, performs it,” Hannibal explains.

And he actually does rather well working from home. With his side-project Quadron or any of his previous projects, he has never toured or played out. And since being signed to Innovative Leisure two years ago with his current act Rhye, he’s carved a pretty good niche out for himself. “Sometimes you have to go through certain points to get to that point to know what it is what you really want to do,”  he states.

Prior to Rhye and Quadron, Hannibal was making a pretty comfortable living in his native Denmark, where he was a full-time musician. “I’ve been living off of music since I was 22 or 23,” he says. “I’ve been [doing it full-time]  for 8 or 9 years now. You pick your ways and you pick your work. I made a lot of music before Quadron, and Rhye as well… There was always a different project going on that was paying for the bills.”

Speaking of what compelled him to move to L.A, the town in which Rhye is stationed, he explains that the move was for each of his two relationships: one romantic, the other musical. In particular, he was committed to his musical relationship with collaborator Milosh, whom he met very much by fate.

“We knew of each other’s music for a while, and we both really liked each other’s music, and then coincidentally ended up on the same label. I didn’t even know they were releasing his music.”

Hannibal adds, “The label-head-guy suggested that Mike should remix one of the Quadron songs… He remixed one of the songs and sent it over and I really liked it.  There were parts of it that were really cool – I really liked the vocals he had done on it.  And so I started to remix his remix, and make an entirely new song out of his remix of one of my songs. And that’s how it started.”

Previously, Milosh, of Canadian origin, was living in Berlin, while Hannibal was living in Denmark.  The two met up and quickly found chemistry. “We both both produce, we both play instruments, we both sing, and we both write lyrics, so it was very easy to understand each other.”

“We do it together, we have some natural goals we fall into,” Hannibal explains, describing their dynamic. ”I’m playing more instruments than he is, and he’s obviously singing more than I am, so in that way everything’s open. If one of us has an idea with one thing then we’ll follow it.”

This special bond is founded equally upon how much they have in common, as well as how little. “Both of us have had training. Mike has played the cello and the drums, and I studied music composition for a while. And liked. I still read books on arrangements. I get really excited about it. To me, that’s the most fun part about the song, that I get to [put] arrangements over an album, and how to create that, which instruments. We both love classical, jazz, and soul. Pop music, both new and old. Mike listens to a lot of Radiohead… He’s also very into electronic music, very modern electronic music.  And I listen to a lot of score [and] soundtrack music”.

About this project in particular, Hannibal discusses where their two sets of tastes collide. “We could meet around [soul music], but we didn’t want it to sound like a soul record,” he says. “We wanted to have the elements of soul that we both really like, which is the pure emotion you sense from a lot of singers when they sing, and it’s more about creating a feeling, creating a tension.”

On the subject of feeling and tension, Rhye’s music is often described as ‘sex music’ – not helped by the fact that their song ‘Open’ was licensed for a Victoria’s Secret commercial. However, Hannibal stressed this quality is largely inadvertant, saying, “It was just kind of what came out of us making music together.”

About the Victoria’s Secret Ad, Hannibal has his regrets: “Maybe in hindsight we should’ve said no to that as well. It was early in the process. We thought it might [have been a good fit] because the song is sensual… but the way they cut the song, we didn’t really appreciate. Now that we have signed to a bigger label, we don’t have so much to worry about about tossing and turning every penny, and we have the option to not say yes to everything, and that feels great.”

And comfort comes in all forms: “It’s mostly [in sales] of records, and publishing… There’s a lot of different areas of money: [there are] production fees. We sell things to different commercials or movies, things like that. It’s interesting and it changes all the time as well. People still buy records and there’s still a business, there are just a lot more [competing artists now].”

While he may be in a loftier place of power now, before Innovative Leisure came knocking on his door, Rhye’s debut was recorded on a surprisingly (and inaudibly) low budget.  All the orchestral sparkle was actually performed by a single sessionist, Hannibal’s good friend Thomas Lea. “We did everything just him and us,” he says, “and actually there’s only one guy playing on record. We just doubled it and created it. That’s just my way of recording strings, it’s actually because we didn’t have budget, so it was the only way we could do it. It’s a way of cheating I’ve learned over the years, not having enough money to [hire] a quartet.”

The organic element is vert purposeful, as Hannibal explains. “We strip down the classic elements of pop song writing and made it more almost more… instant… like a feeling, like a vibe. But then I also thought it’d be really nice to add these orchestral elements, so it could have classic ingredients, as opposed to just electronic and modern.”

And the formula appears to be working, as far as Hannibal can tell. “You get in a lot of situations where people ask you what’ve you done recently, play something that you did. And I always play one or two Rhye songs: I notice it doesn’t really matter what kind of person it is that I play it to, they can all relate to it.”

Rhye’s album Woman will be released through Polydor on 04 March.

In life, there’s always a starting point, an ending point, and in between are all sorts of twists, turns, false endings, and frustrated eraser marks.

But it’s only by facing such blind uncertainty head-on that the elation of accomplishment can be achieved. The same can be said of Mazes. That is, the band Mazes – and more specifically, founder and principal songwriter Jack Cooper. In a Best Fit interview, Cooper talks about what went into the making of the London via Manchester bands’ latest release, second album Ores and Minerals, as well as what went into the making of Mazes, and how sometimes more is more.

You used a lot of looping on Ores and Minerals. Did that make the songwriting flow more easily? How does that translate on stage – do you program the loops or play them outright? 

Hmmm, well I got bored writing the way I was writing. It felt a little bit one-dimensional, writing verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and I’d got in a bit of a rut. The songs that we were working on before Jarin [Tabata, guitarist] left the band were very much in the vein of the first album and it had become very boring. Certainly not his fault but when I’d come up with a melody while out and about, it’d be to a certain formula… usually slightly swung and vertical melodically. It was a trick I’d kicked the back out of, writing melodic ‘catchy’ things. I started making loops from found sounds or very repetitive guitar lines and then forming songs around them. The slightly haphazard and amateurish way I was approaching it sparked off something interesting and more individual. Or at least to my ears.

Live, out of circumstance and financial reasons, it’s just Conan on bass, Neil on drums and me on guitar. We have a very basic sampler that Conan programmed with very brief loops… not a backing track as such, more of a percussive thing. But we decided before playing any of the new songs live that we wouldn’t really try to recreate the recorded version… it’d be more of an approximation and thanks to the poor standard of live sound nowadays and the venues we play, there’ll always be the ‘walls’ like you describe.

There’s a lot of psychedelic guitar work going on, for example, some Velvet Underground rhythms, Tom Verlaine-esque single-note layering and straight-into-the-mixer playing, assorted other garage rock-terpreted Middle Eastern licks and riffs; were you guys listening to those kind of bands while material for this album was coming about?

The first record came from a pretty shallow influence pool… I think it came out sounding as it did because we were a two-guitar band and the idea was not to overthink anything. The thought with this one was that we would let ourselves overthink and we wouldn’t limit ourselves. Like most normal people, our influences are far and wide. To me, the first album sounds like a period drama and this one is something totally different… more over-arching. But yeah, the Velvet Underground and Television have always been there. I’m from the north of England so I’m not always comfortable talking about influences, but Europe in general was something I had in mind constantly when we were making this record. We wanted to sound like the Europeans that we are… to steer clear of any 12-bar cliches.

If you type ‘Mazes’ into Google, what comes up – beside images of labyrinthine children’s puzzles – is a band out of the U.S. (Chicago) called Mazes who claim you guys ‘stole their name’. Their website actually appears one entry above yours; have you heard of them? Clearly the name is a good one, for two bands to vie for it anyway, and straightforward enough to be thought of at least twice, so why Mazes?

Ha. Well, I don’t really know how to answer this like a diplomat, which is something I’m trying to be, but we didn’t become aware of the other Mazes until we had a 7″ out on Sex Is Disgusting and by then it seemed like it was too late. They tried to engineer some weird beef a year back and called us ‘wankers’ on their website. I suppose they thought that was cute. I don’t really care. I think you’d have to be particularly useless at the Internet to accidentally buy a record by the wrong Mazes. Maybe it’s more of an issue for them because we’re on a more established label and have more fans… that’s as Liam Gallaghery as I’m going to be. Jarin came up with the name… we just liked the sound of it. It looked good in capitals or lower case.

How did you guys form?

It’s always been me, and at first, Jarin and Jay. Jay left. Neil joined. Conan joined. Jarin left. Neil left. Neil rejoined. But Conan, Neil and I have been together for the best part of 4 years and it feels good.

Is the songwriting a mostly collaborative effort?

It’s mostly me, but Conan and Neil are the main influences.

In an interview, you said the album is a representation of things that inspired all of you, rather than just some of you. What does inspire you? Are you guys coming from different directions musically/personality-wise?

I’m not sure what I meant when I said that, but I think what I meant was that the first album was very much songs I wrote and the others would interpret them. With this one, we’ve played with each other enough for me to have Neil and Conan down, so although I wrote the body of the songs, I wrote them with them and their strengths in mind. We’re all very, very different people… there’s a camaraderie and affection but we all drive each other mad at times. Well, Conan doesn’t me, but I think he probably gets frustrated with Neil and I. We rehearsed yesterday. Neil had a mental block, I broke a string, had no replacement and Conan must’ve been thinking we were f**king idiots. He’s the guy that organises us and drives the thing to an extent.

There’s quite a bit of dirt on this album. The production work is bright and clean, and there are loads of polished guitar lines, but there’s also an element of sandpaper: guitars heavy on the gain, bent notes, ‘Leominster’ is played on a very Tin Pan Alley-esque piano. How important is contrast?

Very. Sonically, the first record feels lacking in dynamics. It’s flat to me, but that’s what happens when you have two guitars blasting away without much consideration. There’s a charm to that and it can have force, but contrast is far more interesting.

This album is very much a guitar album, which makes ‘Leominster’ stand out, as this lone pretty, yet up in the years, piano riff. Where did you find that piano, and can we expect more piano-playing on material to come?

My girlfriend and I were housesitting for her uncle in Leominster, which is near Hereford. They have a very out-of-tune piano and the song came about because that was the only octave in tune with itself… vaguely. I’d like to write more stuff on piano and I have before, it’s just a case of not having one and being too poor or lazy to buy one.

You self-produced this album. Do you find more merit in trusting your own instincts rather than those of a producer?

We recorded the first album in a studio that’s become really popular now, called Lightship95 on the River Thames. The whole experience was great but the time restrictions that come with recording in an actual studio didn’t fit in with the idea of this record. Ben, who recorded the last one, was very knowledgable, but you’re right about trusting one’s own instincts. It’s something that comes with either age or the arrogance of youth. Thinking about it logically though, getting someone to produce your record is the same as a film director employing another director to direct their movie and then trying not to get frustrated at its dilution. It’s fine, but I don’t think it’s for us anymore. I don’t need anything enabling my inbuilt laziness, either. Conan has firm ideas and so do I.

Do you feel yourselves growing as a band? What do you find inspires growth? 

Of course we feel like we’re growing, but my only perspective on what’s inspiring it is experience. We toured the US with Sebadoh. We were travelling in a van with a tour manager, and they were driving themselves around in a people carrier, selling their own merch and doing their own sound. Now we do the same… everything ourselves and we’re much happier for it.

Ores and Minerals will be released through Fat Cat Records on 18 February, and the band will be performing at the following live dates:

February
19 – Manchester, Soup Kitchen
20 – York, Stereo
21 – Glasgow, Broadcast
22 – Liverpool, Camp and Furnace
23 – Dublin, Workmans Club
24 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
25 – Birmingham, Hare & Hounds
26 – Bristol, Louisiana
27 – Brighton, Prince Albert
28 – London, Birthdays

The excellently named Matt Korvette, singer/shouter with the – let’s not be coy, here – really truly utterly brilliant Pennsylvania punks Pissed Jeans, was recently kind enough to take time out from abusing his vocal chords and tending to his young children to answer a few questions, ranging from their superb new album Honeys to the perils of having a rude name and why, in all honesty, they’re really “not dicks”.  Promise.

First of all, congratulations on a fantastic fourth album – both in the sense that it’s a really great record, and also because it’s far from a guarantee that bands get to make a fourth album these days. Is the idea of having a long career doing this compatible with being in a band like Pissed Jeans?

Matt Korvette:  Thank you kindly! I agree, not a whole lot of bands make it to four albums, and I’m kind of surprised that we did. If there’s anyone responsible besides ourselves, it’s gotta be Sub Pop – I don’t think we’d still be trudging along without their support. Or is that Sub-port?

It’s been four years since your last record, which is double the amount of time it usually takes you. What was keeping you busy?

MK:  Well, we are never in any sort of rush to keep up with industry standards or what not, and it just took us a while to come up with enough new songs that we felt were all strong enough. And we also did a 7” single a few years ago. Plus, we all had kids, which can make taking a shower or eating a bowl of cereal difficult, let alone having hours of productive band practice.

Lyrically, are there any particular themes running through the record, and if so, why were these playing on your mind when you were writing?

MK:  I’d say the themes on this record are mostly about getting older, love and relationships, that sort of thing. Although there are songs that certainly don’t fit that theme, and there are songs on other records that do fit it. Really, I just try to come up with topics that are on my mind and I feel are worth singing about, be as honest about them as I can, and hope that people can relate.

Can you tell us a bit about the choice of title? Why Honeys?

MK:  It has a few different meanings to me personally, but I feel like we have become sweeter, more caring individuals in the past year or so, and it’s a sweet counterpoint to what is some pretty raw music at times.

The Honeys artwork seems to reference the fable of the tortoise and the hare, but in a way that’s been twisted a little… can you offer any insight?

MK:  That’s an interesting take! I was approaching it as, here’s a man who loves his turtle, has a horribly unfortunate accident, and the turtle offers no support, just kinda wanders off. Sort of a take on unrequited love, maybe.

Watching you guys live is always pretty exhilarating – it sounds really muscular but also like it could fall apart under its own weight at any minute. How do you make sure you strike the right balance between being involved in the moment, and keeping things together?

MK:  As the lead singer of Pissed Jeans, keeping things together is thankfully not my concern. I have tried my hand at playing musical instruments, but it’s really hard. My main intent is to just allow myself a release, and have fun, and do my best to entertain the crowd. They are paying to see us play, not listen to a record, so I want to make it worth their while if at all possible. I appreciate you saying that I look muscular, though – I have to agree.

I showed someone a picture of you all after having played them your record, and they were amazed at how prim and proper you all looked. What’s the most common misconception about Pissed Jeans?

MK:  I think you nailed it. People tend to think that because of our music, we are mutated backwoods freaks, in and out of jail for petty crimes and general thuggery. But that’s not us at all. We are probably better people, when it comes down to it, than most boring and proper-sounding indie-rock bands. We are really not dicks, I don’t think.

Joe Strummer thought that punk rock was a young person’s game. Can you ever be too old for it?

MK:  That’s a good question. In one of my earliest bands, I actually wrote a song calling for removal of all people over 30 from the punk scene, but now here I am past that mark and still doing the same crap I did when I was 18. I think punk can apply to any age, you just have to see what it can do for you.

Your band name is one of my favourites. But has it ever presented any problems in the past near-decade, anywhere in the world? No regrets… right?

MK:  I’m glad you enjoy it, but I do regret it. It’s a pretty foul name, and I didn’t intend to be so rude, right off the bat. Plus, it’s embarrassing to admit the name to random border crossing-guards and parents and other random adults. We are strongly considering changing our name to Pressed Jeans.

You guys are from Pensylvannia. My parents lived there for a year in the Eighties. They told me never to bother visiting. What are they talking about?

MK:  We get asked about Pennsylvania a lot, and I can’t figure out why. I feel like it’s about as plain and generic of an American state as there could be – we’ve got farms, cities, ghettos and mansions, idiots and geniuses. I don’t mind it here, but I also have no qualms if no one ever visits.

Honeys will be released on 25 February via Sub Pop Records. 

“I was just trying to be funny, but a lot of people don’t like it when you’re trying to be funny.” Jim James released his first solo record, Regions of Light and Sound of God, earlier this week, and I enquire as to why he chose to bring it out under his own name, rather than the Yim Yames moniker he’d used for past individual endeavours. “I got tired of people taking it the wrong way. I thought it was hilarious, though.”

It might well be that there really is nothing more to the reversion to being plain old Jim James, but the reasons for his decision to add ‘solo artist’ to ‘failed comedian’ on his CV are less straightforward. The new record is the culmination of a four-year period of what has effectively amounted to rebirth for the My Morning Jacket frontman; in his own words, he’s moved “out of the darkness and into the light.”

Regions of Light was heavily inspired by God’s Man, a graphic novel by Lynd Ward – although James doesn’t see it that way. “It’s not really like a graphic novel to me,” he says, after asking me if I’d ‘seen’ the book, as opposed to having read it. “it’s wordless, but it sucks you in the way a book would. It’s like looking at a series of paintings that have this central narrative linking them together; I approached the record if I was trying to score a film, except that I was trying to ‘score’ God’s Man. I thought a lot about what it would be like to make it into a film.”

The book’s themes struck a profound chord with James, who can trace a series of events in his own life along similar lines to those followed by the story’s protagonist. He was seriously injured back in 2008, when he fell off stage between songs in Iowa City: “It was just a very dark time in my life; I spent a while not really wanting to look to the future,” he recalls. “It was pretty horrible, but I found that a lot of the darkness in God’s Man resonated with me; the main character in the book falls off a cliff and is badly injured, like I was, but eventually goes on to be rescued from this dark place when he falls in love. The same thing happened to me, so I guess the fact that that story has shaped the record makes the songs really personal.”

Japanese virtuoso Shugo Tokumaru has recently unfurled his fifth proper full-length solo record, In Focus?, via Polyvinyl. It, like the rest of his back catalogue, is a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of twee-pop, with syrupy indie hooks and saccharine beats that have led him to be compared to the avant-garde experiments of Deerhoof.

It’s a devilishly peppy LP, meticulously worked over by Shugo, who recorded the whole thing himself; the spectacular array of instrumentation has been selected and performed by him, in an almost obsessive way – it’s his brainchild, his cavalcade of miscellany, his cirque de sucré. His last LP, Port Entropy, broke him into the Japanese mainstream, scoring him a top 40 hit – so with a wider eye scouring his music, have things changed? It doesn’t look like it. It doesn’t look like he’s even noticed the success.

The whole work process is lengthy for Shugo, as he tends to write isolated from the outside world. But there’s an honest, respectable work ethic that he has, a DIY ethos and hands-on approach that would see other artists scurrying in fear. Shugo takes it upon himself to make a record he can safely say is his own. “During two and half years since the last album, I worked on demos for about 100 songs of various types. Then I narrowed the list down to 15 songs and polished and developed the demo versions. It might have been good to call in someone else for help, be it a producer or a mixing engineer. However, I came to a conclusion that for this album I just go back to basics and do it all by myself. I don’t remember specific ways of writing the songs, as I used every possible way to make it work.”

Those scores of demos began life somewhere, and the gradual evolution was a closely guarded secret – a fresh pair of ears was never needed. Producers have the tendency to strip back to the bone, but the technicolour flesh is what Shugo is about. “Basically I tend to start working on instrumentals. Then sometimes they become in need of some singing. The rest is simple. I play all the instruments by myself, record them and mix them. Once a song gets closer to the finished form, I go through the process of polishing it until it becomes a triple excellent cut. However, nothing was more painful than simple work. I didn’t let anyone hear the music this time until everything got finished.” It’s easy to see that Shugo is a perfectionist, with an eye for painstaking detail. He doesn’t rely on assistance from others, allowing them to sully his sounds or nosey about in the noises – it’s a process that’s his own. “Some of the work was done in the same ways as before, while I tried different ways as well. I wanted to put various types of songs in the album. More than anything it took a long time to finish it. It might be the first album with which I thought I was really glad when I finished it.”

Multi-instrumentalism has always been a vital aspect of Shugo’s music, allowing an awe-inspiring cacophony where you can get lost in the sounds for hours, discovering new ingredients with each subsequent listen. But for him, it’s just a natural way of working. “I love all the instruments and find each of them interesting. I use a lot of different instruments from different countries, but I don’t really use something that unusual. Even if I did, I wouldn’t use it as the main instrument for a song, so it might not weigh with me whether or not I actually used it for recording or not.” More important than the instruments though is how he comes up with ideas for his songs – his dream diary. “Imagery or stories which I see in my dreams becomes a clue for writing the lyrics. I frequently try to do a cover of a live performance of an unknown band which I see in my dreams by keeping it in mind as it was.” Covering an imaginary band from inside your own head has never been a staple of famous songsmiths, but it’s unmistakeably Shugo.

Due to his reclusive, controlling nature, very few foreign bodies seep in. It’s all very personal, with everything coming from within. What’s his take on influences, for example? “There weren’t any. I just wanted to make things I wanted to make and put them in the album even if in a somewhat untidy manner. While I was working on the album I felt like I was challenging my own limits, almost like an athlete.” And although it’s kooky, and a bit off the wall, it’s not gone down badly at all. “I have received the most pleasant responses ever for this album. I’m tempted to believe it turned out to be a good album as well.”

The lead single ‘Decorate’ has a fantastic video. “I made the song with imagery in mind where something like a moebius strip is spinning, so I told the director about this spinning image. Then he came up with an idea of using this old motion picture device called zoetrope, which was not far from what I was hoping for, so it turned out that way.” With its toy piano and xylophone arrangements, it succeeds in being a massive pop song that’s just pure pleasure to listen to – enough to brighten the sourest moods. Though there are plenty of frills and Shugo’s trademark shunning of the minimal, nothing detracts or distracts, and far from being a heavy-handed dollop of mess, it’s actually pretty light on the palate, veering into dream-pop. “I spent about 100 hours mixing this song alone. We also manufactured postcard flexi-discs for this song. You can’t really hear anything in that format when it comes to all the effort I put into the song with attention to every small detail, and I love that!”

However, being the workaholic that he is, his solo work isn’t his only work. He’s a vocalist/guitarist for alt. rock band Gellers, who draw influences from The Clash and Pavement – not really what you’d expect after hearing something like In Focus?. “They are completely different from each other. If my solo work is something well planned in advance, Gellers are the complete opposite. It’s more about unexpected happenings!” A five-piece made from childhood friends, Gellers released a debut back in 2007, and a single in 2011 – but it’s been a largely stop-start process. It doesn’t seem Shugo is keen to distance himself from the band any time soon, though. “Well, that band has been trying hard to work on some new songs for a long time, but we haven’t had any luck completing them. What do you think we should do about it!?”

Looking back, 2012 was a big year for Shugo. “I was finished with the album release and the subsequent tour in Japan by the end of the year, so I finally managed to take some rest. 2012 was a really busy year for me. I was mostly in Japan. I made the album, released it and then did a nationwide tour. I had to spend many sleepless nights working on the album, so I was always getting out of shape. Now I feel that I have finally got to a point where I can satisfy myself.” But now he looks to the future, with ambitions of dominating the West: “Last year was mostly about making music, so this year I would like to play shows in many different places. I will be touring the West Coast and beyond with Kishi Bashi in February and March, this time as a solo act. Then I will be heading to Austin for SXSW. I’m hoping to tour Europe/UK in the spring or summer as well. I’ve also started thinking of doing something new and am trying to work out various ideas to make it possible…”

2012 may have been busy and exhausting, but that doesn’t seem to have changed him – even with a hectic touring schedule, he’s already alluding to mysterious extra-curricular projects. But then that’s exactly the way he operates – the relentless, obsessive workings of a mad scientist, occasionally screaming “Eureka!” and unleashing another album. It’s a quirky, hellish way of working that is incredibly demanding – but it’s how Shugo is. Without all these idiosyncrasies, we wouldn’t have his fantastic music.

After the phenomenal reception to his third record The Lovers, 2012 didn’t look like it could get much better for singer-songwriter Paul Marshall – better known under his Lone Wolf guise. With a legion of supporters financing the release and production of his new LP via Pledge Music, he was finally able to release a record that was originally very uncertain, on his own label It Never Rains Records.

It was a stunning release, equal parts eggshell-delicate and powerfully emotional; it was glasslike, a vortex of anxiety and inner turmoil. All of these racing thoughts were plucked out of the air and stuffed into The Lovers, a Pandora’s Box of Marshall’s insomniac mind. Marshall tells of his catharsis: “I had an emotional 2012. It was an extremely rewarding, encouraging year, almost like a slap round the face reminding me I can do something if I actually put my mind to it. That’s the only way I can put it. It started bad, but got very good. I got to quit my job, release my own record. I’m not going to ever forget it.”

To promote the album, Marshall played two packed gigs: one in London, and a much-anticipated performance in his home town, Leeds. “The shows were really good, Leeds was full – that was at the Brudenell. London was full too. Really happy with how they went! I spent most of the time in awe of the crowd… I really enjoyed it. It’s been two years since a headline show in Leeds, it felt like a homecoming gig with everyone I’ve ever known.” It was a cosier show, and though Marshall has never been totally relaxed on stage, Leeds was something special. “I don’t play live much. I spend a lot of time thinking it’s like a job interview in front people who decide your future. I’ve never liked that part of it, I’m not comfortable with it. But I love performing. What I don’t like is the feeling of punching yourself in the head because you missed a note.” I’m a perfectionist, always thinking about things too much. Playing Leeds is like playing in front of my parents: it’s comfortable. It’s home.”

But playing new material is not without risk – people might not know the music, for starters. However, for Marshall, it went exceedingly well. But with the calibre of the sounds on The Lovers, how could it not? “I can safely says it’s gone down better than the old stuff. It’s a bit more upbeat, therefore it translates to being played live better than just me and an acoustic guitar singing songs about murder. People can get into a groove while I sing these sad songs. I always noticed, even back on the previous album [The Devil & I], that the new songs were better received!”

Marshall has always used an intensely methodical, but also quite solitary (hence his moniker, Lone Wolf) approach to writing music. “The Lovers was an experiment. With The Devil & I, I spent months demoing absolutely everything, coming up with ideas for strings and things. I demoed it into the ground. I was really inspired by Stalking Horse, a friend who went into a studio with nothing and was ballsy enough to just make an album. I always thought the demo process was where the magic happened, but there was always a tiny bit of me that was unsure when trying to recreate that magic in the studio.” He’s more animated, enthused about the experiment and delighted at the results. It was a challenge and a gamble – one that ultimately proved worthwhile. “So for The Lovers, whenever I had anything that was remotely a song, I recorded it on my iPhone, only little 40-50 second clips. I took them to the studio, sat with my producers and flicked through ideas, and worked on them to make songs. I just bashed it out – either worked or didn’t. The album is like one massive demo. It was nice to let my brain do whatever it wanted to do. But there were lots of casualties, lots of songs that didn’t make it; but then there was stuff like ‘Ghosts Of Holloway’ that just worked straight away.”

Touring with Wild Beasts has had an impact, and Marshall is quick to gush praises. “It’s hard not to learn something when touring with them. I’ve toured with a lot of bands, but when playing the 30-40 shows with Wild Beasts, I watched every single one of the performances. One of the only bands I did that with because they’re fantastic. I soaked up their ideas, what they had the balls to do.” But they haven’t made the only impression on the record. “I was listening to Wild Beasts, but combined with my love of Talk Talk, the spaces between notes and John Carpenter soundtracks – Escape From New York, Halloween 3, all those synth sounds, I decided it was time to wipe out the acoustics and make a synth record. Influences have come from all over, but they’re different from before – one of the reasons for that is so I’m not doing the same thing twice. It doesn’t satisfy my brain.”

There are new additions to Marshall’s record collection too, new inspirations from places he was surprised could exist. “Frank Ocean awoke dormant R&B bones inside of me. It had shit load of hype, but for a good reason. I didn’t know I was capable of liking that kind of music. The Villagers album is great. Look out for the new Hookworms album – it’s psych-noir krautrock, the new album is called Pearl Mystic. It’s already a contender for album of the year.”

It was 11 July 2010 and I was stood in a soaked field somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh working on the BBC Introducing Stage at T in the Park. We’d been supporting Young Fathers on BBC Introducing for quite some time, and out they came – boundless energy, neon beats, and an instant charm that could ignite even the dampest of crowds. And then they just seemed to disappear.

I assumed they’d gone to the place in the sky reserved for the luminous, skinny jeaned stars of 2007, but really the Glaswegians, Ally, Kayus, and Graham, were locked away in a recording space in their home city relentlessly writing in hiding.

“We’ve done two albums,” Ally begins, speaking of the mystery material that will never see the light of day. “We’ve been recording stuff, just constantly recording, two albums worth of material. By the time our stuff was ready to go we were on to the next level, so it’s just like, why let that represent you?”

What finally made the cut for Young Fathers was, understandably after two years and a two record progression, something startlingly different indeed. 2012’s Tape One was a catatonic call of skewed samples, slick R’n’B croons, and uncomfortably lo-fi production, all wrapped up in a despairing depth. And live, gone were the choreographed dance moves and smiles and in was an unnervingly bleak intensity.

“You put in five years, four or five years, and then everything comes together,” continues Ally. “Also, I think the stuff we’ve done before; the albums, if you’d heard them you would have seen a gradual progression and change so it wouldn’t have seemed so dramatic and drastic.”

Kayus, still a sugar rush of beaming personality off-stage picks up, “when you’re younger you’re still trying to find your place and still not comfortable with yourself and timid and whatever, and as you grow up you feel more comfortable with who you are and I think that now we feel grown up. We know what our sound is and we know what we’re doing.”

Describing the new sound as coming from, “a mix of frustration and wanting to take charge of the music,” Ally details the process that forced them to complete and release Tape One. “We just went in the studio for a week and recorded every single day and [our manager] said to us, make sure you have a rough mix by the end of every session, so I think with that intensity, that’s how that came about – because we were constantly thinking about ideas and songs and just in that zone and so we did an album’s worth of material in just over a week and then we picked the songs, just like that.”

Releasing Tape One online last year as a free download, it was picked up by Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop who posted a glowing review, which lead to US label Anticon reaching out to the three Scottish lads. Kayus confesses, “I didn’t know much about the label, until we were signed to the label.”

A UK tour supporting Anticon’s co-founder Yoni Wolf’s Why? followed late last year and at the start of 2013 Tape One had its official release on physical formats to the delight of Ally. “It feels more real. Somehow it improves the sound or the quality of the song. It’s a weird thing, it’s just The Emperor’s New Clothes but it makes it bigger. Seems like yeah, this is real.”

But even with a first release under their belts, Young Fathers aren’t giving up their tried and trusted work ethic having already completed Tape Two and with a new album on the way, information that may terrify their independent label, as Ally imparts,  “We gave them all the videos and Tape One and Tape Two, and rarely does that happen that a band gives them so much stuff that they’re like, fucking hell. We need to try and stagger stuff.”

“We’ve got loads of stuff recorded over the Christmas period and just need to try and get back into it and see what happens,” continues Kayus, as Ally adds, “I think we did twelve songs in nine days, but we just need to see what happens. I don’t know where it’s going. You don’t know where it’s going.”

What happens when an unstoppable force meets a record label? Welcome to the world of Young Fathers.

Tape One is available now through Anticon. 

“This last year was super boring; except for the month we made this record [Wonderful, Glorious].  It sounds like it probably took longer, but it was just a month.  The rest of the time I was twiddling my thumbs, bored out of my skull.”

After two and a half years since the release of Tomorrow Morning, you can tell Mark ‘E.’ Everett is eager to get back into Eels mode again.  Even though this is one of the most forced, artificial situations in which you could ever meet someone to talk about their art (a swanky but characterless hotel room in Kensington), he’s nothing but welcoming and forthcoming, as I assume he is to the ten or so other people lined up after me, armed with questions that are probably quite similar.

Wonderful, Glorious, Eels’ tenth album in a career that stretches back 20 years, is one of the most inventive and sonically adventurous in their canon.  So comprehensively thought out does it seem that if he told me he’d started it the minute he finished Tomorrow Morning, I’d not have batted an eyelid, no matter how handsome his beard and beaming his smile.  Why, then, did it all come together so quickly?

E.:  “This was the one time we went to make a record without any preconceived concept of what I wanted the album to be. It could have been a disaster, but it turned out OK I think.  We moved into a place where the whole house was a studio, and utilised every nook and cranny. We’d made all the previous records in the same tiny basement, which had gotten so piled up with instruments that we couldn’t function anymore. Seating was at a premium! There were altercations that were… couch based. There were a lot of ugly fights between my bass player, Kool G Murder, and my dog Bobby Jr.  The other thing we can do now that we couldn’t before is set up as a five piece and all play live.  Most of the time songs used to be built up piece by piece, now some of these new ones are actually us all playing, in one take.”

It’s an approach that provides the record a tangible energy and zeal.  It’s also the first Eels album on which their front man sounds like just that, a front man, rather than the only guy whose name was worth remembering in a band who could pretty much be anybody.  What brought about this more collaborative approach?

E.: “I’ve always been open to ideas, but would often go ‘that sounds terrible, let’s not try it’. This time, no matter how terrible it sounded, I’d say ‘OK, let’s try it!’  And it turns out I was wrong a lot of the time.  There’s a song called ‘You’re My Friend’ with this clicking thing that comes in – that was Knuckles’ idea, the drummer.  He wanted to try hitting his drumsticks on a stepladder.  I said, ‘that sounds awful, but ok…’  Of course, it’s one of my favourite things about the song.”

Would it be right to call it one of your more optimistic records?  And why do you think people often seem to think of Eels as a really downbeat thing?

E.: “Well, anyone’s who’s paying attention can see that [the downbeat stuff] is always there in the name of getting to a brighter place.  There’s a reason the album starts with ‘Bombs Away’, which is coming from a darker place, and ends up with the title track at the end, which is getting to a very bright place. It’s all about how you’ve got to go through all the dark places to get to the brighter place.”

The album hits its stride at its centre, the sombre reflections of ‘The Turnaround’ contrasting expertly with the comparative buoyancy of ‘New Alphabet’.  I wonder why juxtapositions like that interest him as a songwriter.

E.:  “Both those songs are kind of about the same thing; they’re both in the middle of the record for a reason. Right before ‘The Turnaround’ is one called ‘On the Ropes’ which is about fighting your way out of a jam.  Then ‘The Turnaround’ is about taking the first steps towards making your life better.  ‘New Alphabet’ takes it a little further; it’s about how if shit isn’t working, you’ve got to figure out how to fix it.”

When you’ve made a career of writing lyrics as openly and graphically as Aidan John Moffat, it’s difficult to pull back and attempt to build yourself a level of mystique. Certainly, he’s one of the most affable people I’ve ever interviewed, but the record I’m phoning to discuss, The Island Comes True sounds tailor-made for deep exploration.

His fourth under the L. Pierre moniker, The Island Comes True is a lyricless patchwork of found sound, tape hiss and downright odd noises; opening track ‘Kab 1340’ blends the sound of a string quartet tuning up into clanging metal and seagull squawks before (un)settling on a dramatic violin refrain, while on ‘Dumbum’, a woman’s idle humming gets shaped into a compulsive rhythmic pattern.

Amusingly, however, the album’s origins are a little more prosaic than its contents: “It was really just a result of being a bit bored,” Moffat explains. “I’d been working with Bill Wells on the album [Everything’s Getting Older], and he’d been doing something else. I was looking through some old boxes, and I found some old cds with old samples on, and I just started playing around.” The sense of play is a big part of what makes The Island Comes True such an interesting listen, and inspired the album’s title, which comes from a chapter in Peter Pan. This was inspired by what Aidan describes a his “first real engagement with literature.” “It’s full of themes and images that stick with you,” he elaborates. “Everyone knows who Peter Pan is, everybody knows the story. I was thinking about the idea of leaving the album quite vague so people could use their imaginations. And it led to that – it was quite an obvious thing for me to reference Peter Pan in some way, because of course that’s what the whole book’s about.”

Yet, the album is far less innocent than Moffat suggests, and the inspiration for the sinister orchestral stylings of a track like ‘Harmonic Avenger’ come from much different sources, in particular, the recently reissued Eraserhead soundtrack – “not really a record that you sit down and listen to for fun!”

Everything’s Getting Older – winner of the inaugural Scottish Album of the Year award – was an album which took a long time to put together, and it shows; however, while it may sound meticulously crafted, the theme of ageing fell together pretty much by accident. Far from drained, though, Moffat has used The Island Comes True as “a good way to clear the mind before I get back into writing lyrics,” and its soundscapes – taken from the aforementioned boxes of CDs and “public domain films that no one really cares about” – take the listener on a strange journey. Much like the album with Bill Wells which preceded it, the way Moffat pieced the record together is reflected in its sound – “You might have a vague idea,” he states, “but I think it’s very rare that it ends up how you expect it to.”

When it comes to Moffat’s lyrics, he’s no slouch, but the notion of treating writing as a full-time hobby (like, say, Nick Cave, who writes nine-to-five style in an office) doesn’t exactly appeal: “I work at home, obviously; I’ve got a room to myself, with all my stuff in it, and it’s a fucking mess. My way of thinking is, if my desk is tidy, I’m not working enough.” And Moffat is a guy who tends to have a lot of writing projects on the go at any one time, which may explain why overlabouring a song doesn’t quite ring true as a working method, “I want it to seem as natural as possible, so I let it come as naturally as possible.” This, in turn, fed into what winds up coming out of his mouth throughout his whole career.

“The whole reason I started writing songs the way I do is because I never heard anyone writing songs in the voice that I spoke with, or the voice that I knew from Scotland. Most Scottish artists were always putting on American accents and writing terrible, terrible lyrics that didn’t reflect the country at all. I mean, the Proclaimers for instance, are often the butt of many jokes – which is very cruel, because they actually had such a strong Scottish identity. I wouldn’t say they inspired me in any way, but I’ve always admired them for the way they write and what they do. I remember someone described Arab Strap as ‘The Proclaimers from Hell’ which I thought was fair enough, aye.”

And he seems to have no intention of leaving the place; he occasionally envisions himself living in rural England “in my retirement years”, but even this is more inspired by his English girlfriend – “I hate saying ‘partner’ because I’m not a fucking cowboy, but we’re not married but we’ve been together ten years and we’ve got a son, so it seems a bit silly calling her ‘girlfriend’” – than anything else.

Indeed, having previously covered the traditional folk song ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, and referencing specific areas of the country throughout his lyrical career, Scotland is a constant backdrop to Moffat’s work. When I ask him what makes Scottish misery so distinct from that of other nations, however, he shuns the very idea: “I don’t want to speak on behalf of my country, but as a nation, we’re very very quick to laugh at ourselves, and I think that’s very important.” Indeed, from Arab Strap onwards, his lyrics have been very much rooted in self-deprecating humour (“our records often got dismissed by people who don’t really listen to them as miserable records, but no one would buy an album of just sheer misery”) and any album beginning with the line “It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen/But you’d no idea where that cock had been” – the peerless opening gambit from 1998’s Philophobia – isn’t exactly going to be short on laughs.

Yet, surely he must have trouble reconciling his body of work to his newfound parental duties? “I do fear the day when my son asks me about the old lyrics… but I’ll deal with it when I get there.” Indeed, Moffat insists that he’s in no hurry to foist his back catalogue on his little boy – “I’ll wait until he gets his first really bad broken heart. Then I’ll give him the six Arab Strap albums – ‘There’s nothing I can say to you that hasn’t been said in there!’”

One thing that Moffat and son have been able to bond over recently is pop music. Proper pop music. “I watch a lot of pop music on telly. I don’t have that snobby attitude to music – everything’s valid, and if music sounds good, then there’s no reason not to celebrate it. [A lot of pop songs] say something that might not be apparent, and a lot of pop music is like that.” It’s not too much of a surprising sentiment coming from a man who has, in the past, covered songs by the likes of Atomic Kitten and Bananarama, but there are still new hits that catch him unawares. “I was never that keen on Katy Perry,” he continues. “I thought she was a bit shallow. But when I was watching the telly – now, I’d been drinking quite a lot at that point – but ‘Firework’ came on, and it sounded fantastic. It’s a beautiful sentiment.” One, indeed, which he was able to share with his son (who is “at that age where he only likes songs that he’s heard in films”) during Madagascar 3.

The production line element of pop music seems to genuinely appeal to Aidan, and he was apparently once approached to write some lyrics by Madonna’s former producer (unfortunately for me, Moffat forgets his name); “Obviously I never heard from him again, probably because I replied.” Yet, in spite of it being pretty much his calling for the last fifteen-odd years, working with a producer having the word “Lyricist” printed on his passport remains his dream job.

Which leads to my final question – having covered so many classic pop tunes, which Proper Pop Star would he most like to tackle one of his own songs? “Ohhhhhh,” Aidan muses, sounding like he’s truly relishing the question, “this requires thought!” After a while and, inspired by the “sheer joy” the man’s latest single gives his son, he settles on an answer.

“Let me hear Robbie Williams do ‘Packs of Three’.”

Probably best he keeps that away from his son for a while, eh?

The Island Come True is out now on Melodic.

Two years or so is a long time in music, isn’t it? Back in 2010 when a track called ‘Ffunny Ffrends’ dropped out of nowhere, Unknown Mortal Orchestra were complete unknowns. That track, a combination of deep grooves, a whiff of the jazz cigarette and unexpectedly soulful vocal, came from the brain of one Ruban Nielson.

An early 30-something displaced New Zealander previously responsible for the underrated punk fun of The Mint Chicks, along with his brother Kody. The self-titled debut album was a very fine treat: a psych-rocking trip through a dusty collection of obscure 60s and 70s records played and produced almost single-handedly by Nielson, with a little help from his brother and friends. It was enough to pique the interest of the excellent Jagjaguwar label and got them on tour with some big hitters.

The follow-up record II was written on the road, or at the very least inspired by the constant touring, and it’s so brilliant and inspiring that it positively laughs in the face of the supposed second album syndrome. It takes the clear influences of Pink Floyd, myriad prog acts, the Beatles and soul music and manages to avoid being a period pastiche. It’s bigger and bolder than Unknown Mortal Orchestra, yet intimate and fragile at the same time, and marks Nielson out as one of the best song writers we have on our hands in 2013.

We caught up with Nielson at home in Portland, Oregon to talk about UMO’s new album, beginning by discussing the differences between number one, and number two. II appears to contain a much more expansive set of songs while managing to keep a real air of simplicity, so how did the record take shape? “Well… after the songs started getting a lot of attention online, I threw a live band together and went out on the road and didn’t stop touring for about a year and a half,” says Nielson. Is it fair to say then that II is a tour record? “It was a pretty insane idea to just tour that [the first album] intensely straight out of the gate but I got a lot of life lived in that time and another album’s worth of songs came really easily.” Nielson adds that it’s not simply an album about being on tour, though: “I didn’t try to create them or anything like that but after the songs were written I noticed there was this kind of hedonistic, paeanistic night owl kind of thing. Also, there is a lot of stuff about loneliness. I didn’t want it to be a ‘tour record’ because I thought people wouldn’t really relate to that so I don’t mention the specifics of the experiences, and focus on the emotions instead. I wanted to somehow make this record more soul and more classic rock than the last one.”

Given the amount of touring UMO has done, I want to know how easy it was to get the record written while on the road; Nielson reveals it wasn’t quite as difficult as he expected: “It was surprisingly easy! I had a bunch of melodies and lyrics on my phone. I’d been around the US six or seven times and been to Europe twice. I’d met thousands of new people. I guess experiences make songs easier to write sometimes. I’m good at noticing a phrase or a feeling that needs to be remembered for later. I’ll be blind drunk on some balcony somewhere and still record it.”

Over the course of that year and a half UMO toured with names such as Dirty Projectors, Liars, Best Coast and Girls, but one band really stood out for Nielson: “I learned a lot from Grizzly Bear. To me they seem to be this uncompromising band that still manages to be very successful and be heard.”

It’s important that Nielson mentions “classic rock” as there’s a certain sound to II – a, dare I say, “retro” feel in not just the influences but in the way the album is recorded. It sounds like it could be from 1974, so I ask him how the sound of the album took shape: “My taste in music is right on my sleeve in this band,” he asserts. “I think you can tell I listen to as much Al Green as Led Zeppelin and that I can’t name three Lady Gaga songs.” And as for the production side of things, Nielson has very strong feelings on this: “I don’t hear bigger and bolder in today’s production. My idea of big and bold is Dark Side of the Moon. The bombast in modern production is like a housing bubble. It’s like a Big Mac that leaves you hungry fifteen minutes after eating it. It sounds like white noise to me and it’s sexless too.”

If one sound dominates II then it’s probably prog rock. The influence of bands like Focus, Yes and Pink Floyd are there, right up front, alongside the classic rock touchstones such as the Beatles, so I ask Ruban if any records in particular influenced the sound of the album. “If it was a prog record it was probably Fragile by Yes,” he reveals.  “Yes can be so boring but I think Fragile is a really great record. I guess [Frank Zappa and] the Mothers of Invention are pretty prog too and I love them, especially the first line-up from Freak Out and that whole Uncle Meat period.”  Nielson reveals his love of prog is twofold: “Prog is impressive musically and also hilarious so it appeals to me both ways!” he laughs. “Fusion can be funny too. The Aura Will Prevail by George Duke is something I listen to a lot. Led Zeppelin 2 was something I was pretty obsessed with. [Syd Barrett’s] Madcap Laughs I would just wallow in when I was on the road. I’d listen to it over and over and drive myself to despair.”

Nielson continues – it’s clear he devours music – by talking about records away from the prog scene. “I’m Still in Love With You by Al Green was another record I listened to really hard, and Abbey Road was the Beatles period I was most thinking about. There are records that really influenced the first album that still had a big impact on the second one too like Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Stand! [do action="secondary-artist"]Sly and the Family Stone[/do] and [Captain Beefheart’s] Safe As Milk. I would try and inhabit that world without letting it make my music any less immediate and real.” How does Nielson make it his own, and avoid the danger of  it becoming pastiche? “I love that sound but I’m not pretending to have anybody else’s feelings you know?” he states. “I’m singing my own modern ideas and emotions.”

When I first listened to UMO’s music, I had no idea that he was also the brains behind The Mint Chicks, the young New Zealand punks I’d been introduced to a number of years back by a Kiwi friend. UMO’s music does sound substantially different to The Mint Chicks, so I ask Ruban what he sees as the differences between the bands. “It was just more collaborative [in The Mint Chicks],” he reveals. “I tried out all of the ingredients of UMO at some point in The Mint Chicks. There is a Mint Chicks song called ‘Hot on Your Heels‘ which I wrote and I kind of think of that as the proto-UMO song. You can even hear me singing in my kind of soul falsetto in the background. There would be lyrics in the Mint Chicks that you can tell are me. The album Screens opens with the lyric “Why is it less of a hassle to die in your sleep?” which could only be my words.” But more musical influences started seeping in, which perhaps signalled the end of his Mint Chicks phase. Ruban explains: “Also I started getting into Bach while I was still in the band. I would suggest these weird classical sounding parts and I think the other dudes thought I was being stupid or something. Back then I would listen to Margo Guryan and think ‘why can’t my band be like this?’” he laughs.

Turning back to UMO, Nielson discusses the lyrics and themes that tie II together. “It wasn’t on purpose, but there is this theme about the night,” he reveals. “I suppose that’s because I lived my life at night for two years, including the recording of the album.” But that’s not all that’s at work, as the striking album art attests to: “There is also this kind of feminine energy to the record. I guess that’s why I chose the image of the high priestess witch Janet Farrar for the cover – some kind of idea about female power, women not to be trifled with.” Feminine rather than feminist? “Not feminist power; Witch power. Pre-feminism; your mother’s power to smother or abandon you, and your lover’s power to forget about you.”

The opening to the album is rather striking, with the lyric “isolation can put a gun in your hand”, then ‘Swim and Sleep’ also seems to suggest either loneliness or wanting to be alone, to get away from something, so Nielson reveals what’s behind these lyrics and feelings. “Because I’ve always had these kinds of thoughts, I assume everyone does. I’ve always been either really silly or really serious.” Is it a case of it’s either one extreme or the other, no middle ground? Ruban agrees: “Talk too much at the party or be like a mute the whole night. Either ready to storm the ramparts or crawl under a rock and die. Feeling either very strong or very sickly. Not much in between. It’s a strange feeling to write a song and be able to share a feeling with the world that I could never explain in conversation.”

By producing and playing most of the record on his own, is there not a danger of adding to that isolation simply by choosing to make music in this way? “It’s actually through interviews that I started to realise this, interviewers will bring it up, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” says Ruban. “Strangely enough, solitude isn’t always so isolated. I think when you sit alone night after night making a record of your ideas and feelings for other people to enjoy, you don’t feel so isolated. You’re contributing something positive to society. You’re creating value out of nothing. And yet you can spend time partying and talking and doing drugs and even making love with people night after night and feel completely alienated from real communion.” On the sound side of the recording process, Nielson has been quoted as saying he’s not much of a fan of digital recording, and we’ve already heard how he dislikes the “bombast” of modern records, so what goes on in the studio – does he have a mixing desk straight from the 70s? “I actually edit and mix in Pro Tools,” admits Ruban, “but I have a collection of tape machines I use to get the sounds I want. I actually really love Pro Tools, but I’d hate to use it by itself just because I don’t prefer the sound. If I didn’t have tape I couldn’t work the hours I do. It’d hurt my ears too much. I like the way information is organised on a computer screen, I just don’t like the sound, as far as I can tell.”

There’s more touring planned for 2013, but if Ruban wasn’t making music, where would he be, what would he be doing?  “I was obsessed with painting. I went to art school and then worked as an artist’s assistant. I watched a film about Lucien Freud recently and I really liked it. The way he was painting these portraits of naked bodies when pop art and minimalist abstraction were trendy, and yet his work is always so fresh and real.”

Looking ahead to what this year will bring, Nielson enthuses about some new friends: “Next year we’re taking two bands on tour that I’m excited about. The first is Foxygen, they’re on the same label as us and they’ve done a record with Richard Swift that I think people are going to flip out over. The other is Wampire. They’re from Portland and our bass player produced their album which is coming out on Polyvinyl. Both of those bands have similar names in some way; both kind of childish and foolish. That’s kind of weird.” I suspect strong friendships will be forged between this like-minded bunch of people; while Foxygen have made a promising debut that pulls from the 60s and 70s, and Wampire have a touch of the Ariel Pinks about them, they’ll have to go some way to beating the ever-improving, nascent genius of Ruban Nielson and Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

II will be released through Jagjaguwar on 04 February. 

Photo by Howard Melnyczuk

“We love coming to London,” states Local Natives’ Taylor Rice as he leans back into a comfy sofa in an office of their label’s London HQ. “It was our home away from home for a long time, so coming back feels cosy and familiar, although it feels like a lifetime ago that we were last here…”

It does indeed seem like a lifetime ago that tracks such as ‘Who Knows, Who Cares’ and ‘World News’ flooded blogs and radio playlists, leading the Californian group’s name to start appearing on festival bills far and wide. The band are in high spirits tonight, chatting excitedly about having seen their first ever Premier League match at Chelsea the previous evening, and both drummer Matt Frazier and guitarist/vocalist Taylor Rice are extremely eager to discuss their second record, Hummingbird. So we indulge them, first addressing the fact that all has been eerily quiet in the Local Natives camp over the past 12 months.

“We’ve been working on the new record, so we’ve been at home quite a bit,” Matt responds. “We spent the whole summer in Brooklyn, recording the record with Aaron Dessner. We finished up at the end of the summer, and now we’re just getting back into live mode, because it’s been so long – interpreting the new songs for live, and re-entering that whole world.”

Local Natives first stormed to our full attention back in 2010 with the release of Gorilla Manor, a debut record seeped in the sun-laden harmonies and lush, layered melodies. A light and gentle record, its West Coast creation can be felt and heard from start to finish. So traversing the States to record in Brooklyn must have had an impression on the band, and made a mark on the recording.

“Yeah, it’s really different!” Taylor responds. “We had our own little rehearsal/studio space in Silverlake where we live, and we were there for about 8 months, really working on the songs and doing in depth demos with them. So the songs were pretty fleshed out, but we really wanted to go somewhere else – get out of LA, put ourselves outside of our comfort zones, away from home distractions and to get in that state of being open to new things. And Brooklyn was great. We were at Aaron’s house – he lives on the bottom floor with his family, we were on the middle floor, the top floor and in the attic, which is where I slept. Then the garage in the back yard is where we record, so it was all compact and we had our own little world going on there for a while.”

A figure that’s well on his way to becoming as respected-a-producer as he is a musician, (particularly after the sterling work that he did producing Sharon Van Etten’s Tramp) The National’s Aaron Dessner was brought on board to assist in the creation of Hummingbird. “He’s a great guy!” Taylor states, enthusiastically. “But regardless or whether it was Aaron or not, we were very nervous and hesitant to work with any producer, or to have any outside help at all. When we made our first record, every part was written before we went to record. And on this one, the songs were pretty much done. But we’d just met Aaron on tour – it was our very last tour actually, with The National. We made friends with them, and joked over drinks after shows that we could work together on the next album. But I don’t think any of us really took it seriously. And then when we got home, we were talking about it and meeting with producers, and nothing felt right. So we thought we should just do it on our own – but we wanted help, especially with recording. Then we remembered – the Aaron lightbulb went off – and we emailed him. He was on vacation but he wrote back super excited.”

“The relationship worked really well,” Taylor continues. “There were no horror stories, he was really good at helping us to maintain an openness and to allow an air of spontaneity. He was good at saying ‘the first take is fine, you don’t need a second take’. Even if we argued that there was a mistake, he’d say ‘first take is fine, leave it in there!’ And he’d record on-the-fly moments – he’d hit record, and I wouldn’t be ready to play, and he’d get us to play something… anything. So pushing us outside of our comfort zone in little in ways like that helped to keep this air of spontaneity.”

Second albums can be feared creatures. They’re items that are longed for by fans, but also possess the power to strike fear into the hearts of bands. Experiencing the sweet comfort of success with a first album can inspire a sense of trepidation when creating the second. “Will it be received as well?” “Can we push our music further, or will that alienate our fans?” The mindset when going in to create a second album is a notoriously tricky one to handle, so did the band find their second album to be as difficult as these things are rumoured to be? “I don’t know if it was hard,” Matt responds, deliberately, “it was just a totally different experience. Because like everyone says, you have your whole life to make your first record and then this second one was so much more compact – obviously we wanted to take our time and do it right, and wait until we were happy with the final product. But at the same time, we knew we couldn’t take our sweet time and wait five years to make a new record, we wanted to get something out.”

“The thing about the first record was that some of the songs were written in 2008,” he continues, “some were written a couple of years before that so the timing was way more compact this time around. And I think just wanting to try to push ourselves again, the whole getting outside of our comfort zone thing, and musically as well – not making the same record, really trying new things, new instruments, thinking ‘not everything has to be totally organic, maybe we can try some synthetic instruments’. Stuff like that was a challenge… but a good challenge! I think it gave the record a maturity. But I think that when you get into lyrical content, that in itself was a totally different experience. I think it was a much more personal record for a lot of people. The first record was more fun and feel good, and there’s a lot of that still on this record, but I think there are some high highs and some deeper low lows. It’s emotionally charged that way.”

A huge amount of time spent on the road, the departure of band member Andy Hamm turning the five piece into a four piece and tragic circumstances in their personal lives left an indelible impression upon this latest body of work. “There’s an element of some of the struggles of touring [on there], but honestly, most of the touring is highs. We really love touring and we love playing live, I think it’s kind of feeding for us. But there were more interpersonal things that didn’t have to do with necessarily the band, or being on the road that affected things. Interpersonal relationships are difficult on the road, for sure, and there are other kinds of relationships that struggled in one way or another. And there was an unexpected death of a close family member, and there were some health issues that were unexpected. So you know, just things that we didn’t really see coming that hit us when we were ready to start writing.”

Photo by Howard Melnyczuk

The impressive (and slightly overwhelming) tour schedule that succeeded the release of Gorilla Manor took the Silverlake residents away from the comfortable surroundings of the home/studio that played host to the creation of their debut, and catapulted them onto stages and festival bills around the world. Their live reputation preceded them wherever they went, with crowds consistently impressed by the energy that the band would pour into their shows, and the technical, intuitive skills that the group had garnered along the way. So is the thought of getting back out on the road something that they’re excited about? ”Yeah, definitely,” Taylor answers readily, a response quickly confirmed by his bandmate. “Definitely, definitely, definitely!”

“It’s been really interesting because we weren’t worrying about how to play these songs live when we made this record,” Taylor elaborates. “The first record was us playing in a room and we’d figure out that ‘that’ was a song. On this record, a lot of the writing process is definitely still collaborative and democratic, it’s still us playing together a lot, but we just didn’t worry about it. We said ‘let’s expand off in this direction and not care and see what that takes us’. So it’s been an interesting challenge to work out how to do these songs live. It’s been expanding our gear and out live palette, so it’s been a really fun process.”

And how about the experience of being a full time, touring musician? Does that live up to the childhood fantasy?” I don’t think I ever really thought about it!” Taylor responds. “You only think about that in the most wide eyed, visceral ways, you think about what it’d be like to be on stage. RIght now, i’m thinking about At The Drive In because when I was learning guitar – Ryan and I picked up the guitar when we were like 12 years old – and At The Drive In was our favourite band. So that’s the kind of thing I’d think about, what it’d be like to be on stage and playing guitar. But I never thought about the ins and outs of the daily life. The experiences we’ve had though, playing to all of these people all over the world… never in my wildest expectations did I think that that would happen, so it’s been really amazing on that level. And we got to play with a full orchestra at the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles – that was literally my musical dream and we were able to do that last year. So that was as good as the hype, I’d say.”

With a new album about to finally reach the hands of avid fans, and a band that are chomping on the bit to get back on the road, Matt reflects upon his ambitions for the coming year. “I’d love for us to go to South America because we’ve never played there before,” he says. “I don’t know if we have any fans there! But I’d just love to expand even more than we have and to see some new places.In a more general sense, as long as we can keep doing this – we hope people will enjoy the new music and come to the shows, so we can make another new record, that’d be awesome.”

Hummingbird will be released through Infectious Records on 28 January.

“We never really started with a plan to actually do anything. It all came together pretty naturally.”

Veronica Falls‘ James Hoare is speaking to Best Fit from his flat in Whitechapel, where the band have just wrapped their penultimate day of recording for sophomore release Waiting for Something to Happen; with the record already wrapped up, the finishing touches are now being applied to the accompanying EP of covers that will ship with deluxe editions of the album.

“We did one for the last record as well, and it was really well-received, it sold out straight away, so we thought we’d do one again,” Hoare says of the EP, which is set to feature covers of artists as diverse as Ween, Bob Dylan and The Moles. “It’s been good fun to be recording in a more relaxed environment than the studio.”

Veronica Falls, by now, are already pretty intimately acquainted with the recording studio, with Waiting for Something to Happen set to arrive less than eighteen months after their self-titled debut; James attributes this impressive level of output to the band’s work ethic. “We really had very little time off, just a short break before we started knocking the ideas we had for these songs into shape,” he says. “And that was the only time we spent off the road; by the time we’d started recording last summer, we were juggling the time we were spending in the studio with going out and playing festivals. The whole process was a little bit disjointed, but we’re pleased with how it’s come together.”

At first glance, Veronica Falls seem a pretty disparate bunch, at least in terms of their geographical roots – England, Scotland and France all represented amongst the band’s membership – so it’s maybe a little surprising to note what a cohesive outfit they really are. Common interests have driven the band both sonically and lyrically so far, and James confirms that the new record will essentially stay true to the formula that served them so well on their debut. “Simple drums, bass, guitars, a lot of focus on the vocal melodies. There’s no keyboards or synthesizers or anything like that; I just don’t think any of us have ever been particularly influenced by that side of things.” The simplicity of the band’s modus operandi is reflected in their approach to recording; “the new album was mostly done live again, with minimal overdubs. We found out pretty early on, when we were making the first record, that our music’s suited to that type of recording process. We ended up scrapping a lot of the early recordings we did for the first album because we didn’t like how it sounded when we started tracking everything individually; it didn’t really sound like us.”

Speaking of misrepresentation, the band have continually had to contend with being mislabelled and pigeonholed with genres that even the most cursory knowledge of the Veronica Falls sound, with the dreaded ‘C’ and ‘T’ words cropping up time and again, and proving a point of considerable consternation. “I think that kind of stuff can often just come from things as simple as photography, like people looking at press shots of us and just thinking that we look like a twee bunch of people,” James laughs. “We’ve said before that C86 was never an influence for us, but I’ve been reading reviews of the new single [‘Teenage’] and some of those have mentioned it too, so for the time being at least it seems like something we’re struggling to break away from.”

Much was made of the dark nature of the first record’s lyricism; lead single ‘Beachy Head’ was an ode to the infamous Sussex suicide spot, whilst ‘Bad Feeling’ was written about a stalker and the likes of ‘Found Love in a Graveyard’ were loaded with gothic, ghostly imagery. The most striking divergence from album number one on Waiting for Something to Happen is the move away from those themes; as James puts it, “the darker elements are something that we were all really into when we first started the band; we were inspired by a lot of dark stuff we were listening to from the early sixties and eighties. One of the main differences with the new album is that we went for a lighter sound. There’s still some darkness in the music, but you can definitely hear a lot of more upbeat sixties stuff in there as well; that kind of sunshine music was definitely an influence.”

The reverb-heavy guitar sound on Veronica Falls was arguably the record’s defining feature; Pitchfork described the “clarity of texture” of that album’s guitar work as “immaculate”. “I think Lou Reed‘s always been the main influence on my playing. The one influence that’s definitely crept in a bit more on the new record is Television,” James says. “I’m a big fan of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd as guitar players. You can definitely hear their influence on a couple of the new tracks. Teenage Fanclub were an influence as well in that respect, but I think that’s something that’s carried over from the first record too; we were lucky enough to tour with those guys a couple of years ago.”

Given the breakneck pace at which Veronica Falls have moved thus far, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if they’ve already got an idea of what’s on the horizon, beyond an intensive touring schedule that currently runs up to May. “I think it’s going to depend on how busy the summer gets for us. We definitely want to be doing some more recording; I think the more you record, the better you get at it, and we want to try and get the next batch of recordings done even quicker.” The band seem to have maintained that focus on the studio from the beginning, having started out with a succession of single releases before finally came to record a full-length – and even then, they didn’t sign to Bella Union until after it was finished. “Ideally, we’d put records out as often as possible,” says James. “I think there’s a tendency for a lot of bands to be lazy these days. If you look back to the sixties, it wasn’t unusual to be getting two records a year from a lot of artists. That’s an extreme example, but really we wanted to get this album out at the end of last year; there just wasn’t enough time for press and everything else to make it feasible. It should be a fairly quick turnaround when we do something next.”

Whatever the ‘something’ is that Veronica Falls are waiting to see happen, wider recognition, both critically and commercially, certainly seems viable with a new record that plays like a more nuanced, refined version of their debut; if the something you’ve been waiting for is the return to prominence of pop records that rely on vocal melodies and plenty of jangling guitars, Veronica Falls look set to lead the charge.

Waiting For Something To Happen will be released through Bella Union on 04 February. Pre-order the album here, and catch the band playing the following live dates:

February
08 – London, Shoreditch Church
14 – Norwich, Arts Centre
15 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
25 – Sheffield, Harley
26 – Glasgow, CAA
27 – Newcastle, Cluny
April
17 – Liverpool, The Kazimier
18 – Dublin, Wheelan’s
19 – Dublin, Voodoo
20 – Manchester, Deaf Institute