Everything Everything‘s Arc is an album to really sink one’s teeth into and – by the band’s own admission – one which provides a much more expansive and less cluttered song palette than their debut Man Alive did.

The quartet’s particular style of choppy sounds, erudite verbosity and rich arrangements has divided opinions, to the point that they could be referred to as a bit of a Marmite act. For those who are open to their sound, they are the more ambitious forebears of faves-du-jour Clock Opera, Django Django and Alt-J. For others… they’re not. But the four Mancunians revel in this dichotomy and from meeting them, the things that come across most strongly are their passion for their craft, their absolute dedication to their songwriting and their self-awareness.

We sit down with Jonathan Higgs, Jeremy Pritchard, Michael Spearman and Alex Robertshaw for a detailed discussion about Arc‘s eclectic track list, so as to provide you, the listener, with a listening companion for an album which they are, by all accounts, extremely proud of.

Cough Cough

Jeremy: I was worried that it was kind of what people had expected form us. In a way it’s the link between Man Alive and the more mature parts of Arc but, actually, the response was that we’d honed things a bit and that it was more concise. A bit more verse-chorus. But it still sounds complex to most people, I think. We just thought we’d put it out and dip our toes in the water and build a bridge into the next record. The response has been way better than we could have imagined.

Jonathan: There were more elements to ‘Cough Cough’ in the original demos and we stripped it out a bit.

Michael: We wanted it to be a bit more characterful and by that I mean memorable – and wanted it to have hooks. We weren’t necessarily obsessed by that but we wanted to pack a lot in there. I guess it’s the same with people like Xenomania.

Jonathan: But we didn’t want to do much hanging around, we wanted to get to the point quickly and be concise with it as a pop song. We are, more than ever, aware of the radio ‘chop-down’ that has to happen. You don’t want to be too long with something that might be a single. You want to try and make it concise.

Alex: But we really didn’t expect the kind of attention that it got.

Kemosabe

Jonathan: It’s one of the more Man Alive clusterfuck songs in some ways. It’s about turbulent relationships and feeling alone even if you are with somebody. It’s playing off the Lone Ranger and his relationship with Tonto. The fact that he’s the Lone Ranger despite – well, he’s always been Tonto. I always thought that was funny and a bit weird. And I liked the language: Yippeekayay and Hiyo Silver and Kemosabe.

Jeremy: It was the first thing that we wrote after Man Alive. So it’s still in that world, really. Well, lyrically and vocally, at least.

Torso Of The Week

Jonathan: ‘Torso Of The Week’ is inspired by the many exercising folk of Manchester. I was going to the gym a fair amount and I would go at night quite often, sit there on my bike or whatever and obviously your mind wanders because there’s this terrible, terrible music in there. And I was listening to Scott’s Journey to the Antarctic and just looking at these people like zombies on their treadmills. I was thinking how weird it is that in this day and age we come into a room to use our bodies. You have to set time aside to use your body. It got me thinking of the balance of work-life and the lure of the bright lights and some kind of story in my mind of a woman who is struggling to stay on top of things with all the stuff she has to deal with. A treadmill woman just going and going and going. It struck me as a sad struggle in some way.

Jeremy: It’s not meant to be spiteful. It’s sympathetic. All these external pressures that are put on women, especially to be thin. We’re not saying everyone should be unhealthy. We all have to go to the gym from time to time but the title comes from those magazines that put pressure on people to go to the gym.

Jonathan: And also I wrote it being in the gym myself. I’m in the gym, for God’s sake. There’s a torso of the week sitting in there in the magazine and that’s not me.

Duet

Jonathan: Something I have wanted to do for ages is to write an orchestral, sort-of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, quartet song. And it got a bit out of control. We slaved for ages on it. It was originally just orchestral with a far more electronic accompaniment but we really worked hard to try and get the rest of the band involved in it -

Jeremy: That was something we [Jeremy, Michael and Alex] didn’t work on at all before we went into the studio. There was no live arrangement.

Jonathan: But I thought this was the best thing I’d done and that I really didn’t want it to be just me. I thought this could be a single and so everyone else has got to be on this.  So we worked really hard to find a place for the band on it. I think we definitely got there in the end with the arrangement. I’m really, really proud of that tune.

Jeremy: I think we are – us, three [Jeremy, Alex and Michael] – kind of the sides-men on that song. And we’re perfectly happy to be, really, because the strings arrangement is central to it. And if you take that away we’re not really contributing much. The beat is important and that was vital – finding the right thing for Mike to play, a happy back-beat [gestures drumming].

Michael: We’d had the demo and had talked about it a lot but never actually sat down and tried to play it. It was the one I was most nervous about in terms of capturing the right spirit but in the end I think we got it.

Alex: As a whole, I think ‘Duet’ is the most poppy of the new tracks.

Choice Mountain

Jonathan: ‘Choice Mountain’ is essentially about depression and feeling like there’s no point in doing anything or that you’re not going to achieve anything, I guess. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that all animal embryos are the same and then they turn into elephants or dolphins or whatever but there’s that point where they’re all the same and all have the potential to be ‘the thing’. The story is one of those… a fish egg just drifting along and thinking what am I going to be? Am I going to be the dolphin of your dreams? I could be a lion or a whale. But I’m probably not going to. Just drifting along in the darkness.

Jeremy: It’s quite a dense allegory…

Jonathan: A metaphor of… you’re not going to achieve anything and just carry on undeveloped.

“The responsibility of the songwriter [is] putting history in context,” said The Wooden Sky‘s Gavin Gardener when we recently caught up with him in an interview. And that’s just what the Toronto band have achieved on this, their third album, Every Child A Daughter, Every Moon A Sun, as they address the subjects of family life, back yard parties, the drawbacks of touring and full on, righteous love songs. Touching on each element of the band’s life and style, The Wooden Sky have created a tender and accomplished chronicle of their life together, combining joy, sadness, longing and moments of pure musical sublimity.

Here, frontman Gavin Gardner takes us on an insightful journey through the stories behind each of the album’s tracks, so why not put your feet up, listen to album exclusively ahead of its release on Monday, and really the tales behind the sounds.

Child of the Valley

This song I wrote largely about my mother and her family. Trying to get inside the inner-workings of someone else’s family and understand the complexity of those relationships. It was really me trying to work through the idea of forgiveness and how anyone is able to forgive someone else for actions that have life altering consequences.

The recording itself was originally just a studio experiment that Simon and I did in our practice space in about six hours. Then when it came time to record it in the studio we liked the demo so much that we tried to record over the top of it. That was a horrible mistake and one that cost us at least half a day of recording. Finally we scrapped the whole thing and started from scratch. Where we ended up was close to where we started but certainly a more fully realized version.

Angelina

This song I actually wrote on the Ukulele. It was in the middle of a winter tour on the last record and I had flown home from Edmonton to be with my girlfriend as we had 4 or 5 days off. At the time a good friend of hers was very sick and into the last stages of his life. It was around the same time that the earthquakes happened in Haiti and I was looking through photos of the aftermath. I just picked up the Uke and the whole thing just kinda rolled out. It’s amazing to me when that happens, there’s a connection to something else and you become just a vehicle for it. I remember I quickly recorded it on my phone and was driving to meet a friend and listening to it in the car. Listening back now I still find the lyrics to be really powerful, that sense of relief that only comes from knowing that your struggle is over whatever that might mean.

We recorded two different versions of the song. The electric full band version was one of the first songs we arranged as a group for the new record, it was also one of Howard’s favourites from the recording process. I remember being in the studio and really struggling to try and hear how this song was going to live on a record, especially after playing it live so many times. It was a battle with everyone trying to figure out the tones that would best suit the song and work within the framework everyone else was creating. Then suddenly something just clicked and the whole process took off. We came back into the control room to listen and Howard was all smiles. And when we heard the music coming back off the 2″ machine it started to make sense why. I think aside from replacing the vocals there wasn’t much that was added in overdubs and for me this song has some of the best guitar and drum sounds on the record. When it came time to do the tracklisting and we were trying to decide which version of the song to put on the record I believe Howard said “if this version isn’t on there I will kill you” that made the decision a bit easier.

‘The Reprise’ version started as an idea that sort of sprouted from the original demo. Often I’ll make sketches of where I hope it to end up, and quite often they are quite rough. But there were plenty of times that we had sat around and played the song acoustically with Edwin sitting in on violin and there was just something so beautiful about the sound of that riff with such a sparse violin line. We also had this idea of a man choir as a texture for the record and this seemed like the perfect song for it.

In some ways this was one of the hardest songs to record, it was pieced together when not everyone was there and I think that maybe left some feelings of resentment or maybe it was just due to a lack of communication within the band. Making a record, as I’m sure most anyone will tell you, is difficult and time consuming. You also have to balance ego’s while making sure that there are not so many opinions being tossed out that nothing gets done. It’s a tricky one to navigate for everyone and I think in the end it all turned out for the best but it was a reminder just how delicate relationships, even within a band comprised of best friends, can be.

Dancing At My Window

This song was another song that I had been working on for months on and off. I find I’m really good at getting started at working on a song and then putting off finishing it until right before we record it. The original riff was written on a Christmas vacation in Costa Rica and I think I drove my family nuts just playing it over and over again trying to figure out where to go next.

The lyrics came to me sort of in a dream state, for years I had been living in apartment above a kids store when a very “hip” clothing store moved in and started using the backyard for parties and events. I woke up in the middle of the night to music shaking the windows and took refuge in the living room with my guitar. I had been playing that riff everywhere I went and that night I just started singing and the words sort of fell out and into place.

The arrangement itself also went through a lot of different variations. The first stages of writing this record were done at a cottage in Dyers Bay and this was one of the first that we worked through. It was a fairly exciting process because we decided to demo everything as we wrote. It kept changing right up until the day we recorded it, in fact this was one of the few songs that we actually went back and mixed twice. The first go at it really seemed to fall flat and was very disappointing. But I think we learned a lot from our mistake and so when the decision was made to take another crack at it there was no wasting time and it was pretty clear what we were going for.

It Gets Old To Be Alone

I actually wrote this song right after we released “If I don’t come home…”. When that record came out and started getting reviewed and people started to really pick apart the songs and ask me about the lyrics it was quite a shock and I remember really having a hard time talking about it. It also meant for me that I started to become very self-conscious about anything else I was writing. To sort of side step that process I started another band with some friends, we booked a show without having ever practiced and certainly had no songs. I made a plan to write a song before every practice so that we could work through one each time. At the time I think we had about 2 weeks before the show was to happen and this was actually the third song I wrote. It was a really healthy exercise for me as it got me to remember that to really be an effective songwriter you have to be able to turn all that stuff off and really trust yourself. Eventually that group recorded all the songs we had written together… still haven’t managed to finish them yet!

Lyrically I think this song really touches on themes of isolation on tour. It’s a strange world because you’re never really alone and yet you’re sort of alone a lot of the time in that you’re away from your home and your life.

Malibu Rum

This summer and really past year I got really into Jonathan Richman and as such found myself on the hunt for some nylon string guitars. This was the first really Jonathan inspired song, although as I began to write the lyrics it pretty quickly became obvious it was following in my own style. It was written largely around rhythms from a 1960’s drum machine that I acquired a few months before the record and was obsessed with the limitations it put on my writing.

It was probably the last song I wrote for the record and maybe my favourite. The title, although not entirely representative of the song, was inspired by summer cottage getaways with friends (sweet but sometimes with a nasty hang over). I always imagined the feeling of this song to be sort of like a summer vacation gone just a bit wrong. Like a shitty hotel room in Las Vegas where the air conditioning fan is loud and the whole thing is dripping condensation onto the floor. Like finally realizing a dream you’ve always had only to find out it’s not quite what you had imagined it to be. In that way it’s sort of about being a traveling musician, you don’t quite realize what you have to leave behind until the time actually comes.

This song was a lot of fun to record because I had done a pretty in depth demo but we’d never played it together. It was fun to work on it because there was lots of room for interesting percussion (shakers, cow bells, stools etc.) and it was the first time we’d ever used a Theremin on a song… although not likely the last!

Take Me Out

Take me out was the first real unabashed love song that I’d ever written. It was really fun to write and I think the sentiment of it rings true for a lot of new lovers. That feeling of just wanting to be with the other person no matter what it is you do.

Growing up I got my start in playing music from listening to 50’s rock and roll. Mostly Richie Valens, in fact the reason I got my first guitar was that I was obsessed with the movie La Bamba which details the life of Richie Valens and wherein (as most people know) he dies in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. Around the time of my obsession, I’d have to guess that I was 5 or 6, my father was traveling on business out on the West coast. They were all set to return home when weather left many of the planes grounded and their passengers stranded at the Vancouver airport. One of the members of their party also happened to be a Pilot and suggested they charter a small plane and he could fly them out of there. They all agreed, however while up in the air the plane door swings open and my father, who is sitting next to the open door some 2000 feet above the ground. As you might expect visions of the repeated plane crash scenes began to play in his head. When finally they landed (safely…) my Dad, so happy to be alive, returned to his family, a new electric guitar for me in one hand and a diamond ring for my mother in the other.

This song was a real challenge to mix as it’s a style of music that’s been done extremely well (Lennon’s records with Phil Spector come to mind) as well as extremely poorly (elevator music). Once we found the path we wanted to follow it was actually quite easy to get it there, it was just finding that road map that was the hard part.

Photo credit: Danielle Levitt

Time can be a right old cad! One minute you’re casually listening to your Little Earthquakes cassette on the Walkman whilst doing your homework, then the next thing you know: two decades have flown by, as if by the click of a finger. Mind you, Tori Amos doesn’t pause to ponder where the years have gone because she is too busy spending her time being creative. Hot on the heels of last year’s superb return-to-form album, Night of Hunters, she has been fine-tuning her re-scheduled National Theatre musical, The Light Princess, with playwright Sam Adamson, as well as joining forces with the Metropole Orchestra on Gold Dust, a collection of re-recorded songs from her back catalogue. The occasion? Little Earthquakes‘ 20th anniversary.

Although the mile-stone involves her first album, Amos decided to put the spotlight on songs from various stages of her career, with the only albums conspicuously ignored in this regard being To Venus and Back and The Beekeeper (well, there’s nothing from Strange Little Girls, either, but that was a covers record, right?). Here, she tackles Best Fit’s probings about each of the tracks on Gold Dust and, as usual for Amos, she doesn’t shy away from an elaborate answer.

Flavor

Best Fit: The original ‘Flavor’ on Abnormally Attracted to Sin was very much a sonic sibling for ‘Lust’ from To Venus and Back. Do you feel a connection between the two songs?

Amos: Yes. I do. I think that Abnormally Attracted to Sin had a lot of links with that time period, with the Venus time. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

Best Fit: Was it an obvious choice for Gold Dust from the outset?

Amos: ‘Flavor’ stepped forward for all kinds of reasons. I think that she was overlooked on Abnormally a bit. She took me by the hand and said: “I have a message. The American elections are coming up, there are so many flavors and lifestyles that are being marginalised. And it’s hard to know which way the election is going but what we really need to think about, as an open-minded community, is that people are required to pay taxes but they don’t have the same rights as other people – so, some people can get married but others can’t, yet we’re all expected to contribute to the government? That makes no sense to me. So, word up, ‘Flavor’! I felt that it was important to showcase that and also to talk about the idea of “whose God, then, is God?” [a lyric from 'Flavor'], especially with what has happened recently with cultures clashing. Even though America, as a nation, didn’t put out that film, I didn’t put out that film but there are people out there that have an agenda, that want to create terror or anarchy. The idea of [the lyrics] “whose God spread fear? / whose God spread love?” – well, many of the Gods, it seems to me, are spreading fear. So, ‘Flavor’ really said to me: “my time is now” and that’s how she was chosen.

Yes, Anastasia

Best Fit: Let’s talk about your controversial decision to halve ‘Yes, Anastasia’ [the 1994 Under The Pink version was almost 10 minutes long!] Why oh why?

Amos: Because this is a collaboration! And it’s a little self-indulgent to say “sit there, whilst I do this”. This is a collaboration record, ok? They’re not just backing string-players. It’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Jules [the conductor Jules Buckley] is really my dance partner, though, because the orchestra is a creature, you know? They’re a dragon and he’s the brain of the dragon and I’m riding the dragon. It seems as if the other approach would be to come in where the Prokofiev energy starts, the Russians coming over the hill. We liked that idea. That was exciting. But you have to make decisions in context. That song ended an album, that was of its time… it exists! But for the orchestra to wait through all of the first part, I felt that would be a little self-indulgent, for this project. For the live version we have another arrangement again because… well, in the studio, without lights and without the visuals, you have to be on the money and on the mark with your cuts and edits.

The albums have to be done for composition’s sake. And then when you play live, because it is live and there aren’t backing singers covering my bum and there’s not an oxygen tank on stage – although, maybe one should be hooked up to me, but that’s another conversation – then you have to design things. It’s different when I’m with the band and I can look over to Matt [Chamberlain, Amos' long-term live drummer] and he would just know the look of ‘just give me 30 bars’ and we would improvise on the spot. But you don’t jam with an orchestra. So you have to build the improvisations in. And ‘Yes, Anastasia’ has some little extra moments built into it. For quite a few of the songs there will be new live arrangements. ‘Flavor’ has a really wonderful new introduction. I was humming to Philly [John Philip Shenale, the album's arranger] over the phone and he was giggling his head off but then came back with exactly what I hummed over the phone as the melody for the introduction of ‘Flavor’. On record, if you have a 2 or 3 minute introduction, that doesn’t really work for a focused, precise presentation but performing live is a totally different medium and I treat them differently.

Jackie’s Strength

Best Fit: Despite From The Choirgirl Hotel reaching number six in the UK album chart and the single, ‘Spark’, being a top-20 hit, the scheduled release of ‘Jackie’s Strength’ as the follow-up single ended up being cancelled here. What happened?

Amos: I think there was just an administrative change, there were people changing all the time at the record label and that was a very challenging time. It just was. Because the people who really understood the music and who had been there for Little Earthquakes and Under The Pink – like Max Hole – were gone. He’d moved to Universal by then. So I guess when you have people at the record label changing constantly, sometimes decisions would be made out of America for Europe.

Best Fit: Speaking of America, the US also got a full remix CD release for ‘Jackie’s Strength’. Would you ever go down the dance route again?

Amos: I can tell you that, hopefully, as we speak there is a dance remix being done. It’s in the works but I can’t tell you more than that. It’s for this record and it’ll be out by October. That’s the plan, anyway. Because it’s 20 years and because there have been dance remixes, I thought that would need to be represented.

Cloud On My Tongue

Best Fit: What are your memories of writing and recording this song back in 1993?

Amos: I had just come back from Down Under. I had spent some time in that part of the world and I guess it had an influence. I was in New Mexico writing the record and the desert played a big part. The light! This is where Edith Hamilton and Georgia O’Keefe went to paint some of their great works so the light there really did have an effect. And the expansiveness, the sky. It seemed like an endless sky. I wanted to include it on Gold Dust because it is an overlooked piece of music that I have really grown with. I didn’t pick out a lot of groove songs, as you can see, because it wasn’t a band set-up. That wasn’t what the collaboration was. But I felt as if certain songs that were possibly really rhythmic, like ‘God’, ‘Cornflake Girl’, ‘Juarez’, ‘Cruel’… we decided to explore those with the Quartet [Apollon Musagete, with whom Tori toured last year], instead.

Precious Things

Best Fit: ‘Precious Things’ is one of the finest moments on Gold Dust…

Amos:  …well, she stepped forward and really wanted a make-over and was really open to it. It’s been 20 years, she’s secure in who she is and I’ve played her with a band, I’ve played her by myself and then with the Quartet. But it was one of those moments of let’s let her have a big make-over.

Best Fit: It’s one of your biggest and most-loved songs, yet it never ended up as a single. Did you consider releasing it back then?

Amos: The thing is, when people choose singles… I sometimes don’t know why they choose them. I think it’s trying to fit a format, that’s why. The public, however, makes their own decisions, which I think is really exciting and great. Thank god they have their own minds!

Best Fit: The “Guuuuurl” bit in the middle-8 of the song has become a bit iconic in terms of your live performance of it. Fans seem to look forward to your enunciation of it, sort of like the “Handbag” line in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest…

Amos: [laughs] The thing about that with the orchestra… I hope people are going to realise that “Guurl” is going to be different. Because I’m on a count there. And when you’re alone you just come in when you want but when you’re playing it live with other people you have to get it right and you’ve got to be right on the mark. There’s not as much freedom. I’m just focused on hitting that piano line with the orchestra and not falling behind because they don’t stop! [laughs]. They just keep going!

Gold Dust

Best Fit: The lyrics to ‘Gold Dust’ resonate with a sense of hindsight and looking into the future so as to try to avoid regret. Do you have any tried and tested precautions for avoiding regret in life?

Amos: Oh, that’s a very good question. And I don’t know if I have a good answer.

Best Fit: Do you have any regrets that you are prepared to talk about?

Amos: A few. Reacting before thinking things through. You know that saying ‘be smart not right’? I wish that sometimes over the years… even where I have been proven to be right, how I confronted the situation wasn’t right. So yes, you’ve been right but you’ve just left a room in tatters. I think that with confrontation, something that I have learned over the years is to take a step back and try to find out why somebody is in the place that they’re in. I’m sure we have all had that in our lives. The one thing I had to learn that I wish I had known sooner is neutrality. That’s a very powerful place to come from, to be able to be neutral, not to have to respond. Just being able to listen. Not having to have a solution, not having to fix it or defend it, whatever we are talking about – this applies to everything, trust me! Just standing there and not reacting. That’s a powerful place to come from and I’ll tell you, I’m still struggling with it [laughs].

Since the release of their acclaimed second album Wild Go last year, Dark Dark Dark have spent their time touring, making friends and acquaintances on the road, sharing their love of creating music and working on Who Needs Who, the collective’s latest album, released on Monday through Melodic.

Again proving themselves to be the masters of the art of combining time, place and sentiment in each of their carefully considered, delicate tracks, we asked Dark Dark Dark’s leading songstress Nona Marie Invie to tell us about the stories and inspiration behind each of the tracks from Who Needs Who. So read on to find a personal account of the album’s creation and to hear an exclusive stream of the album ahead of its official release next week.

Who Needs Who

I had the melody of the chorus kicking around in my head for months before the rest of the song came together. I remember singing it in the shower in portugal and while riding my bike in minneapolis. It’s a sort of riddle for me. I was thinking a lot about that owl in the Tootsie Pop commerical. How many licks does it take to get to the center? And then cutting through anyway. Who’s doing the pulling and pushing? and what do I have left when I stop playing that game.

Tell Me

This song was really fun to write. It changed drastically from when I first brought it to the band, and it felt like such a nice collaboration. I love to create a dream world and live in it. Or better yet, dream about living in it.

Last Time I Saw Joe

I was having some difficulty writing, so I made up an exercise of picking some of my favorite songs and trying to write them in a new way. This one started with me listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Last Time I Saw Richard” and lead to me thinking about a sweet winter moment with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We really do talk a lot about Roger Miller. and about things that are actually so true, it can be devastating.

Patsy Cline

I wrote this song in some form many years ago on the ukelele. The verses changed quite a bit, but the chorus always stuck with me. An homage to good women gone.

Without You

This is another one that took many forms and changed drastically over the months. It all started with that bass line, a nice slow rambler on the piano. But adding the accordian and the bass totally changed the tone. Along with many different sets of lyrics. I love the reverbed out banjo and accordion.

How It Went Down

This is the only song on the record where I don’t play an instrument. It’s so nice to be able to to just sing and let the simmering cymbals and piano plunks and laid back banjo really sink in. Really puts me in a good groove, this one.

It’s A Secret

This song came from not being able to satisfy someone’s interest in why I was behaving in a certain way. And how I was, at the time, pretty much unaware of my motives. A secret even to myself. The choir vocals at the end are so powerful.

Hear Me

Sometimes it’s hard to get the words out, especially if I feel like they aren’t being received well. The words “hear me” were cycling through my brain constantly around this time. They needed to get out. I love the epic drums and the choir vocals. What started out as a simple song turned into something so lush.

Meet in the Dark

Another track about groping around in the darkness of our minds, unclear of our intentions, trying to figure it out and find our ways. And understanding the most important thing among all the uncertainties and vagueries, something I know to be true is that I’ll always be singing.

The Great Mistake

I started writing this song while I was riding my bike in New Orleans. It just wrote itself by the time I got home. I’m so happy that everyone in the band sang, I love a wall of harmonies.

Who Needs Who will be released on 01 October. Pre-order the album via Melodic now.

Welsh fivepiece Race Horses are not ashamed of their love for pop. With influences varying from Michael Jackson to Soft Cell and Dexy’s Midnight Runners, they’re the type of band who’d rarely utter the regret-tinged words “guilty pleasure”. But alike fellow Welsh acts before them – Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci –  their pop sensibilities come laden with an intellectual seal. Furniture is as much a record inspired by Queen as it is D.H Lawrence and Ken Loach. Their album’s lead track ‘Mates’ perfectly exemplifies the band’s knack for infectious hooks, making an entire freak-pop gem out of stretching just one word.

“We stayed in a youth-hostel with loads of Spanish tourists,” explains the band’s frontman Meilyr Jones. “We were in dorms with families, but it was good because it meant that we would get back to the hostel after a day in the studio and and dance in the disco, listen to the history of pop music, and take some influence of that into the studio the next day.

“We had spoken a lot about R&B and trying to subvert that, use those kinds of sexy rhythms and grooves that get people grinding in clubs, but turn it on it’s head. Do them with real feel, where you can hear the sound of the instruments, the sound of wood and really natural and physical.”

‘Furniture’

“Michael Jackson was an influence on the song, everything comes from the feel of the bass and the rhythm.

“I wrote these words down ‘We are furniture’ when I was out. It seemed that all around me were people in really frustrating sad relationships that had grown stale and restrictive. I thought of the visual idea of people no longer being able to see each other or excite each other, and dissolving into the background, into the wallpaper.”

‘Mates’

“I really liked the origin of the word relating to the act of mating, finding a mate, something primitive. Like furniture in a way, thinking how far people have distanced themselves from what’s natural, and the primitive act of sex.”

‘Nobody’s Son’

“This song sounds like ‘Radio Gaga’. Queen are obviously a big influence. My Dad always says this thing in Welsh “mae o’n fab i rywun”, which means “he’s somebody’s son”. Your enemy is somebody’s son, or husband or father. In the same way people aren’t born monsters, circumstances turn men into monsters, humans are turned into monsters by being made to perform monstrous acts against other humans, or by being mistreated in some way.

“The feeling of detachment from life was strong in the song in the song, also the idea of being disowned. I think it again comes back to unfair, unsustainable pressures put on people to behave a certain way.”

‘Sisters’

“I think there are lots of people who feel like they fall between groups, fall through the gaps of society- a teenager who doesn’t go to university with the rest of his friends, a 36 year old woman who hasn’t married and had children, where all her friends and having children and living a certain life – too disillusioned to feel comfortable spending time with people in their 20s, but far removed from a family life with children to be able to feel comfortable in this environment.

“Someone in a religious or conservative community who is gay but can’t be open about it. So many people that don’t fit in to any of the norm groups that we feel we ought to fit into.”

‘What Am I to Do’

“I think it’s again about the feeling of being trapped and based around the feelings of anxiety and desperation. Also my girlfriend at the time’s dad was a painter, I thought about all the nudes he’d painted, and other things.”

‘Bad Blood’

“The words owe a lot to Ken Loach‘s films. The idea of the fallen woman was mainly what was behind this, and the hard time that women have at the hands of men and an unfair society. Female struggle.I had just read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D”urbevilles, this was an inspiration.

“But i always imagined the song set in Glasgow, or perhaps Port Talbot. I imagined tower blocks or factories and a woman who ‘has brought shame upon herself’.”

‘My Year Abroad’

“It felt seedy and i wanted to sing from the point of view of a businessman on a trip to Tokyo, the grim reality not the glamourisation of excess, using things and people, cheap thrills. I dressed up in a suit to sing this one, it felt really restrictive, like and act of bondage, I think it helped. Dress was a big part and help to me in the studio and would help put me in the mood needed for the song, I enjoyed undressing to do vocals for some songs. Our engineer Matt had to draw the curtains in the control room if I would strip off, he didn’t want to see me naked, fair enough!

“Enter The Void, the Gaspar Noe film was the biggest influence on the words and feeling of the song. I called the song’Enter the void for a while. I really wanted to capture that feeling of distortion of the mind, of the emptiness and of drugs, prostitution, money, and business.”

‘See No Green’

“This song is about objectification. It is about the loss of real freedom, real sexuality and its replacement with fake counterfeit sexuality and behaviour.

“It’s about women behaving as they think they should behave/ as men want them to behave, it is about pornography and the way it dictates how women and men feel they should be. People’s expectations of themselves and each other mean that no-one ends up behaving as they really want to behave. Society is full of self-abuse. And I tried to capture this. ‘I’m just a hotel, I’m just a place you stay’ the empty functional.

“Women giving into men through false sexualisation and men giving into women through being domesticated. It’s all in D.H Lawrence.”

‘Old And New’

“I suppose the passing of time- things gone and things to come in their place, the never-ending cycle!”

Furniture is released 10 September on Stolen Recordings / [PIAS] Recordings.

Today we’re thrilled to be able to offer up an exclusive stream and track-by-track guide to Look Out Mama, the new album by Hurray For The Riff Raff – the musical alias of one Alynda Lee Segarra. In certain respects, the ten tracks here are trad-country through and through, but with Andrija Tokic in the production seat (also responsible for Alabama Shakes album) and Segarra’s desperate throaty croon at the fore, Look Out Mama is delightfully authentic and consistently rewarding.

Read Alynda Lee Segarra’s personal commentary and enjoy Look Out Mama in full, below.

1. Little Black Star
This is a tune I learned from a John Jacob Niles recording, probably a children’s rhyme since he was fond of those. I changed it to have a swamp pop feel and we had a great time layering this in the studio. A lot of hand claps, foot stomps and “ooh wops” It’s about time we had a “feel good” jam, y’know?

2. Look Out Mama
Wow, two happy songs in a row! A big step for me. We were gonna have Sam Doores do double duty in the studio and play drums, then overlay a piano part. But a fella by the name of David Grant came in and layed down a Levon Helm feel on the drums. It really makes this recording for me! We did it all live, probably two takes at most. I was so happy with it, though I have been working on my yodel since then.

3. Ramblin’ Gal
I wrote this tune after listening to a Elephant Micah song called “Wild Goose Chase” He wrote it as a response to the Hazel Dickens song “Ramblin’ Woman”, and that song was in response to “Ramblin’ Man” by Hank Williams. I guess I wanted to continue the conversation through song, to hear the musician’s experience of travel from all different perspectives. I wrote it from more of a place that I was at before I found a path as a musician, I felt restless and lost. Wondering if i’d ever find a “home” or feel at least a little satisfied with where I was. Here it is to add to the game of telephone.

4. What’s Wrong With Me?
Sometimes you fuck up, and you gotta write a song about it. What better feel than a soul song for thinking you might lose it all? Dan Cutler and Sam Doores sing great backups on this one.

5. Ode to John and Yoko
I am obviously a huge John Lennon fan. I am inspired by him not only as a songwriter and musician but as a very opinionated person who believed in world wide unity and peace. I really respect Yoko Ono as a feminist and an artist. I wanted to write a song that told the love story about John and Yoko and about what I got from their work together. Though it tells a story, I am more interested in the effect I believe they had on American consciousness and the impact they’ve had on younger generations. I thought that through out time there has been too much negative conversation about the two together, they deserved a song about the good they tried to put out into the world. So this is kind of a thank you and my way of speaking to a hero that I will never get to meet.

6. Lake of Fire
My apocalyptic surf love song. I loved writing this song, and recording it was that more fun. That’s me on the guitar solo, and Yosi killin’ it on the drums!

7. RIley
Poor Riley Downing (of our longtime tour mates Sam Doores and the Tumbleweeds), this is not about him but I did borrow his first name. It’s such a poetic name, I hope he doesn’t get pinned for this one cause he’s a good man!

8. Go Out on the Road
I wrote this one long ago and played it with my old band Sundown Songs. We got to get real classic country in the studio with this one and we thought a lot about Patsy Cline production.

9. Born to Win (Pt. 1)
Part two coming someday! This is kind of an anthem, i wrote it with a lot of old friends in mind. Some aren’t around anymore, but they lived their lives on the streets and on the road and they brought me up and took care of me. It’s my song for all of those people, wherever they may be.

10. Something’s Wrong
Last but not least, we recorded this one on Andrija Tokic’s front porch during a thunderstorm and tornado warning. So there’s a lot of rain on this track. It’s my song for New Orleans, kind of a lullaby that was written after a very dark and traumatic period where there was a lot of violence in my community. I felt very weak and helpless, like there was nothing i could do to help anyone who was feeling so much grief. So i wrote this one, we recorded it on our first day in the studio and right when we finished a tornado siren blew (in key with the song!) and the power went out. We took it as a good sign.

Hurray For The Riff Raff, Look Out Mama is out now via Loose Music. Catch the band live on tour across the following dates:

August
30 – GLASGOW, Pivo Pivo
31 – NEWCASTLE, Central Bar

September
01 – SWANSEA, The Chattery
02 – END OF THE ROAD FESTIVAL
04 – NOTTINGHAM, Glee Club
05 – SHEFFIELD, Greystones
06 – MANCHESTER, Night & Day
07 – NORWICH, Arts Centre
09 – WINCHESTER, The Railway (SXSC)
10 – LONDON, Borderline
11 – BRIGHTON, Green Door Store

Bristol’s perhaps most understated gem of eccentricity Minotaur Shock returns from a four-year break with perhaps his most diverse and assorted record to date. Orchard bears the marks of influence from the likes of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and shares the same sonic experimentation, warping and shape-shifting throughout its nine-track entirety.

The album drops next Monday (20th August) on Manchester’s Melodic Records, the label where it all began for the musician. But before then, you can get stuck in to a rather comprehensive track-by-track rundown of the release in question below:

‘Janet’

This is named after a boat I stayed on with some dear friends. We hung out in Norfolk, recording sounds, drinking and watching Steel Dawn. Steel Dawn is the best Swayze film – it’s the one where he looks like MGMT on the cover. Check it out if you get a chance. It’s a bit like Mad Max, but better. Released in the same year as Dirty Dancing but it’s like a totally different Swayze.

‘Janet’ was meant to be an aural representation of the journey to the boat – I had this grandiose plan to make an album that consisted of just two long tracks. I guess I was listening to a lot of Mike Oldfield and decided that people didn’t make those kinds of records anymore. This was back before his performance at the Boyle thing made him a hit with the kids again. I didn’t get further than this track in terms of making a concept album. The first section of the track focuses on the first part of the journey (my house>M4>London), then the second section (3.40) was the bit from London>A11, and there was a long bit where we were stuck on the A11, behind a camper van that had loads of amazing stickers on the back. The mallet instruments in the tune are the soundtrack to all of these stickers. The final section was when we actually went out on the boat.

In terms of instruments and stuff, the track was written at home on my laptop. I usually use fake instruments when I’m writing and then work out how to play them afterwards, so I think I used drum samples originally. All of the acoustic guitars were lazily recorded in my bedroom, because I wanted to get a lot of air in there. You can hear me breathing all over the guitar tracks at the end, but that’s totally intentional. In fact, everything that you hear that sounds a bit wrong is intentional.

I was fascinated by Oval’s Oh while I was writing this album; I loved the strange fake/real string instruments he was using. So there are quite a lot of string-modelled synthesizer tracks on Orchard. I liked the idea of mixing these with real ones. I had this 10-string cuatro in the loft so I got that down too.

Once I had created the track with fake drums, violin, piano and xylophone, I went into a studio (Toybox, in Bristol) and played the fake bits on real instruments. My friend James from the excellent Iskra String Quartet played the violin. He then emailed it back to me, which is one of the wonders of the modern age.

There are nods to Arvo Pärt, Tortoise and Virginia Astley in here. I think this is my favourite track on the album.

 ’Ocean Swell’

When I ‘practice’ the drums, which is rare, because I do it in my garage and I am over-sensitive about annoying my neighbours, I usually either drum along to tracks on my headphones or just try and imagine I’m playing in other bands. I never really learnt how to drum properly, so technically I’m awful and my wrists hurt. Ocean Swell came out of me trying to play Photek’s Hidden Camera. My pal Dom was round so we set up a microphone in the garage and just recorded the drums without really thinking about it.

I found the raw drum track on my hard drive a few weeks later, and after a bit of EQing, the actual sound was pretty good. I don’t really understand how things like that work, but the way the cymbals get squashed when they are squeezing into the mic along with the kick does it for me. So I built the rest of the track around it.

I wanted to keep the boat theme going; this one was about the motion of a boat and seasickness. The main melody is a prepared piano, and there are quite a few atonal clonks in there. There is a one-take, one-finger synth bassline towards the end that is not something I’d normally do – I’m crap at basslines and always feel like a charlatan. A bass faker. So keep an ear out for that one. And the choral vowel sounds. My favourite track, this.

 ’Through the Pupils of Goats’

I’m still not sure what I think about goats. They are amusing, don’t get me wrong, but they are so sinister and they eat anything. I don’t really trust anything or anyone that consumes with no discernment. So this one was me imagining what went on in a goat’s head. I decided that although they look like they’re a bit manic, they are actually really calm and know what they’re doing. There are two levels to a goat’s psyche, and I attempted to capture both in this track. The initial layer is the act they act; quite dense and semi-psychedelic; a bit scatty and confusing. The second part of the track is the soundtrack to what a goat really thinks. Please understand that this is my interpretation – it is not grounded in any medical or vetinary research. I would love to hear other musician’s ideas about what a goat thinks.

Again, everything was recorded at home except the drums. Oh, and the bass guitar. I remember recording the drums to the first section in front of a massive plate reverb, and they sounded amazing. Really powerful. Unfortunately I couldn’t get them to sound like that in the mix; it’s totally different when you feel the vibrations in your body – both in your ears and through your arms and legs as you whack them.

Another thing, a few weeks ago the album appeared on the internet on some file sharing/torrent site (which is, of course, flattering). The problem was, they’d listed it under ‘Trip Hop’ as the genre. I was outraged and drafted a letter to my local MP. It was then that I heard this track, and realised that the opening section was pretty much actually trip hop. I can only apologise for this; it was unintentional. Well, admittedly I did want to find a synth that sounded like Air for the end section, but those first Air EPs totally stand up. They’re not trip hop.

This is the first track on the album that uses an acoustic steel or nylon guitar as the main melodic instrument. I did this because you don’t hear it much nowadays. I treated the acoustic guitar like a synth preset; instead of spending ages programming a synth sound, I’d just reach for the guitar, knowing full well the baggage that comes with it and the limitations of the sound. I’m not the most gifted of guitarists, so there’s nothing complicated there, just a straight up simple melody played on a straight up simple instrument without much processing. Why not, huh?

The bass was recorded in Toybox; the wonderful engineer Ali was able to get the Serge-ness of the bass sound just right. I played some and he played some and it was all great. Until he told me that it wasn’t a million miles away from Girls And Boys by Blur, which soured things somewhat. The drums at the end are just hat, snare and kick, set up in a live room. Something so aesthetically pleasing about that. I think that’s why it’s my favourite track on Orchard.

 ’Too Big To Quit’

My favourite track on the album, this was written and recorded in about 25 mins, just after I’d finished another track and was about to go and put the kettle on and have a celebratory cup of tea. I started playing over this loop that was on my computer, and then just hit record and played the melody a couple of times on various guitars (and the cuatro). I left all the takes in there, added some fake flute and some electronic drum things, and didn’t do anything else with it. I actually thought it was ridiculous and had no intention of putting it on the album. But someone said they liked it and I am very easily led so I asked another lovely pal (Emily) to re-play the flute and stuck it on the album.

From experience, I knew that whatever I did on this album, reviewers would mention folktronica. So I thought, sod it, I’m going to do something really folky; maybe that’s what the world needs right now. Maybe it is, I don’t know. But it’s only 2 mins long, right?

 ’Westonbirt’

This tune is probably the oldest on the record, but it’s still my favourite – it has been knocking about in various incarnations for a while. I could never get the drums right – I’ve tried live drums, crazy breaks, no drums etc. But one day I was listening to some Todd Edwards and I wondered what it would sound like with that kind of 2-step beat. So I tried it out and the rest is ‘history’.

I thought that this was the most electronic track on the album, but there are a lot more live instruments in there than I remembered. I borrowed a slide guitar (well, it was basically a plank with strings and a pickup), so that’s on here, and I used the Tiersen piano (not sure what they’re really called, but you know what I mean).

Westonbirt arboretum is a lovely place, and recommended if you like trees. I think my friends had all gone to see Erasure at the arboretum the night I mixed this track.

 ’Lending Library’

This track is ridiculously complicated (for me). I have no idea what I was doing. Everything was recorded at home, but the drums are live. They were recorded with those massive rods instead of sticks, for all you drumstick gossip fans.

I spent hours chopping up samples for this, and the whole thing got a bit dense, so I wanted some sort of simple hook for the first section – hence the 3-notes-up, 3-notes-down melody. The second section came out of me trying to perform this track live once; I never really knew what to do for the second half, but I was playing it in a pub somewhere and the end bit just kind of looped – I started playing that rhythm on the drums and wanted to keep it going as long as possible. So I just looped it for ages. When I got home I started building up the marimbas etc and trying different samples and chimes out.

I was a bit worried that the kind of power chord bits make the whole thing a bit silly, but now I’m ok with that. If I had the balls I would have made the end bit go on twice as long, maybe I’ll just do that live. My wrists would hurt though, so maybe not. Hmm. Ah well, this track is definitely my favourite on the record.

The title refers to the library service; around the time it was written, there was a lot in the press about library closures. I spent a lot of time in libraries in when I was younger, and learned so much about different types of music by simply borrowing any CDs that I liked the look of. We didn’t really have much of an internet back then, and I guess youngsters now have many more opportunities to discover stuff than I did, but the very idea of libraries being extinct fills me with dread.

‘Quint’

Named after Robert Shaw’s character in Jaws, I wanted to do two things with this track. Firstly, I wanted it to sound like it could almost be a band playing it, and secondly I wanted to base the whole thing on using just 2 notes.

The drums were recorded in my garage with Dom’s help again. I loved this little rhythm loop – there’s something slightly wonky about it, but I can’t quite work out what it is, and I loved the groove of it. Again, we’ve got a nylon string guitar as the main melody. Think I was trying to get a bit Morricone there.

Emily played the clarinet on this one, and James did the violin. I added the piano and ride cymbal in the studio – I wanted that to be a bit like Michael Nyman, but just really brief. I like this track; it just does what it does with no messing about. It’s my favourite.

‘Saundersfoot’

Another track that was written before the majority of the others. This one is very apt for this year, featuring various sports sounds as percussion. Squint your ears and you’ll hear the unmistakeable sounds of Wimbledon, snooker balls and other sporty delights.

Saundersfoot is a little place near Tenby in Pembrokeshire, and I used to go on holiday there when I was little. I visited recently and remembered just how nice it was round there.

There are no live instruments on this track; I think it’s the only track on the album that is all ‘in the box’. Oh hang on; I’m forgetting the main melody, that’s done on some chime bars that I recorded at home, so forget that bit.

The chord change at 4mins really bothers me in this track – does it sound out of tune to you? Probably wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t mentioned it right? Never mind, too late to do anything about it now, it’s still my favourite track.

 ‘Adventure Orchard’

Ah, the final track. Definitely my favourite on the album. Another one where I knew exactly what I wanted it to sound like before I recorded it (the other ones I just make up as I go along).

I’m pretty interested in the idea of nostalgia in music, and what makes electronic music ‘warm’. It’s usually when it refers back to other stuff right? I guess that’s the same with most pop music. I get mildly annoyed with people who slag off modern pop music but are happy to rave about something made in 2012 using old analogue synths designed to sound like it was recorded by Conny Plank in 72. Doesn’t make much sense to me. But equally I’m quite happy to push some of those nostalgia buttons if I feel that it gives the track the right kind of warmth.

Which is why this track opens with the kind of synth that you’d hear in 70s TV science documentaries, and has a Detroit bassline, but the drums and percussion are made entirely out of unintended digital glitch with a bit of reverb on. And there are balls-out acoustic guitars all over it. It was really hard not to just stick a TR-505 in this track and make the drums a bit more meaty, but I’m really glad I didn’t. I like they way it never kicks in.

I was originally going to call the album Adventure Orchard, but that’s just ridiculously cheesy. It’s ok for one track though.

Pre-order the album here.

Evening Hymns are back, making a very welcome return after what feels like a lengthy absence. The Toronto based bands last album, the sublime Spirit Guides dropped back in 2009, with the following years proving to be emotionally turbulent for leading man and chief songwriter Jonas Bonnetta.

The new record Spectral Dusk presents a moving and intensely personal meditation on these past few years, on life, family and Bonnetta’s late father. Here he takes us through some of the memories, moments and emotions that inspired the tracks on the record.

Find out about the release information for Spectral Dusk by clicking here. 

Intro

The record opens with a field recording made in a place called The Burn which is where my dad shot his first deer. It’s north of Mazinaw Lake in Ontario. My brother Jake and I cross-country skied deep into the woods and made this recording last February. The snow was over our knees.

Arrows

I began writing this song while on a train from France to England on our first tour of Europe. Sylvie was asleep and I was thinking about where I was at in dealing with losing my father. Searching the reflection in the glass of the train window for answers, I tried to create something intimate sounding in mono to have it explode and open the record into stereo halfway through the track. Still like the idea of “singing hymns to call someone in” as a practice…

Family Tree

I’ve often felt obligated to associate with people in my life based on traditional family structure. This is about severing a lot of those dysfunctional relationships.

You and Jake

This is one of the first songs that I wrote for Spectral Dusk and it was a turning point for deciding how personal I wanted to get with this record. Jake is my younger brother and Dad and him had a pretty amazing relationship. After Dad passed away, I went through a bunch of his stuff and found all these receipts he had kept from coffee shops and breakfast places and I had these strong images of him and Jake going out for coffee or breakfast before going to work on the sawmill for the day. The two of them always scheming a trip north to the moose hunting camp or dreaming of something. I’ve liked this idea of Dad still being here guiding me by setting a precedent in how he lived his own life. As if although he is gone, he is still there teaching me how to be a better man.

Cabin In The Burn

I wrote this song at my cottage a few winters ago. I drove up by myself for a few nights of recording in the dead of winter. I packed up every piece of musical equipment I owned and some food and whiskey and got up there in the early evening. I set up everything, after carrying my gear through waist deep snow down to the cottage on the lake. It’s not really setup for winter living. I got the furnace going and cooked some food and started to record. Out of nowhere the cottage began to shake and howl and I opened all the curtains to see a massive winter storm blow in off the lake. It was intense. Knocked out the hydro, the furnace, etc. I eventually called an older man who lives down the lake to see when he thought the hydro would be back up and running. He said probably not for at least a day. I guess they had just got it going again, after a few days without electricity, just before I had got up there that evening. With the wind howling and no heat the cottage instantly froze up and I had no choice but to pack up and head for home through one of the snowiest winter drives of my life. I started this song that night in the cottage and the rest of that night inspired a lot of the imagery in the song.

Asleep In The Pews

Actually fell asleep in the highest pew in the church while watching a friend play music, thinking of how we relate to one another. How sadness is a hard thing to explain to people sometimes. Having someone you’re close to die is like entering into a club or being passed a secret. I had certain things reveal themselves to me that I never could’ve understood before.

Spirit In The Sky

This song was written as an intro into ‘Irving Lake Access Road’. I wrote a big list of things I related to Dad. Images of us as kids playing with him. Swimming, hiking, fishing. Just meditated on my youth with brothers. The idea was for the song to be dreamlike and have the long string piece wash in and take it away. To carry it out to sea.

Irving Lake Access Road

This is the road that leads through The Burn. It’s a massive forest that was destroyed in a huge fire in the last century and then replanted eventually. I’ve spent a lot of my youth roaming those logging roads with my Dad and friends. In his last few years when he was still able to drive, Dad would go out here on the weekends with his coffee and his pipe and just drive the roads looking for deer.

Song To Sleep To

I wrote this many years ago while Dad was still alive. It was supposed to be like a spell or something, that I could play and heal him. We were almost finished making the record when I remembered it and played it for James in the studio while we were mixing. We just turned microphones on and captured it really quick. Still remember being hunched over my grand piano in my old dusty studio in Peterborough, Ontario writing that song when we were first trying to get used to the idea of losing Dad so many years ago.

Moon River

Listening to the original ‘Moon River’ one night in my old apartment, it’s sentimentality and melancholy totally killed me. I was thinking of original love. True love. How sad yet romantic it is to die with the one you love. How much my parents were in love. Mom taking care of him. It’s one of the most beautiful things in the world. Hoping that I get to die with the one I love.

Spectral Dusk

This was the last song we recorded during the initial session up in Perth. Everyone lying on the floor in the dark. We saved this song for last as it was just me and a guitar. All the lights out. The wood stove giving us a bit of orange light across the floor. Everyone on their backs with glasses of whiskey. You can hear an ice cube crack in someone’s tumbler about 20 seconds into the song. Recorded about half a dozen takes and then that was it, a bunch of hugs and some tears and then more whiskey.

The record finishes with another field recording from The Burn. You can hear Jake and I hollering off this ridge about a kilometre away. We had hiked away from the recorder and way up on a cliff to have a can of Dad’s favourite beer and to smoke the pipe tobacco he always did. We lit a bonfire and talked before we went back to the recorder. It wasn’t until weeks later when I listened through to the whole recording we made that day that I heard that faint yelling. Seemed fitting that we would leave it in there.

As Maximo Park prepare to unleash latest single ‘The Undercurrents’ from their fourth album, The National Health, leading man Paul Smith walks us through the thought processes behind each track on the album, and the poignant lyrics that run throughout.

When I Was Wild

“In a shadow world/Running parallel/The present follows me/At first it’s hard to tell”

This song deals with the notion that there are (at least) two possible ways to live each moment or deal with a situation. It starts the album on a questioning note, with the narrator wondering if they have made the right choices especially in their wilder moments.

The National Health

“Serendipity took a hold of me/Fellini couldn’t have dreamt of this”

I thought it would be fun to drop a few names in this song – Houdini is mentioned in the first bridge and Federico Fellini, the Italian director known for his dream-sequences, appears in the second bridge. Lyrically, these famous names lighten the mood in a fairly aggressive number about finding yourself adrift in a sickly nation.

Hips And Lips

“Your face will fall/But let’s try to keep it together/The blade withdraws/Before the knot starts to sever”

There’s a moment in every argument where you have the choice to take a step back or whether to say/do something that will cause irreparable damage to the relationship – this is about that decisive point!

The Undercurrents

“Tyres rush through/Rainwater fresh/Sounds like a shell/Held to an ear/Same as the house where I was raised/Safe in a haven single-glazed”

I like to write descriptive parts to all of the songs so the listener can get a sense of place within the song and these words had a nice ring to them. When I was a kid I listened to the traffic outside as it drove past in the rain.

Write This Down

“Stealing post-punk posters’From your sister’s room/Gossamer voices rising from speakers/In a Prefabricated plume’

When we recorded this song, at Rockfield Studio in Wales, we extended the middle eight at the last minute so the second two lines were a last-minute addition. I wanted to have some details about the disastrous summer romance outlined in the rest of the song and since this part was quite dreamy I felt I could be quite elaborate with a lyric about listening to Prefab Sprout in a teenage bedroom and nicking Joy Division posters.

Reluctant Love

“We lie horizontal, holding hands/And the symmetry is all too clear”

Again, this painted a picture in my mind of two lovers both contemplating their relationship, simultaneously.

Until The Earth Would Open

“We could drive until the earth would open/Take me to the verge of England’s ocean/Tonight suggests so much.”

I wanted to write an English version of the classic American driving song, only there are less wide open spaces in this country so the obvious alternative is the coast, which feels like the end of the world sometimes.

Banlieue

“Pixellated punishment/Desire’s the only crime/The calmness of the pack/Whose power is in decline/These violent dreams are nothing new/Don’t think that she won’t leave you”

This song is partially about young women reclaiming power from male gang members who abuse them and record their vile acts on mobile phones. I read an article about a particular situation in the French suburbs where some girls felt they would be part of the gang if they submitted to peer pressure, but the biggest act of refusal, ultimately, became their unwillingness to remain subservient and loyal to their abusers.

This Is What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted

“Commitment never seemed like a risk/But that’s the way it is.

I wrote this because commitment sometimes seems like the safest option and stability can appear staid and dull! However, I’ve come to realise that it’s a constant struggle that is somehow very satisfying to maintain and feels very worthwhile, like a strange balancing act.

Wolf Among Men

“Homo homini lupus est”

I thought it would be funny to have a bit of Latin in the middle eight of this song – it has its own musicality that fitted with Dunc’s guitar line. It comes from a quote by Thomas Hobbes – “Man is a wolf among his fellow men” that I had in my notebook. His theory (from 1651) that mankind was inherently selfish was based on lines from a play by the Roman playwright, Plautus, and still holds true today – we are our own worst enemies at times.

Take Me Home

“And the moon is hidden tonight/By a swab of cotton sodden with light/And this is our street corner/Where no-one else has kissed goodnight”

I like the idea of mixing slightly complex, poetic phrases with very simple sentiments and emotions- it’s a fine balance and I’m sure I teeter over the edge one way or the other in some people’s opinion! Again, the first phrase sprang out from my notebook, detailing a clouded moon, and it seemed like a good opening line that sets the scene. The second phrase is something I hope listeners will relate to – that certain place that lingers in the memory after a romantic moment.

Unfamiliar Places

“Don’t be scared of the life you’re making./Making decisions on your own.”

A lot of the songs on this record are about encouraging someone to make a change in their own life, whether it’s the narrator (me!) or addressing someone else. It is scary to make crucial decisions and it’s easy to put things off, but I think it makes you feel more helpless than you need to be, generally-speaking. This song is about being away from someone and they keep popping up in your mind making you wonder how they’re doing.

Waves Of Fear

“High company/Means nothing to me/I’ve cleansed myself of shame/I’m second-class ingrained.”

I’m sick of hierarchies and class systems and people feeling like they’re inherently better than someone else because of their upbringing. I’m proud of who I am and my background, but that gives me no sense of superiority (or inferiority). This song is about overcoming your fears and woes, feeling stronger instead of apathetic.

New single ‘The Undercurrents’ will be released on 20 August through V2.

Back in 2010 Oh! Canada fell in love with the short, snappy jangle-punk of Apollo Ghosts‘ sophomore record Mount Benson, naming it as one of the years best Canadian releases. Following on from releasing numerous singles, one off collaborations and a bookmark last year, the band are ready to unleash their follow-up album Landmark, a record that bears witness to the fact that quietly and assuredly, they have developed into one of the finest bands in Canada.

We caught up with frontman Adrian Teacher to talk about Landmark, the joy of being a “seasonal” band and what the future holds for Apollo Ghosts, and to tell the stories behind the tracks on the album.

Landmark is your debut with You’ve Changed Records. It seems like a natural fit (there are even references to fellow You’ve Changed artist Shotgun Jimmie on the album) but how did the collaboration come about?

Adrian: It was actually really easy. It’s funny to see stuff pop up like, “Apollo Ghosts sign to You’ve Changed records” when in fact nothing has been signed. There were no papers or fountain pens. I got to know Steve last summer while I was living in Sackville, New Brunswick. A summer bro-mance if you will. I played some drums for him in a jam-space. We had a few beers. I asked him if he’d be interested in putting out a future Ghosts record and he seemed really into it. You’ve Changed is no paperwork and no bullshit. Ideas and promises are made verbally, informally and honestly. We’re honored to be associated with such great bands on the label.

Your previous records had a very particular geography – with Hastings Sunrise and Mount Benson littered with references to your home town now and while you were growing up. Landmark too has a definite sense of home, yet much of it was written while you were away in Sackville. Do you feel that being away from home was a factor that influenced the writing of the record?

It influenced it a bit, but ultimately you can’t escape yourself. As my Dad likes to say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” The word ‘landmark’ has multiple connotations in my mind. It’s something to lookout for when you’re lost. Even the word itself seems solid when you say it. The apartment building I’m living in right now is named ‘Landmark’… it’s built like a brick shit house; in fact, it withstood the leaky condo crisis of the 1990s here in B.C.

Your live shows have built quite the reputation – from cape wearing to crowd surfing and beyond, you really seem to have a great time and many of the songs on the record seem to have a real joy about being in a band. What do you enjoy the most, playing live, or the process of putting records together?

We definitely enjoy both aspects equally. We’re a seasonal/regional band though, and we generally hibernate for part of the year to work on new material. I would say we don’t play live on a regular basis – it’s deliberate and keeps it special for us. It’s also impossible for us to tour for long periods or over great distances. I think that’s why we really pop when we do get the chance to play live – it’s exciting and very exhilarating to get up in front of a sympathetic audience! I still can’t believe people come and see us play, to be honest…

Since Mount Benson, you have released 7”s, a book with an EP bookmark, a Christmas single with a wrestler, a Valentines day single using an erotic letter from James Joyce to his future wife and a collaboration with fellow Vancouverite Dirty Beaches. What can we expect next from you and Apollo Ghosts?

There will be a new split 7″ coming up this fall as well as a new EP. After that I’d like to work on a larger project; hopefully something super hi-fi over a long period of time. It’s something I’ve never done. Jarrett plays in a band called Korean Gut and Jay has been playing with Lost Lovers Brigade and Collapsing Opposites so I’m sure they’re going to be busy too.

Track by Track

What are your Influences?

A call to arms, raise the trumpets and fire the cannons, will the kids pogo? Will they tear apart the room while you’re playing? Lazy rock journalism and the ultimate question. Are you what you eat? Bowie’s coke habit – guitars soar like twin eagles and friends reunite for an evening quickie.

American Joint

‘American Joint’ is an ode to the punk-rock kids of Bellingham, queer power, house parties, Pacific Northwest skinny dipping, train hopping… you know? A summer jam.

I’m in Love With the USA

Jesse Taylor, who runs Nite Prison and plays in Twin Crystals/Shearing Pinx, did a wikkid sax blowout near the end. Takes it across the border illegally.

Why Can’t I be the Man on Stage?

Originally a lot jazzier….Kicks a bit more with the disco beat. Jarrett keeps threatening to make a video of this one.

Violet Margaret

A woman named Violet fell in love with my grandmother in the 1930s… After my grandmother married Ernest in 1940, Violet arrived at the door one day with a suitcase – a wedding gift. The suitcase was monogrammed Violet Margaret. I felt incredibly sad for her and for the times she had to live in.

So Much Better When You’re Gone

Initially a poppy song, written during the Hastings Sunrise LP sessions and then shit-canned. It later got reworked into one of the saddest songs we’ve ever put out. We don’t even like playing it at practice!

Landmark

The guitar solo was written by Jay and we used a lot of tape echo. It still sends shivers up my spine every time I hear it – like early U2 Edge. I was listening to a lot of The Cure when I wrote this. I think Robert Smith gives very polite interviews.

Weekend Fantasy

The title is lifted from something Robert Pollard said in an interview…he was talking about doing rudimentary science experiments for his grade 4 class…and living a “weekend fantasy” with his band, Guided by Voices. Probably the funnest song to play live from the record.

Day of Glory

We generally start the set with this song since it’s hard to fuck-up.

For What They Do, They Do

I think of all the songs I’ve ever recorded myself, I’m most happy with the sound on this song. My friend Jay helped me with the vocals.

Paralysis of My Long Clerkship

Lyrically, this song is an homage to The Winter Of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck – a major influence on this record? I’m not sure. I’m not sure about any of these.

I Followed the Rules and I Got Everything

There is a drummer named Zippy (The Dils, DOA, Art Bergmann) in our jam-space. That’s all I gotta say.

Guitar Brother

The ultimate bro-down. Snap the beer rings and grab another one. Slam shoulders, hit the overdrive pedal. Pretend like you’re playing in front of millions.

Newcastle

Go home? Stay here. Go home? Stay here. Go home? Stay here.

Will You Forget Me

I hope this person doesn’t forget me. I really don’t. What will I do if that happens? Go home? Stay here? What would I do? Is this over?

Landmark is released through You’ve Changed Records in Canada on 15 May and can be ordered directly from the bands website.

Not one to hang around, Spencer Krug’s Moonface project has made a swift return following the release of first full length,the fabulously titled Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped back in August 2011.

With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery is a collaborative project between Krug and Finnish band Siinai, the two teams having come into contact a few years back when a previous incarnation of the group toured with Krug’s other project, Wolf Parade. A union was formed, and so when Siinai declared they were searching for a vocalist to come aboard and record an album, Krug stepped up to the plate. Recorded in Helsinki in the latter part of 2011 and the start of the new year, this collaborative effort turned into a dark and yearning, bittersweet concoction with walls of guitars flooding every corner, and Krug’s unmistakable vocal leading the charge.

Listen below, and read on to find out what Siinai’s Risto Joensuu has to say about each of the tracks.

Heartbreaking Bravery

“This was the first track we heard Spencers vocals on. I think, when we [Siinai] heard this, we knew that this was going to be unique and fun project.”

Yesterday’s Fire

“This song changed a lot from the early demos we sent to Spencer. When we were in studio we wanted it more slow and dirty, so we added some feedback. It did the trick.”

Shitty City

“Spencer had this little song and we wanted to extend it. In the end we didnt make it as long at some points as we felt it should be. Probably a good idea.”

Quickfire I Tried

“When you are recording, you always need some new instruments or things you want to try out. This time they were congas. Why not?”

I’m Not The Phoenix

“Theres some Turkish vibe with the synth here. I love 70′s Turkish rock.”

10,000 Scorpions

“This is one of the jams we had in the studio. There was plenty of jamming and it felt right to cut few of them to the record.”

Faraway Lightning

“This song started out as a jam too. Spencer came up with this great dark story and this song became one of my favorite songs on the record.”

Headed For The Door

“This was one of the first songs everyone felt had something special in it. It’s some kind of dark and dramatic anthem. I think Spencer read the letter in the end of the song during the night when everyone else had gone to sleep into a talkback mic in the monitoring room.”

Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips

“Nice and simple pop song. And short by both Siinai and Moonface standards.”

Lay Your Cheek On Down

“By the end of our studio session, we felt we needed one more new song, and before lunch we cut this track, actually in just a few hours. Matti had the chords and Spencer had this poem that fit perfectly. Later we added some piano and it became quite an emotional way to end the record. And we made it to lunch just in time.”

With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery will be released through Jagjaguwar on 16 April, and catch them live on 29 May at London’s Cargo.

Denmark’s Sleep Party People are set to release their highly anticipated second album We Were Drifting On A Sad Song on 9 April through Blood & Biscuits. The Line of Best Fit spoke to main Sleep Party Person Brian Batz ahead of the album’s release to find out about the inspiration and origins driving his latest selection of songs. Here’s what he had to say, and here’s a stream of the superb We Were Drifting On A Sad Song, available to hear in its entirety exclusively here at The Line of Best Fit.

The Line Of Best Fit & Ja Ja Ja present Sleep Party People with support from Pale Seas, live at London’s Buffalo Bar on April 19. Tickets are on sale now.

I feel satisfaction and excitement [about the upcoming release]. I’m really pleased with the final result and the fact that I’ve, in my opinion, succeeded making the second album rather different and more organic than the first album. That was my plan from the very beginning, but I wasn’t sure if it would turn out as I wanted. But it did and that’s indeed satisfying. If the album won’t be well-received I’ll still be very proud and I will still love it. That’s the most important thing to me.

When I’m in the process [of creating] it’s my one and only love. My art needs all my attention and if I’m not capable of giving it all my attention it’ll die and vanish and I’m not interested in that. But sometimes it’s hard to give it all the attention it needs. Some days are just more impulsive and creative than others, but also if there are days where nothing works I will still be working in my head. You know… figuring things out and use my inner MacGyver to find the best solutions.

My current favorite songs [on the record] have to be ‘Chin’, ‘Melancholic Fog’, ‘Heaven Is Above Us’ and ‘Gazing At The Moon’. Maybe that’s just because I’ve played some of the other songs on the album live throughout 2011 and these four songs are just brand new… maybe that’s why they compel me more than the rest of the album. But that’s totally understandable if you ask me. At this moment the record is still so new to me so I can’t really think of any things I wished I’d done differently, but I’m sure when I listen to the album a half year from now, I’ll have tons of things I wished I did differently. Isn’t it always like that? That’s how I experience it every time I listen to a record I’ve done after some time.

On this record, [the live show] had a massive influence and I also wanted it to have this great impact on how the final result would turn out. But yet again, I wrote everything myself and recorded most of the things as well, but when I was finished doing my thing I pulled the guys in from the live band and then they colored the tracks with their instruments. After touring a lot I felt that it was a natural move for me to write songs which were in a more upbeat and uplifting mood. When we play live I often feel more compelled by playing the rock-ish stuff than the more quiet songs.

I love that fact that the live versions of the songs are way different than the album versions. That’s very charming. If we were to play the songs exactly as they are on the album it would be very boring in the long run. I love the fact that we can interpret the songs as we like and play them how we feel like. Sometimes we love to play them more noisy and other times we like them more mellow and dreamy. It all depends on how we feel that very day and how the audience are responding. Nothing should be easy and I love the fact that I have to struggle to get things my way and adapt the songs. It would be horrible if everything was easy-peasy and you didn’t have to struggle. That’s what makes it more uplifting when it actually turns out working after the struggle.

I started to write some of the songs right after my debut album was released in 2010, but it was just sketches at that moment. The recording process really began in September/October 2011 and it took about 3-4 month to finish it. The recording process was very intense and at some points, lonely. I used a lot of time by myself. Like the first album, this album is also mainly recorded in my apartment and the mixing process also happened in my apartment and all by myself. I’m not complaining. I like being alone but after spending almost 3-4 months [trapped] inside my apartment I really needed to get out and see my friends and family again. It was both enjoyable and challenging, but not easy. But as I mentioned earlier I don’t like it when everything becomes too easy. I appreciate when things are challenging and you have to struggle to get the result you’re looking for.

I don’t have any specific references. First of all I don’t have any schooled recording and mixing techniques. I use my ears and I’m sure I have a fucked up approach when I mix and produce stuff. I have no idea what I’m doing. I just use my ears and my intuition. I worked with a very well-known producer two years ago and when he saw how I EQ’ed the tracks he laughed and pointed his finger at me. He thought it was pretty funny to see how I worked, but yet again he agreed that it all depends on how it all sounds all-together. I can’t agree more! I don’t have a clue of what I’m doing but I know what I want. Second of all I listen to a lot of different genres so I think my background music catalogue is pretty mixed up and schizophrenic.

In that specific period I didn’t really listen to anything else than my own songs and sketches. But I think I’ll always be subconsciously influenced by dreamy, old, electronic, ambient and dark stuff. The last few years I’ve been listening a lot to the early Brian Eno recordings, Scott Walker and the 80′s shoegazer scene, but also more classical piano parts by Arvo Pärt, Erik Satie and Yann Tiersen. I’m sure they haunt me in my way of writing songs and produce them. But the visual impulse also influences me in my writing. I love being back home on my birth island Bornholm. The nature there has a certain impact on me and I often imaging being there when I’m playing the piano or guitar in my apartment in Copenhagen. That’s in a way more important to me than music. Or just as important.

“Ok here goes…”

A Dark God Heart

“It’s actually a track which earlier has been released as a b-side, but this version is modified and brand new and the feeling is more grand and bombastic. I remember while re-arranging it, that I wanted it to sound like a four piece chamber orchestra played it and then I wanted everything to be ruined and fall apart in the noisy and heavy ending of the song.”

Chin

“I’ve always been accused of writing a lot of quiet materiel and therefore I was seeking some music that could inspire me to write an upbeat track. A friend of mine introduced me to the new Little Dragon album and it instantly hit me, that I just needed a simple beat all the way through the track. Some say it’s similar to ‘Billie Jean’ by Michael Jackson and I really agree. It’s pretty similar, but I wasn’t inspired by him but Little Dragon.”

We Were Drifting On A Sad Song

“This track was written after releasing my debut album. Actually I played it for the first time at Roskilde Festival in 2010 and I’ve played it ever since. Yet again I wanted to create a track you actually could dance to. But the funny thing is that it was originally written on an acoustic guitar and it was in the beginning a very folk-ish track. I recorded that version as well, but I didn’t feel that it should be so quiet, so I changed the feeling of it and went for the more uplifting and party-ish mood.”

Melancholic Fog

“I don’t know exactly why I’ve always been inspired and drawn to Chinese melodies, but this song is my attempt to write a blend between the Nordic and Chinese mood. Actually I was looking for at more Chinese sounding instrument to play the piano part on, but I couldn’t find anything.”

Heavy Burden

“This track was actually an attempt to write a hip hop beat. It’s not a typical beat I would create but I felt that I wanted the groove of this song to be different than the other tracks on the album. So this is my attempt to write something very groovy and camouflage it with a lot of dreamy soundscapes.”

Gazing At The Moon

“This specific track has been through a lot of makeovers and at a point I was really close to give up on it, but then one late night I played these drums upon the recording and the feel took a different turn, and all of a sudden I found the calm and creativity again to finish it. It became a bouncy dream-rock track instead of a quiet and simplified track with a lot of piano and stings and no vocals. Everything changed when I recorded the drum parts. It’s funny how things surprise you sometimes. I didn’t expect it to be this kind of a track and that’s what I love in the process of making music.”

Heaven Is Above Us

“One early morning after no sleep at all I recorded this song. I think I must have been in this very sleepy kind of mode, because when I listened to it later that same day I couldn’t remember how I played the song or how I arranged it. Very weird feeling but I think it captures the mood of the song very nicely.”

Things Will Disappear Like Tears In The Rain

“This song was also written shortly after I finished my debut album and I’ve played this song a lot on tours. The sketch was very much inspired by Suicide, but after playing it live I could see that it needed a full-band to back it up and to make it more powerful. In the recording process I took my live-bunny-members in the rehearsal room and recorded a way more violent version.”

The City Light Died

“This is my lullaby track and ever since I wrote it I thought it would be the perfect closer on the next album. It’s also my hymn to Mercury Rev and their album “All Is Dream”. I don’t recall what their last track on that album is called, but I wanted my song to have the same feel.”

 We Were Drifting On A Sad Song will be released through Blood & Biscuits on the 9 April.

The Line Of Best Fit & Ja Ja Ja present Sleep Party People with support from Pale Seas, live at London’s Buffalo Bar on April 19. Tickets are on sale now.

It’s just a year ago that Julie Ann Baenziger, also known as Sea of Bees, first came to our attention with the release of her album Songs For The Ravens. After a very busy and highly successful musical year, Jules is now making a welcome return with a new album, Orangefarben, due for release on 9 April though Heavenly Recordings. We caught up with Jules to discuss the emotional journey involved with bringing the record to life as she walks us through the making of her latest record, track by track. Here’s what Jules had to say, and here’s a stream of the sublime Orangefarben, available to hear in its entirety exclusively here at The Line of Best Fit.

I am feeling quite a lot of emotions and thoughts right now. These songs were just sitting in me waiting to come out (like an old fashioned letter). They are simple songs, direct songs. I’m putting something close to my heart out into existence, and it’s a bit of all my feelings really. I am nervous, I am scared, I am excited and I am grateful for the fans and friends I have made.

[The reaction since the release of the last album has been] really unexpected, everything. Signing with Heavenly and 13 Artists was such a sweet beginning… they are good friends and have been such a huge support to me, I just feel so lucky to have a great team of people on my side. The touring was unforgettable, being away from home for so long and sharing my time with people I will never forget. I am grateful. It was like I was in a movie, and everything was just so unreal and fast. I grew so much as a person and also in my music. I became more inspired, more knowledgeable about how to share my songs. I learned a lot and am still learning. It was a full year! Glastonbury was one of my highlights, the whole scene was like a muddy dream of all the best, loved it.

I had just got home from touring Jan-Aug 2011 and I was ready to write about what was flowing constantly in my heart and mind, and it was about someone close to me. “Orangefarben” was a special word we shared. I did most of the writing in the back studio ‘the B room’, at the Hangar Studios in Sacramento, CA. I would sit in the small room for hours thinking and remembering the past; the good things, the hard things, the experiences, learning, growing and what I wanted for her and what I wanted for me. Melodies would come out and I would have a memory attached with it. There were a lot of differences in this album. It is very direct, about myself and one other person. The last album was everything (laugh). My mother, my father, my friends. This one is about true love. But musically the album is different as well. We had so much time to make Songs for the Ravens, and to experiment with sounds and textures. This one, I kinda knew what I wanted: simplicity. And time, I just didn’t have as much as on the last album, and now things are just getting so crazy busy. But, I am not complaining (smile), you just have to know when to let go of something and say it is good. And I feel really good about this.

[When creating the record] everything, usually for me, just comes along the way. I have a skeleton starting out with the basic pianos and guitars, but then after that we just have ideas and go with them. I hope this record helps people know they’re not alone. The plan for the release is to come out to the UK and do an awesome tour and then come back to the US and do the same. We have some festivals coming up as well. And then after the full long year and things die down a bit, I’ll start my next album. But I don’t want to think about that right now…

Broke

“This song is how she won my heart and I did the same with her, but she was broke from things in her past. She was still fragile.

I wrote this song with my acoustic, and then I added electric guitars and simple bass and a tiny bit of Juno synth. My friend and producer, John Baccigaluppi, came up with the 12 string melody part, and I played all the other lead parts. My friend James Neil and I both played drums on this one.”

Take

“I wanted her to be who she wanted to be without doubt, I thought about giving our love my best.

We started with acoustic and picking the strings with my fingers, like Beck on “Sea Change” which is so beautiful. Then we ran some white noise through a synth filter and LFO for the ocean sound in the background and I also hit the spring reverb with my fist! I added a marching drum, and the bass and some guitars. We had my friend Alison Sharkey come in and do some strings for me as well at the end of the song.”

Gone

“I felt like she was gone sometimes.

This song started with me on acoustic and then we ran the electric guitar through a Leslie which John played for the beginning. My friend James Neil played the drums on this with me live. I played all the other guitars and the bass.”

Teeth

“I always loved her teeth. I kept thinking how I shouldn’t think certain thoughts, it was wrong.

I wrote this song at my friend Al’s house in London, I kept singing it over and over. It started out with an electric guitar on this. I did the simple drumming and bass. We wanted it to be sparkly and flowy. We had a friend, Jon Graboff, add the pedal steel.”

More

“I started out with the acoustic writing this song. I wrote it before touring in the UK for the first time. It was when I first met her, she haunted me in the sweetest way.

The process of recording it was completely different from how I played it live, but that’s how I wanted to do it. I was wanting to play the drums and also experiment with looping some of the parts I played, and the final track is a mix of both.”

Give

“I remember I kept singing this song and thinking of her. Thinking of what she was like as a child. I would hum this tune on tour but I didn’t know the song yet, until I wrote it at the studio.

We did more looping stuff on this one and the funny rhythmic sounds are a high-hat that I played and looped and then put through the modular synthesizer filter. And we ran the nylon string acoustic through the synth too, and then I added the other guitars, bass and piano. This was one of the first songs we finished up and me and John got really excited about it and were all grooving to it in the studio.”

Smile

“I wrote this in the studio, it was a hard day and I had been writing all day, but this song came without trying. I thought about her and her past… how she would smile.

My friend Amber Padgett sang on the end of it and so did James Neil who did the brushes.”

Leaving

“Again this wasn’t trying at all, it was natural. I knew the song. I would sing this to her before I left for anywhere.

We recorded this as a b-side after the record was all done and it only took a few hours, but we were so happy with it, we decided to put in on the album instead of another song. We had to get permission from John Denver’s estate because we added one sentence and we were worried they wouldn’t like it, but they liked it so much they released it as a 7″ for Record Store day. Funny how things work out.”

Girl

“I was in the studio and this popped into my head. The melody, it reminded me of Neil Young for a bit and then I added lyrics of how I felt inside.

I started it on acoustic guitar, and again really basic simple guitars and bass. My friend Rusty Miller played drums on this live with me and added some guitar too.”

Alien

“This song I wrote in London at Al’s flat. I fell in love with it, recording it was different though. It was hard for some reason? I can’t pin it down. But in the end, I was pleased with it because it doesn’t sound like anything else on the record. Me and James both play drums again on this one. We did another song called ‘Easy’ that sounds even more different but we left it off the album because it was too different and noisy. I really like it though and maybe we’ll release it as a b-side later.

Grew

“I wrote this while recording, totally tired one night, it was really late. I was frustrated. John wouldn’t leave the studio until I finished it though, and when I was done recording it, I felt better. It was just me and the old pump organ.”

 Orangefarben will be released on 9 April though Heavenly Recordings.

Having whetted our appetites a couple of weeks back with the unveiling of ‘Love Is Taking Strange Ways‘, The Mary Onettes very successfully managed to wind us into a stupor awaiting the arrival of the rest of their latest record. Well, that wait is now over as The Mary Onettes unveil the complete Love Forever EP, available to stream a week ahead of release exclusively here at The Line of Best Fit.

With two tracks produced by the magic hands of ex-Studio member, current music mastermind Dan Lissvik, the Love Forever EP is home to pop pinches and melodic bites, not to mention the emotion soaked, sweeping sadness of the beautifully titled ‘A Broken Heart Is A Brilliant Start’.

The Line of Best Fit caught up with vocalist and guitarist Philip Ekström to uncover the story behind the making of Love Forever EP.

How do you feel about the EP now that it’s about to be released, and do you have any favourite songs? 

Philip: “We feel that it’s good for us that we’ve done something different. And that we now dare to release it. So it’s great!

I really don’t have any favourite songs. I like to think that my favourites are the songs that I have not written yet! You know, in your mind you have all these great ideas. The hard thing is to create an output for them. To really make them as good as they are in your head. This also means that I never wish that I did something different. I just force myself to move on!”

What kind of relationship do you have with your art?

P: “I have nearly an unhealthy relationship to my art. Since I write the songs and do most of the demo-recordings, I live with it 24 hours a day. That can become pretty frustrating! I need to relax! I can become almost obsessed with it.

The others have a more distant relationship to it, which is probably a good complement in the creative process.”

How does playing live impact writing and recording? 

P: “Since we always sound so different when we play live it makes things a bit complex. But most of the time I think it improves my creative process. You can always refer to the great live performances when you’re in the studio. Pick up some good vibes or ideas that happens live etc…

Sometimes it’s really hard to re-create those live moments in a studio. But I guess that’s the whole idea about playing live, it’s a unique and very creative  moment up there on the stage.”

Are you someone who develops songs in a live environment first?

“No. We always have a demo version or a finished track to work from. It just works better when we have directions. We are too unstructured as a group to be rehearsing towards a result. But I think we’re getting better and better at that now though!”

How long did it take to make the record, and how did you find the recording process?

P: “The EP took us more than  a month to finish. That is quite long for an EP. But I [wouldn't be] surprised if the album takes us a year.

The recording process was most of the time enjoyable. It was completely new for us to work with a producer like Dan [Lissvik]. In the beginning it was a bit uncomfortable but we knew we had to relax and just focus on the process in order to get a result from Dan. So it was challenging in that aspect.

We didn’t listen to much music at all while we were recording. But when I was writing I listened a lot to Prefab Sprout and some Brian Eno stuff. Maybe you can hear some traces of that.”

Love’s Taking Strange Ways

Philip: “The song has a bit of a cheesy-ness that I love. The piano does the whole song in my opinion. We wanted to do a song that was very slick and kind of an arena song, we wanted it to be almost exaggerated in the chorus.

The song has  the complex rhythms that Dan is very good at. Also a great complement to the slick production.”

Will I Ever Be Ready.

P: “This song has almost a sixties vibe to it. With some great Dire Straits guitars that Petter did really great! In the beginning, Dan wanted to have a “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band beat” but the song became softer in the end. It has a good flow!”

A Broken Heart Is A Brilliant Start

“A great song! Unfortunately Dan wasn’t involved in this one. We simply didn’t have the time to record this one with him. But we will make an album version of this track that is even better!”

8th Of June

“I think I recorded this song ’8th Of June’ in 2009. But somehow I’ve always liked it and I have always wanted to release it. And I felt that it was perfect for this EP.

Without saying too much, the date is of great importance for my family as well.”

The Mary Onettes’ Love Forever EP will be released through Labrador on the 27 February 2012.

This week finally sees the highly anticipated third record from Rock Action band Errors‘ being released. Since the first rumblings of the record were heard via the ‘Magna Encarta’ single which appeared back in March of last year, Errors fans have been chomping at the bit to be able to hear Have Some Faith In Magic in its entirety.

We caught up with Errors multi-instrumentalist/tasker Steev Livingstone ahead of the album’s release to find out where the band have been, and how this sensational record came to be.

“We’re pretty excited about the album coming out and finally getting to play the new stuff live, the rehearsals having been sounding good and we’ve had the addition of live vocals for the first time in a lot of the new stuff. So i’ve been rediscovering my own voice and trying to teach myself how to sing, with varying levels of success, but it’s been a good challenge, one i’m sure I will live to regret in the coming months touring.”

“The last year was probably the hardest we’ve ever worked. We started the year doing a short UK tour with the release of ‘Magna Encarta’ single, then SXSW in Austin, then back out to the States for over a month of touring then wrote an album from May ’til September whilst doing a handful of festivals in some amazing and exotic places. I think the highlight of the year has to be our trip to Brazil. It became a bit of a holiday but the shows were amazing and the response from the audiences were insane. It was a good feeling to have someone shout “Magna Encarta!!’ during the opening bar of the song, considering how far we were from home and given that the song wasn’t ever released in Brazil.”

“Compared with previous Errors records, HSFIM came together in a relatively short amount of time. Mostly being written and recorded between May and September of 2011, in the living room of Simon’s flat in the west end of Glasgow. There were parts which had been floating around for some months that became proper tunes within this time. I was also trying to experiment by writing music in different modes of transport. I think I managed car, plane, train and ferry on this record. Tunes like ‘The Knock’ came together whilst we were away on tour in the US with Mogwai, though I found the experience of trying to write on tour pretty frustrating. I think a big difference was what we were listening to in terms of other bands, I think the year or so running up to the record being made was probably the most I’ve gone out and listened to music both old and new.”

“From the outset we wanted to make more of a feature of vocals. ‘Magna Encarta’ had already hinted at this but we kind of wanted to expand on this, but still treating the vocals as another instrument. I think the main difference on this record is that where there may have been a synth melody or guitar part in the past, we’ve used vocals instead. I think that was the only conversation we had about how it should sound though I think there was an unspoken conversation between Simon and I who had been listening and downloading similar music from new artists, so it seemed like we maybe had a concept of how the record would be aesthetically. At the start of the process we also bought a whole bunch of mostly mid-late 80s synths from a farmer in Ayrshire and from various other sources which I think helped to shape the sound of the record somewhat.”

“I hope the new record opens us up to new fans which I reckon it should do because the outcome is quite broad in terms of influences, though probably our most accessible and consistent in many ways.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tusk

“This tune was the first tune we wrote when we officially started the recording process. The twin guitar sound is probably as a result of listening to a lot of Michael Rother’s solo work, his fuzz guitar tone
is one of my favourite sounds in the world. Originally it had electronic drums on it, then James came along and suddenly the tune was finished. It’s the only tune on the record that doesn’t have any
vocals on it.”

Magna Encarta

“This was written in may 2010 and was finished within a week, which is almost certainly the fasted we’ve ever worked. We released it as a single in February 2011 and then recorded some live drums on it for
this album version. The guitar parts of it, I recorded all at home using a guitar which is literally taped together, I think it adds a pretty rough feel to the sound overall.”

Blank Media

“One day on my way to the studio on the bus, I decided to get off early and walk through the Barras Market. I walked past a vendor selling a ”box of mp3s” and “Blank Media”. I was listening to the Cocteau Twins as I strolled through. When I arrived in the studio I started a new project and called it ‘blank media’. I think the guitar part was the first part I wrote, the melody being inspired by an Eli et Jacno song. It was one of the few tunes that I can look back at and say where almost every element of it came from.”

Pleasure Palaces

“Due to nerve pain, I had been given prescription strength codeine which I was taking throughout the recording process. I remember being quite light-head and blissing out around the time of writing ‘Pleasure Palaces’ and can only assume that the ethereal nature of this tune was partly due to the effects of the painkillers. The working title of this tune was ‘Ben Vane’, named after the Scottish munro in the Arrochar Alps, but I didn’t think it represented the tune very well so we named it ‘Pleasure Palaces” which is the name of a programme about historical British buildings of pleasure and leisure, by the engineering enthusiast and historian Fred Dibnah.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Knock

“The title of this tune came from another Scottish hill, in fact I think the word Knock means ‘small hill’ in Scots. A lot of this was written while we were on tour in the US. The end section reminds me of John Carpented, it’s pretty sinister sounding, made even more so by the ‘creepy-child’ vocal effect we’ve used. The start of the tune has a sample from a Terrahawks video which is kind of warped and creepy too.”

Canon

“This track is like a halfway point in the record. It was written about 6 months before we started recording and I’d completely forgotten about it. At the time of recording it I was into the idea of one-take recording and that one-take being the version you use regardless of any mistakes. I think I like it for that reason, it’s not perfect and it’s a more sub-concious way of doing things.”

Earthscore

“‘Earthscore’ is probably the most complicated tune we’ve ever written in terms of arrangement. I think this took well over a year to finally get to a point that we were happy with. It has so many different sections and we just didn’t know where to take the tune at all. We were even at the point several times where we were going to abandon the tune altogether because we couldn’t agree on where it should go and how the drums should sound. I’m really happy with the way it’s turned out though and I’m totally glad we persevered with it. I think I’ll be able to use it in the future as an example of why you shouldn’t give up on tunes, even if they seem to be going round in circles; “Ah, but remember Earthscore”.”

Cloud Chamber

“This one was being completed right up to the final moments of the deadline for the record. I couldn’t help thinking of Enya when I was recording the vocals for this, I think that’s pretty evident when listening to it. This tune made most comprehensive use of the synths that we had recently purchased. The working title of the tune was ‘Nervous’. On this tune, more than any other, listening to the original demos of it and comparing it to the final draft, you wouldn’t be able to tell they were the same tune, it took on many forms, being deleted and undeleted several times. It’s one of those tunes that could have gone in many different directions.”

Barton Spring

“This tune features guest vocalist Kip Ulhorn, who plays in one of my favourite American bands Cloudland Canyon. I met him at SXSW in 2011 and asked him if he’d be up for recording some vocals at some point. I was struggling with a middle section for this tune for ages and asked if he’d help out. He’s got quite a similar vocal style to me so it fits pretty well. I liked the idea that it was a kind of Transatlantic duet we did together.”

Holus-Bolus

“This tune was one I had more or less finished a year prior to writing the record but I didn’t have an ending for it and I had stupidly tuned all the synth parts and vocals to a guitar which I hadn’t bothered to tune which lead to problems when we came to record parts again, as everything was in “Not-quite-E”. The vocals were probably influenced by the religious choir music I had been listening to around the time. The working title for this was “Shallow Tears” but we decided that sounded like a terrible emo bands name so we changed it to Holus-Bolus, which means all at once and kind of suits the nature of the tune as there are so many instruments all playing the same parts in unison. The noise-out at the end was fun to do.”

Have Some Faith In Magic is out now through Rock Action Records. 

Last week we revealed our top 50 albums and tracks of 2011 – an outstanding year for new music. The lists were drawn up and carefully ordered over several weeks – we wanted to encapsulate the year in terms of the songs and bands that we felt took leaps musically and, to be frank, blew our minds personally.

Atop the long players of the year sits I Break Horses‘ Hearts – a breathtakingly beautiful record that makes us as giddy as a schoolgirl at the Twilight premiere every time we listen to it. We reached out to the talented creator of Hearts, Stockholm resident Maria Lindén, just before Christmas to find out more about the record, three months after release.

“For my first record, I’m happy with how things have gone,” Maria told us. “It just feels good to have it out there, but of course I’m already thinking about new songs and I’m eager to move on.

“For everyone listening to the record in the last few months and for all those still to discover it, the songs are all fairly new thought for me some of them are 3-4 years old so it’s a hard balancing act!”

While the lyrics come courtesy of the band’s percussionist Fredrik Balck, Maria is the primary musical force behind I Break Horses and took her time to find the right scenario for recording Hearts, trying out a solitary bedroom set-up as well as an analogue studio in Poland with a sound engineer. “I think in hindsight it was good to try some other ways,” says Maria, “even if the result was to realize that I needed to do most parts of it myself. It can be quite difficult to be happy with anything because self-critique is something I specialize in!”

Uniquely, the record saw its release prior to any live dates being played and Maria’s resolve to wait until the right time saw the band’s first London show sell out at the 300-capacity Cargo venue back in December – a monumental achievement for their fifth ever gig. “I’ve always heard how playing songs live ahead of recording can be a massive help,” Maria explains, “but as this record came out of late night bedroom sessions, that was never going to be possible! I want the live shows to be special and rushing into it, it wouldn’t have worked so I’m thankful we waited a few months. It will be an ever-evolving process I think.”

And for the future? “I have a lot of ideas for new songs and the next record,” Maria enthuses, “and I’m super-excited to get working on that!”

Read Maria’s thoughts on each track from ‘Hearts’ below and make sure to enter our amazing I Break Horses competition at the bottom of the page.

‘Winter Beats’

“I wrote ‘Winter Beats’ in Poland, while we were there recording the first parts of the album. I suppose that even though I pretty much scrapped everything I recorded there, once I came home some good did come of it and that was this song. I ended up liking it so much I made it the album opener.”

‘Hearts’

“I wanted to create a song that blended the aggressive with the romantic. ‘Hearts’ is the only song I felt I didn’t need to go back and change after writing it. The album version is the same as the first demo.”

‘Wired’

“This was the very first track I wrote for the album. It’s got a very simple rock groove and I mixed that with a very floaty chorus. I had an idea of detuning/pitchbend effect at the end of the song that maybe only I like…”

‘I Kill Your Love, Baby’

“I like the paradox feeling this song results in – as the phrase, the same as the title, is being repeated almost like a hymn, but with a more aggressive, textual content.”

‘Pulse’

“This song was a complete pain to record. I think I did about ten different versions of it before I ended up with the final one. Naturally, it’s not one of my favorite on the album.”

‘Cancer’

“I wrote it after a cheap, last minute trip to Greece, inspired by the sound of charter tragedy. It was a bit off-season when I was there and the town was closing down. Still, some places tried to maintain the high season leisure mode by playing Mediterranean disco its over and over. And through my bedroom window it sounded so sad…”

‘Load Your Eyes’

“It was practically written by itself. Very quick and easy to put together – it has a playfulness about it that I like.”

‘Empty Bottles’

“A little poem about now and then for some people. All the takes are one-takes I kept to make sure I got the intimacy and urgency you have for a part when it’s first being recorded.”

Stream Hearts in its entirety below.

Competition

I Break Horses’ label Bella Union are giving away an amazing package of prizes to celebrate the success of Hearts on our end of year list.

Just leave a comment below telling us what you’re most looking forward to in 2012 and you could win everything the band have released to date (a vinyl and CD of the album plus 12″s of ‘Hearts’ and ‘Winter Beats’) as well as a lovely band T-shirt and – best of all – a day pass to see the I Break Horses play at this year’s End of the Road Festival.

The competition closes at midday on 13 January. We’ll pick a winner at random soon after!

Sometimes it’s hard to hide your love of something or someone. You know those times when you become aware mid-conversation that you keep mentioning a certain friend, girl or band. And so you have to stop yourself, while your sentence trails off to nothing… Well, San Fran duo Girls are kind of like that. They’re the friend-crush you sometimes get when you meet a new person and are so enthralled by them with a mix of male envy and happiness that you’ve found a physical manifestation of your own reflection that the sensation tiptoes dangerously around being homoerotic.

With this in mind, we’re going to throw caution to the wind and talk a whole lot more about the band, whose second full-length album Father, Son, Holy Ghost has just been made available for streaming, embedded above.

The duo – comprising of Christopher Owens and Chet ‘JR’ White – have never been adverse to opening up a little. Their debut single, the upbeat pop hit ‘Lust For Life’ sardonically longed with morbid black humour for a man in their lives in the wake of Owens’ ex-girlfriend’s new relationship. But already being flourished with rave reviews by everyone from Pitchfork to The Guardian, this record is their ultimate break-up album, their Rumours, their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, or their ‘every Bright Eyes release’ – brilliantly documenting the highs of  infatuation and the rock-bottom lows of loneliness.

Here’s a track-by-track rundown of the album’s turbulent ups and the downs:

‘Honey Bunny’

It always seemed a bit far-fetched when Girls were repeatedly compared to Elvis Costello, Buddy Holly, and The Beach Boys, didn’t it? Well, not so much anymore. This opening track kickstarts the album with pockets full of blue jean swagger and deserves to be played on the car radio of a ’58 Cadillac (a car that may or may not actually exist). But don’t think they’ve gotten all High School quarter-back on us quite yet. Nope, despite the cocky strut of the music the band remain hopeless outsiders. Some records are records to have sex to, like, I don’t know, Marvin Gaye? You can clearly tell that my experience in this subject is rather limited, can’t you? But it’s pretty damn clear from this very starting track that this album is not one of those to have sex to. You don’t want such select lyrics like “Mama, she really loved me / Even when I was bad / She’d hold my little hand / And kissed me on the cheek” serenading your conquest. They really don’t need another moaning girl in the room. If anything, it is rather an album to not be having sex to; a manic proclamation of love, a lament of loss and crying over grazed knees and the like.

Lyrical highlight: “I’ve been messing with so many girls / Who could give a damn about who I am / They don’t like my boney body / They don’t like my dirty hair / Or the stuff that I say / Or the stuff that I’m on”.

‘Alex’

After the ’50s-infused opener we’re back to a more familiar Girls as Owens’ vocals are lost in a sea of distortion. It’s a song of teen-like obsession and infatuation. Owens sure does have a knack of name-dropping these mystery muse-like figures in his songs, like ‘Laura’ from the first record and ‘Jamie Marie’ later to come on here. It’s kind of like when people don’t @tag friends in their tweets. ‘Alex’ sounds like it could soundtrack that scene in Donnie Darko when Donnie and Gretchen are walking down the stairs into the party after they’ve done the deed. Yeah, you know the part, right before Gretchen goes and dies… Happy mating, kids!

Lyrical highlight: ”If somebody somewhere cries / Well who cares? / No you don’t”.

‘Die’

Errr, okay, this is still Girls right? We’re not being tricked here, are we? We haven’t been given a decoy press copy as punishment to the album leaking a few weeks back, have we? The track throws us in the deep-end from the beginning, drowning us in shreads of heavy metal guitar more suited to what Owen-lookalike Wayne’s World’s Garth would listen to rather than that which Girls’ more natural fanbase would. It sounds like someone’s using Kerry King’s bald head to play milk bottles, all lined up in a row. You kind of expect Tom Araya to yell “raining blooooood!” at any moment. Right, it’s a good thing we’re not having sex really or that would just ruin the mood completely. And then the words come in after around a min and a half of not-quite-headbanging-but-nevertheless-headmoving glory: “No, nothing’s gonna be alright / No, we’re all gonna get fucked up tonight”. Okay, yep, it’s still Girls alright.

Lyrical highlight: “No, nothing’s gonna be alright / And we’re all gonna die / All gonna die / All gonna die / All gonna die!”

‘Saying I Love You’

Now how do you follow that guitar solo? With the post-coital comedown of ‘Saying I Love You’ that’s how. The song seems like a generic radio-friendly sickly number until the crux of the chorus hits you like a fairground hammer to the chest.

Lyrical highlight: “And how can I say I want you / Now that you’ve said I want you / Now that you’ve said everything I said to you / To somebody new”.

‘My Ma’

One thing you should know about Girls’ lead singer Christopher Owens is that he was raised amongst the new age cult ‘Children of God’. That said, this song isn’t just a 20-something guy crying into his beer about missing his mama. No, it’s more than that – a metaphoric manifestation of his divided history and self, between his isolated childhood where everything seemed so simple and the life he has fallen into now; drug-addled and confused wandering around the modern world, from city to city, country to country, singing in front of rooms full of total strangers who actually encourage his digression into insanity and despair.

Lyrical highlight: “I’m here in darkness / And I want to see the light of love”.

‘Vomit’

This one, pre-album single ‘Vomit’ , feels a lot like a daydream when you don’t know the boundaries of what is real and what isn’t. It’s an epic 6:36, culminating in a euphoric burst of female gospel-choir vocals sounding as if he’s fallen asleep listening to Nina Simone. In the accompanying video, Owens drives around LA like a fringed Travis Bickle out of ‘Taxi Driver’ – just, you know, looking for love, not teenage prostitutes.

Lyrical highlight: “Cause there’s something that I get for myself / And there’s something that you give to me / Well, I got one without the other / Well, it’s not enough to be / I need your love”.

‘Just A Song’

From its childlike guitar strumming intro, the song bursts into an emotional languish as Owens laments the emotional decline of not only himself but all those around him. You remember all those pretty, perfect Californian hipsters that flooded the videos from Album with their shoplifting and their nocturnal sleeping habits, well it turns out they get sad just like the rest of us normal folk. The lines “Feels like it’s gone / Yeah, it’s gone, gone away / Seems like nobody’s happy now/ Feels like nobody’s happy now” has enough power and intensity to silence an entire room. Seriously, do not run the risk of allowing this track to creep up on shuffle at a party, you will not be able to have fun afterwards. And you will be drenched by your own and others’ damp tears.

Lyrical highlight: “Keep me up / Keep me down / Keep my feet on the ground / Love, love, love, love / It’s just a song”.

‘Magic’

“Just a look was all it took / Suddenly I’m on the hook”. That’s all it takes really and we’re done for, hook, line and sinker. This is Girls’ reflective take on the truly pathetic nature of our male neediness. Like when a girl asks what the book is that you’re reading in a coffee shop. Or when an attractive woman sits by you on the train even though there’s a good two or three seats free down the other end of the carriage. Or even when the lady behind the till in Sainsbury’s asks if you need cashback. I try to reply “Yes, twenty pounds please” in the most seductive way possible and then they ask if I want the receipt in the bag – a clear double entendre if I ever did hear one.

Lyrical highlight: “I must confess / If I manage to forget / Everything from as of yet / Then what a success”.

‘Forgiveness’

Sometimes when you’re so immersed in your own problems, you find it difficult to measure quite how long you’ve been talking about yourself. Owens definitely suffers from this on the record, with three songs topping the 6 minute mark. This one is two seconds short of a whopping 7 minutes. ‘Forgiveness’ comes across like a confused mind quite literally stuck on an endless loop, with neither Owens or the listener being able to or wanting to break free.

Lyrical highlight: “And I can hear so much music / And I can feel everything now / And I can see so much clearer / When I just, close my eyes”.

‘Love Like A River’

Okay, so these last few lyrical highlights have been hard to pick out. All early reviews are championing Owen’s great penmanship but I’m not entirely convinced by this. As much as I love the band, jeez – just look at all the gushing above and below, the power doesn’t lie in the words on the page as so much as the feelings conjured by the way and how they are sung. “My love is like a river / She just keeps on rolling along” is hardly a line that neither you and I could have ever written, I mean, come on, it sounds more Cat Stevens than Cat Power. But Owens’ pop sensibilities and his inclination to the kitsch render him as more comparable to Stephin Merritt. Yep, unashamed, inhabited and unapologetic outpourings haven’t sounded this good since… Nearly tricked you, they’ve never sounded this good.

Lyrical highlight: “Too many times I’ve fallen in love / Just to wake up and find it all falling apart / Too many times I’ve given my heart / To someone who never wanted it from the start”.

‘Jamie Marie’

‘Jamie Marie’, perhaps some relation to the ‘Lauren Marie’ of Album, sends us off with a little bit of a lullaby. Owens bemoans “I guess I didn’t realise they way I loved the way you moved /Until I moved so far away, I could see you anymore” , ultimately proving the the album to be not so much of a catharsis after all. From start to finish Father, Son, Holy Ghost is Owens rattling his brain, with all the songs falling out but evidently there seems a lot of hurt still remains at the close. Not that we’re complaining, anyway, in fact one day I wish I could make a break-up record somewhere as beautiful as this. It’ll be the aim of the next relationship I commit to. And with Los Campesinos!’ new record, the upbeat-sounding Hello Sadness, also coming out soon, what exactly are the guys at Turnstile Music trying to do to us? Man, I’m gonna have to fall in love and get my heart broken all over again just to be ready for Round 2.

Lyrical highlight: “And I know you are gonna be just fine / You know they say it’s better to have loved and to lose it / Than to never ever know it / Easy come and easy go – whatever!”.

Father, Son, Holy Ghost is out now on Turnstile. Our review of which will be up later in the week.

We asked Team Ghost‘s Nicolas Fromageau to take us through his new EP – Celebrate What You Can’t See. Not only has he talked through all of the material but he’s also included a free download of Signs & Wonders.

‘High Hopes’
I did this song with the help of Pierre Sendrané, who is our ex-drummer. I first wanted this track to sound like Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ soundtrack, but we added big guitars, so it finally sounds a bit doom, as the tempo is very slow. With Benoît de Villeneuve (the producer of the EP), we had a lot of fun adding lots of synth parts at the end of the song. We had so many tracks, it was very hard to mix it!! The lyrics are very simple: it’s about having fun, doing drugs…

‘Celebrate What You Can’t See’
An instrumental song. In a way, it’s my favorite track on the EP. We wanted two tracks on each side, a ‘real’ one, played with a band, and an ‘ambient’ one. This one is very melancholic, I like it.

‘It’s Been A Long Way But We Are Free’
Another instrumental song. For this one, I’ve been very influenced by Tangerine Dream’s work on the ‘Risky Business’ soundtrack, and by John Carpenter’s music too. So it’s an imaginary soundtrack, I guess, for an imaginary movie produced in the ’80s!

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Signs And Wonders’
This is an old track of mine, but we changed many things on it with Christophe [Guerin, Team Ghost multi-instrumentalist] and Benoît, to make it a bit more modern. Maybe you can hear some Mogwai in that song, well I do! Benoit did a great job on the synths. I like the mix between guitars and synths. The lyrics, well, I’m not sure I really know what I talk about, but I’m not sure it’s really important.

‘Into My Arms’
A very simple song I found on my computer one morning. Maybe I did this song, but fuck, I just can’t remember when…

Team Ghost: ‘Signs & Wonders’

After our recent TLOBF Recommended Album review, Adrian Mules sat down with Jessica and Katherine to go through the album track by track and learn more about how this modern folk masterpiece came together.

So where was the album recorded?

Through Low Light and Trees was recorded during a 10-day session at Cornwall’s Sawmill’s studio. We had put a lot of thought into the songs, demo-ing them at home on the computer, trying out different ways of playing them with the band and discussing ideas with Head the producer.

The main access to the studio is by boat. This meant all our amps had to be loaded onto a small boat at just the right tide. Typically, in the long history of the studio, ours were the only amps to almost fall off the boat in the journey. Luckily they were caught at the last minute.

We arrived in Cornwall on a rainy night, and had to walk in complete darkness down the quarry train track and through the woods to get to the studio. The studio’s seclusion provided the perfect place to record the album. Surrounded by trees and in a small bay, we were able to watch the tide rising and falling and go for walks when we needed to clear our heads. A lot of the atmosphere, sounds and images of the surroundings crept into the songs in different ways, from the grinding of the quarry train to the huge and eerie moon that rose in the middle of the session. In many ways it was quite a magical experience, where we were able to fully explore our vision for the songs. The album has a generally autumnal feel so hopefully it will provide a mournful but comforting soundtrack to the changing seasons.

And what about the tracks can you talk us through those?

‘Summer Fades’
This is a song reflecting the nostalgia and excitement that comes with a new beginning. Autumn always feels like quite a dramatic and nostalgic time of year, with the low light of the sun and the beauty that comes with decay. A lot of life is going to sleep and making way for cold and bleak weather. I think we go through similar seasons as people. Sometimes you think you are never going to live up to a dominant figure in someone else’s’ past so when new things are starting there can be a feeling of both excitement and insecurity, kind of similar to the feeling I get when the weather switches into the autumn.

‘Devil in my Mind’
We have been playing this song for a while live, so it was good to finally capture it. It’s a dark song about getting lost and trapped in the city in various ways; the way it can mess with your mind and things can become hazy, confused and your thoughts can become more sinister as the claustrophobic atmosphere closes in. Occasionally when things are recorded all the different parts merge together in a peculiar way, so that when you listen back there is the illusion of a whole new part. I think this has happened here. There is a very strong pulse present that can’t be pinpointed to one instrument. Very fitting for a song about the city.

‘Hotel Room’
It was fun to record this song, it has a looser more immediate feeling which suits the character of the song. We wanted something upbeat and optimistic on the record. It’s all about light and momentary pleasure that might not last, but is good anyway. The best bit about recording this track was when we both sat in the studio playing the Hammond Organ and the Fender Rhodes which isn’t something we get to do often.

‘Dragon’
We wanted to try something with a different instrumentation. It’s a strange song that just came out of imagining England in a more dangerous and isolating way. Dragons eating people.

‘Feeling Is Turning Blue’
As the title of the song explains it is about a feeling/situation that was once happy but has since turned slightly melancholy. A city provides the backdrop to narration. We recorded most of this track in the kitchen with the intention of creating a harsh, basic guitar sound but to have a pulse running through the song, replicating the drone that cities have.

‘Erie Lackawanna’
We tried many different ways of recording this song. At one point it was sounding like a medieval carnival but in the end it worked best just playing it live with just the two of us and then adding noises to create swells. We featured noises from the Quarry train that ran by the studio. Imagine this story to be told early in the morning before the sun has risen, perhaps on one of the last few nights of someone’s long life.

‘Morning Blues’
I did this song in one take with the help of a glass of wine after diner. Katherine then added the Mermaid-like vocals. Originally it was called Little Mermaid Lullaby but Morning Blues fitted better to the general feeling of the album.

‘Strange Moon Rising’
We had been playing around with this as an instrumental for a few weeks before going to record. We decided to go ahead and record it with no lyrics or tune so no one knew what kind of song it was going to turn into. It was only when we came to mix the tracks that we came up with the chorus and quickly fitted it all together. To get the tune for it we tried to think of something that we wouldn’t normally come up with. It is almost like a playground chant.

‘Storm Song’
This was written on really dark and windy and night, the trees were bending back and forth and the rain was hitting the window sideways. The house we lived in at the time was really drafty, so it felt like the storm was coming inside. We tried to create something that builds in quite an epic way.

‘Blue Skies Fall’
Blue Skies Fall was a song we had only just worked out how to play with the band, glad it came together in time. It seems to have an endless amount of possible guitar parts that could go with it. We stopped at four.

‘After the Rain’
This was approached in the same way as Morning Blues, played and sung in one take, with Jessica’s backing “oos” added later. I think it’s quite sparse and haunting, the words are pretty dark, so it needed to sound stripped back and lonely. One day it had rained pretty heavily and the feeling in the air was one of freshness and possibilities and it seemed interesting to think of that in terms of escapism for someone trapped in a certain situation.

With their long player, The Quiet Lamb, up for pre-order this week and an extensive UK tour too, we invited Tom Morris (chief song-writer) of Her Name Is Calla to walk us through the album and describe the influences and inspirations behind this extensive, and impressive, piece of work.

Moss Giant
This was written by Adam. I asked him to lend a few words surrounding its conception.
Adam: “Moss Giant came from the sun bleached ivories of the piano I’ve been playing since I was nine in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Being Two tones flat, Honkey tonk, and having barely any spring left in the keys doesn’t stop it being the main port of call for most Piano music I’ve written. To get the best tone out of it you need to do a lot of tricks. Leave the thirds out of chords in the bass, never hit the top end hard, pedal over clusters and avoid that Bb at all costs. Moss giant was born out of these strictures. I didn’t want to do anything showy, and I was too hung over to write anything that might go faster than a crawl, so Moss Giant just kind of happened. Wallingford is a very beautiful ‘midsummer murders’ village rich in green and quiet, and just imagined how this huge unknown entity could wander sloth loped across it’s hills without gleaming more notice than the startling of a murder of crows. I thought I was happy with the piece until I heard how much further Sophie’s strings could take it- that midas young Miss!. This seems to be the case with most things in Calla, the whole is often greater than the sum of it’s parts. It’s the first track I’ve ever sung on, and was suggested as an opener by my little brother. Hopefully it’ll make us some money one day in the only way you can in the music business in these days – soundtracking a car advert. Works quite well if you do a David Attenborough impression over it too -sadly I can only do Jimmy Stewart. Points for guessing which game soundtrack it’s inspired by…”

A Blood Promise
This is the first song that I wrote after relocating to Yorkshire. I’d just come out of hospital after a breakdown followed by an overdose. I sat trying to write a song for the first time in ages but nothing was happening. I stared out of the window and the ground was covered in snow and I started to play that opening guitar part. The inspiration was the new surroundings and the fact that my family had moved up there for a fresh start. But I was quite confused at the time and felt that I’d let a lot of people down, especially my daughter. It’s one of my favourite recordings and performances on the album but a few folks often complain that it’s too quiet. Despite that being the point. It sounds really easy but is actually a bit of a shit to play live. If we don’t get the pace and the emotion just right, it can fall flat on its arse. We recorded it in our normal approach. Live guitar, bass and drums, and then overdubbing the rest in our various homes. Normally, after the initial live recording, we all record our vocals/violins/ trombones and such separately. Everyone then puts their parts into our Dropbox and I mix them into the songs.

Pour More Oil
Written around the same time as A Blood Promise. They both have to sit together, we were always sure about that. They support each other someway. This is one of the first songs that we all played together when Sophie joined the band. She played her violin over the top and I welled up with tears. Just like I did at the end of Toy Story 3 recently.This song is about, as macabre as it sounds, my own place in hell. Every band has to have a Dante inspired song, and this is ours. It’s about my experiences with depression, medication and an inability to communicate with my wife about what is happening and alienating her. It’s about being punished for my actions. Which only seems fair really doesn’t it. I think so. The pour more oil part is literally that- burning oil. Pour More Oil was the first song that we finished recording and mixing. I made Sophie rerecord her violin parts about twenty times. And each time there was multiple lines for her to do. She was close to tears but I didn’t really care, we knew how good she was and it’s important to get the right take. It was also the last song that Sophie Barnes played on before she left the band. I really like Thom’s trombone lines in this. It adds some lovely textures down the mid and bottom end of the range, alongside Dave Dhonau’s (part time Calla member) cello lines.

Interval 1
Our friends The Monroe Transfer played the string parts for this. Nick Gill wrote it as a coda for The Union but we preferred to use it at this point. Since our releases are intended for vinyl we wanted to make sure that there was a clear start and end to each side. And to give the listener some time to reflect. That was the important thing.

Condor and River
This has been knocking around for years now. We always hated the original recording because it sounded so bad. There’s so many mistakes on it. I’m sure at the time we thought it was great but it was the first big song we’d recorded. We’d also been playing it for about a week when we decided to record it, so we weren’t all exactly sure on how to actually play it. Like most of the songs on The Quiet Lamb, it was recording and scrapped about five times before we settled on what we have here. There’s a lot in here that’s the same as the original, but there are extra touches here and there. A string arrangement, better performances and a better recording and the key differences. The guitar also continues into the second half to add some extra texture. Thom does the scream in the sixth minute and I think he lost his voice after this. I remember looking around at the other guys as we were recording the take which ended up on the album and thinking, “Shit! We’re finally recording this album we’ve talked about for so long”. It was a particularly proud moment to be there with my best friends making music, knowing that it needed this exact combination of people to be made.

The story surrounding the song is fictitious. I think it’s pulled together from bits of newspaper stories and my mind working overtime to create a new tale. Unusual for us as our songs are normally biographical in some way or another, however vague they may sometime appear.

Long Grass
Written some time half way through the recording of the album I think. Denovali released it on an EP in early 2010. This song also documents my relationship with my wife and the support that she brings during my, let’s say, bad times. I remember that everyone was away for the weekend apart from my daughter Edie and myself. Edie was a bit ill and didn’t want to do much, she was three at the time. I’d set up to record this song in the living room in the early evening. At about 9pm Edie woke up sweating and couldn’t sleep, I brought her downstairs to lay on the couch where it was cooler and she drank some water. She didn’t want a cuddle or anything, she just wanted to lay still. I started playing the song softly on the nylon guitar and she just watched. She seemed really calm so I carried on and recorded the main guitar and vocal live, playing towards Edie. I added another two nylon tracks and a banjo track. Right at the end of the banjo track Edie decided to speak at last and say “I like that song Daddy”. Unfortunately, she’s been drowned out by the other instruments now. But she’s definitely in there somewhere adding to the texture. As it happens, she got better after that.I passed the files onto Adam and he added his piano, drums and double bass over the top before adding Sophie. He mixed it also.It’s played on one of my favourite guitars – a nylon strung that has the most gorgeous mellow sound. I stole it from a school for the blind; but that’s another story. One that I’m not proud of.

Homecoming
A very fragile song separating Long Grass and Thief. It was recorded live onto my iphone in one take. I’m still trying to understand this one…We tried to expand it but it just didn’t sound right. So it remained the delicate little flower that it is.

Thief
This was originally played on a Magnus organ which was slightly out of tune. It was Adams and we needed to rerecord it. Unfortunately, I broke it to a point where it couldn’t be repaired. This song has been kicking around since mid 2009 but we could never get it to work out properly. We finally settled on this version and Adam did a great mix of it. It was one of those nice recording days when we had some friends over with us hanging out whilst we did our parts. We all got to do group vocals live too which is always good fun. Adam used a theramin that he built over this which adds a nice layer.It’s another biographical song.

Interval 2
This is using Sophie’s original demo violin parts for Thief mixed in with some samples that we use live. She didn’t know that it appeared on the album til the day before it went to press. You can tell it’s a demo because of the rough recording and the mouse clicks in the background.

The Union: I Worship a Golden Sun
We recorded this with drums, bass, guitar and keyboards all live. I really like Mike’s bass part in this song. We’ve been playing the whole trilogy for close to two years but we never felt it was ready to release until now. The turning point came when we actually broke it down into four parts, and then eventually three. It was the first time we experimented with a bigger than normal live set up also; multiple keyboards and triggers for the drones etc. We always liked to use lots of percussion live as well. This trilogy was a really good way for us to all push ourselves musical, mainly in a live context. When we last toured Europe we played a mix of both albums. It was mainly a headline tour so we were given quite big set times. Most ran between 1hr 20 and 1hr 45. Finishing the set on this trilogy and then coming back on to play New England was thoroughly exhausting. It meant that our last 30 minutes on stage was pretty much non stop without any breaks. Just like the theme of The Heritage, this particular part is about ultimatums and generational inheritance. I feel bad for the poor sods, I really do.

The Union: Recidivist
This had a number of title changes and at a time some lyrics. It represents my fear of sliding back into old ways or losing control. Likewise, it’s also about being scared of giving control away. Without a doubt this had to be the most dark as fuck part in the album. Thom and Mike played some huge timpani’s and bits of drum kit over the guitar feedback and chords. We played it together live. Gav from worriedaboutsatan came into the recording session and just said, “what the fuck is this?” then just walked out shaking his head. Sophie’s job was to torture her violin to death. Some time before whilst on tour in Europe, we’d pulled into a music shop to buy some replacement cables and drum parts (we’d broken a lot of stuff during a particularly destructive show the night before). Adam managed to buy a little red recorder for €1. Good job too because he plays it extensively during the first part of this track.

The Union: Into the West
We’d always wanted to do a song that was an epic western. It details a crossing over into death and beyond. And just hoping that there is something, anything. Adam gets to drum like a beast in this. In fact, everyone gets to play like a beast in this. Corah is wailing on his trombone like it’s his last time. Mike’s bass riff is unbelievably hard to play. And I get to play some slide guitar. Hell. Yes.Our friends The Monroe Transfer played on this also for some extra, screwdriver guitar, viola and cello. It was important for the whole song to sound like it was all around you and incredibly dense. I didn’t want any space left in the mix, everything had to be filled. The album always had to end like this, with these three tracks. We’d decided very early on that it would be this way. We recognised somewhere during the mixing process that the album was very long and quite hard going. I think we knew, because of the content and the journey involved to get to this point that it was always going to be that way. We’ve never put more effort into the recording of a record than we did for this, it was really quite draining at some points during the mixing, but it’s okay; we were prepared for it in some way. Like we all always knew how it would sound, before it’d been written.

Fuzzy Lights, the husband and wife, Cambridge based post-rock band, release their impressive second album this very week, entitled Twin Feathers. We included a taster track on this months podcast, but we also got Xavier and Rachel Watkins to give us a run through the album and tell us a bit about it…

‘Obscura’
Xav: That was a bit of an odd one… Rachel and I wrote it as we got home after a late night out, just picked up the instruments and it flowed out. We spent the next morning deciphering what we had written… Chris was starting to play the singing saw at the time of recording and it worked perfectly with the mood. Michael from Last Harbour kindly accepted to record the double bass part for us. I’m not sure our neighbours like it very much.
Rach: Xav and I wrote this one night when we got home late. I was messing around with the viola while Xav made toast, then he joined in and Obscura came out of nowhere! I still don’t really know where this song came from, it just appeared under our fingers! The singing saw, wine glasses, glock and double bass added by the others really made it a very special track indeed. The viola part was transposed to violin for the recording.

‘Fallen Trees’
Xav: This song has had many different incarnations, this one being my favourite. Rachel wrote it on acoustic guitar, we then took it and span it on its head to record it with electric mandolin and noisy guitars before settling on the current arrangement.
Rach: This was a song that I originally wrote back in 2005. It’s about spending your whole life with someone and how even when things don’t always work out the way you want, it can still be better to work through your differences and accept the other person for who they are. The arrangement of the song has changed a lot since then, with a few different versions but I think we finally managed to capture the mood.

‘Through Water’
Long brew… song about a destructive relationship.

‘The Museum Song’
Xav: The Museum Song was in a shortened version part of a soundtrack Rachel and I played to the Chris Marker film “la Jetée” for the Arts Picturehouse cinema in Cambridge, the scene where they visit the natural history museum.
Rach: After the event we started jamming it as a band in soundchecks on tour last year and it just fell into place really instantly. I think by recording live it’s maintained the spontaneous feel of the track.

‘Lucida’
Xav: Oldest track on the album, Rach and I wrote it at the very beginning of Fuzzy Lights, when we first got a harmonium. It never felt right to have on any of our other releases until now. It was recorded straight to tape, which gives it a dreamy mood. Double bass played by Michael from Last Harbour really lifts the music and helps give it an early baroque feel.

‘Rituals’
Xav: One morning, I was playing around with different tunings and found the melody. We went for a walk in the afternoon along Granchester Meadows and wrote it there.
Rach: I was in the early stages of pregnancy when Xav wrote Rituals. We spent the afternoon sitting in the sunshine and Xav wrote the lyrics while I lay next to him not feeling very well!
Chris: It always struck me as pretty amazing that when we first played with it in rehearsal everybody’s part was right, pretty much from the very start. I reckon we only actually all played it through on two occasions before recording it.

‘Shipwrecks’
Shipwrecks took shape during our last tour, every night Mark kept adding more and more speed-of-light drum fills. It would flow into “Bells Chiming in an Empty House” from the first album and then “Something to do With Light”. The fuzz pedal I used for the guitar part in the last section picked up a local radio station during the take, you can slightly hear it at the very very end. Can’t remember which ’80s classic song it was though…probably best you can’t hear it too much so we don’t have to deal with copyright issues.

‘Slowing Time’
Xav: This one is about loss and solitude, and how you can get trapped in these feelings and not see a way out. I used to sing it in a falsetto voice through a tape delay but it somehow didn’t work as well on the recording.
Rach: Slowing Time came about from some parts Xav had written on acoustic guitar. The really important element in this song is the interplay between the guitars and drums with the changes of time signature driving it forward. The violin really just sits on top with the delayed melody.

‘The Sea & The Heather’
Xav: Rachel wrote the lyrics and I was playing around with the guitar riff one day and she said it would fit perfectly, which it did! There’s another version of this song, much more folky but we decided to rerecord it as it didn’t have the right feel – this one sounds more soothing where the other one was more jaunty.
Rach: The Sea and the Heather is a song about a girl passing through that stage of adolescence where she’s not yet a woman but isn’t a little girl any more: about how an old flame remembers her years later as she was then and tries to imagine how she is now.

Bruce Peninsula‘s debut album, A Mountain Is A Mouth was longlisted for the Polaris Prize in Canada this year. It was a vindication of the hard work that went in to it since recording began way back in 2007. Oh! Canada caught up with Neil Haverty to chat about the logistics of being a ‘big band’, those BSS comparissons and to run through the making of the new record.

Hi Neil. First up can you give us 3 reasons TLOBF readers should seek out more from Bruce Penninsula?
I Never was very good at quizzes, but I’ll give it a go…
1 – We mean well (we are just regular dudes and ladies trying to accomplish a common goal)
2 – We are hard workers (it takes a lot to keep a band like this on the rails)
3 – Line Of Best Fit seems to like us (and they seem to know what they’re talking about)

You have just come back from touring Canada…how does touring work for you guys logistically? There seems to be so many people in the band?
Well, we trim down and puff up as necessary. It’s only as hard as we make it and it changes from show to show. On this recent tour, we were 7 for one leg and 9 for the next. We believe the songs can be interpreted by any group we manage to gather together. That could be 5 of us, it could be 10, it could be more. In most cases, the songs are adaptable enough to handle the membership fluctuation, as long as the people that are there are really letting loose.

You must be delighted to see so many people associated with the band doing so well- the likes of Timber Timbre, Ohbijou, The Weather Station and more? Do you see it as being difficult to get the band together to practice, tour and record more? Can you keep up with all the projects people are involved in?
We simply surround ourselves with as many talented friends as possible. There’s a core band of 5 of us that write the songs and plot everything out and then we bring in more hands and throats to fill things out when we think it’s necessary. The kind of music we make sounds best when it’s BIG so our band is usually pretty big to accomplish that. It happens that most of the talented folks we know have great bands of their own. Timber Timbre, ohbijou, Katie Stelmanis, the Weather Station, Germans, THOMAS, Isla Craig, Muskox, Snowblink… these are all projects that existed before, or at least grew up alongside Bruce Peninsula. We poach their members for our band whenever schedules suit it or when we think a song calls for it. All those bands have been jewels in Toronto for the last few years and we’ve been lucky to work with all of them. It’s getting harder to have those people at shows as their bands get more attention, but we aren’t concerned. There are tons of talented people in this city and we have a pretty fluid system when it comes to membership.

The sheer pool of talent has drawn a lot of comparrisons with the whole Broken Social Scene, er, scene.
We don’t really like that “new BSS” angle though. We like that band just fine but I think this kind of loose ensemble system existed way before they did. Look at big bands in jazz or folk collectives like the Perth County Conspiracy. It’s simply a choice we’ve made – to let the work call for the people it needs to accomplish it’s goal, rather than defining a strict roster of performers. If a song calls for a trombone part and we know someone that’s skilled with that instrument, then Bruce Peninsula expands. Why do we need to set parameters? Music is only fun because it’s an open canvas and we can do whatever we want to. If that means you can’t be sure who is in the band and who isn’t, then so be it.

Do you have any plans to come over to the UK? Are there any plans for a full UK release?
We are working on it! As with anything, it takes a lot of planning and relationship-building. So far, we’ve done everything independently. We recently took on a Canadian booking agent, but we are entirely self-managed and every decision is made within the band. That’s been relatively easy on home soil but other countries are a slightly harder egg to crack. We are starting to talk to people that can help and are tentatively trying to get everything in line so we can get over there by the spring time. Fingers crossed.

So….here is our track by track guide to A Mountain Is A Mouth

Inside / Outside
We got a couple of metallophones while I was working for the government and wasting all my time and money on Ebay. They’re beautiful instruments so we started to incorporate them as soon as they arrived. I’d like to use them more, actually, but we haven’t written much on them, outside of this song and Northbound/Southbound.
To this day, we call this song Mynah Birds. It has always been referred to that way and it actually takes a second to register whenever anyone refers to it as Inside/Outside. We always have fake names, or working titles, for songs as we are writing them and sometimes they stick (like Shanty Song) and sometimes they get changed at the last minute, like this one.

The first bounce of this recording is hilarious because it’s just a vibraphone and a really cheesy drum machine part. We worked very hard to make this song sound nothing like that first export. It came a long way.

Steamroller
When we wrote this song, I think everyone in BP shared a collective “aha!” about what kind of band we wanted to be. It’s been a foundational song for us since then because it incorporates all the styles and sounds we were chasing after in the first place. This recording was our engineer Leon’s little baby. He just loved this jam, more than any of the others, so he paid especially close attention to it and I think that’s audible. The handclaps, the toy piano at the end, some of the panning tricks… those were all Leon’s suggestions.

If you listen really closely in the choruses and the “greatest forest fire” part, you should be able to hear some tenor sax. It had to be really quiet in the final mix because so much other stuff was going on, but our friend Colin Fisher put down some really good horn parts. Maybe in the future we’ll release a remix and jack them up really loud so you can hear them in all their glory.

2nd 4th World War
There are so many shakers on this song. You probably wouldn’t know it because of the way we mixed it but they are all over the place. We had access to a room in the local university that was full of percussion instruments. I mean, every percussion instrument you could think of. We also didn’t really restrain ourselves when we were tracking so there was a lot of stuff to go through when it came time to mix. I think 2nd 4th is a real testament to the effort we put into mixing. Those were grueling, long days but they were worth it in the end.

Satisfied
This song is the most ‘live’ song on the record. Throughout the record, all the group vocals you hear were done live, with all of us singing together in the sanctuary of St. George The Martyr church. Save for maybe a tambourine or two, Satisfied is pretty much exactly as we played it. We were sure those claps at the end would clip the vocal mics but they didn’t. It just ended up producing a very raw and natural sound.

This is one of two traditional interpretations on the record. The original version that we based our version on featured anonymous school children singing it. On the recording, Alan Lomax asks the children to do it twice as fast and the result is mind blowing. Seek out that recording. You won’t regret it.

Shutters
We always imagined Shutters as the last song on the first side of the record, so that’s how it ended up as the fifth track. Just the nature of the song, with all it’s twists and turns, screamed side-closer to us. Funny thing is that, so far AMIAM hasn’t been pressed on vinyl so the sides thing hasn’t really panned out, but we’re working on it. Just scrapping our pennies together and hoping we can afford to press it by the end of the year.

We originally recorded Shutters in the very first session in Scarborough along with a bunch of the other songs. But it wasn’t entirely finished at the time so we ended up recording the final version a few months later at a different studio downtown. You can hear a slight difference in the drum sound if you listen hard enough.

Our friend Nick Storring came in and dropped some cello on the track for a little icing in the final stages of tracking. The song was big enough as it stood but we thought we’d take it a few extra steps with some big ass John Williams strings.

This is probably my favourite track on the whole record.

Weave Myself A Dress
This was the very first Bruce Peninsula song. Misha sang some lines to Matt years ago and eventually they fleshed it out into a real song. We knew the record was going to have a pretty heavy hitting first side so this was the perfect song to start the second. A little calm before we built it back up again.

I’m especially proud of the middle section, which we refer to as “the water”, because all those sound effects you hear are made on real instruments. The loon calls are really just Andrew’s lap steel and the water and wild bird sounds are just Maya scraping the bottom of her Kalimba. This recording also holds a special position for us because Misha recorded her vocal in the first few hours of her 26th birthday. Just after midnight we set her up in the massive sanctuary with just a couple candles and this is the take she came out with. After a very long day of recording, that was a really special way to cap it off.

Crabapples
So far, we’ve always played Crabapples as our set closer. It takes a lot of energy to do it justice and people respond rapturously to it so it just makes sense to blast it out last. Things are different with a record though. We wanted AMIAM to have a pretty significant denoument and so it wouldn’t have made sense to have Crabapples finish off the record.

It’s also always been a partner with Weave Myself A Dress. When we first started the band, we were keen to make connections between all the songs we played and those two songs turned out to have the strongest relationship.

Recording Crabapples was fun, just because we let ourselves go nuts on the percussion. There’s marching snares and timbales and lots of rimshots all over the place. My favourite part was when Steve just started walking around the studio, looking for things to hit. Paint cans, beer bottles, ladders… they’re all in there.

Shanty Song
About 3/4s of the way through recording, Leon decided he was sick of buying time at other people’s studios and figured it was time to start one of his own. Through a friend of his, he found a great little unfinished garage that could house his studio. There was a hell of a lot of work to do though. So recording sort of haulted and we all got to work gutting the place, insulating and soundproofing it, putting up drywall and getting covered in this gooey black stuff called Acoustiseal… It took about two months until the space was useable. That’s a long time to not be recording but we were lucky because, once the studio was done, we could go in as much as we wanted for the final stage of the record. We didn’t have to pay for studio time, really, because we had logged so many hours doing labour for Leon. We did a daily schedule after that, putting all the finishing touches on the record. We were finally up and running again… until the computer started acting crazy. Error messages, blue screens, all those terrible things that PCs do when they’re overloaded. We’d already stalled for a couple months and now we were facing another hang up.

I only mention this stuff here because Shanty Song came very close to the fire. It honestly almost didn’t make it through the crash. I can’t imagine what we would have done if it was lost for good – we really like this song because it was one of the first that really gelled for us and we thought the recording had turned out pretty well. The project file was riddled with errors and it took everything Leon had not to throw his computer out the window. Eventually we went back a few steps and salvaged it, but not without some serious machinery battles.

Drinking All Day
This is the other traditional song on the record and was probably the initial spark of Bruce Peninsula’s flame. Matt and Misha were asked to do a variety night in 2005 and, along with Weave Myself A Dress, they performed this song and a few others from the Alan Lomax archive. They based it on a recording of a woman named Vera Ward Hall. To this day, I have yet to hear a voice as effortlessly heartbreaking as hers.

Misha and Matt’s original interpretation was stranger than the BP version, with ominous tape and guitar loops, but the song has been with us since day one, so it was important to us to include it on AMIAM. We tried to record a version of this for a compilation very early on in the timeline of the band. There were 9 of us huddled in our little basement, clanging bells and playing casios. We recorded to two tracks, so some of it was totally unusable because we got too excited to consider dynamics, but bits and pieces of that recording made it into the record version. So, some of that drone you hear in Drinking All Day comes from the very first recording we ever made as a band.

Northbound / Southbound
We played this as a show opener a lot when we first wrote it but it was always fated to end a record. It’s sort of just a snippet of a song – we are constantly playing around with little bits of melody without worrying about length – but it gave us good opportunity to dial things back. We conciously made Northbound / Southbound very small so it could act as a further denoument for Drinking All Day, which we used to calm down a whole record’s worth of rocking out.

Matt and I were alone and screwing around at the studio one night and wanted to hear what a sort of tape-crunch end would sound like. We used my shitty dictaphone and recorded the choir into it and then fed it back in with the talk back mic in the control room. I think we were planning to do that properly at some point, with a real tape machine and some distortion, but it just started to sound right after a while. I never thought we would use my stupid little handheld tape recorder to end our record, but that’s what’s there in the end.

It took us a year and a half to make A Mountain Is A Mouth. We recorded it in 8 different places. We spent all of our money and way too much time on it. We were so happy to be rid of it when it was finished, but sad to see it go. Bring on record number two.

You can stream the whole of ‘A Mountain Is A Mouth’ over at CBC Radio 3 now, or download album track ‘Crabapples’ from us below. You can also download ‘Steamroller’ on Oh! Canada 1.

mp3:> Bruce Peninsula: ‘Crapapples’
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Malcolm Middleton plays Field Day this very weekend and at Sounds In The Ground festival in Stornoway on the 22nd August. New single ‘Zero’ is out on Full Time Hobby on 3rd August, whilst the album, Waxing Gibbous, is brought to life in Malcolm’s own style below…

If you want to check it out, download the track ‘Carry Me’ here!

Red Travellin’ Socks:

A fun song written after an intimate acoustic tour, where I was probably singing most of my more depressing songs. I fancied a change of pace and this song came floundering to the surface. I remember that it was written completely in about half an hour, including all the wee changes etc, which is pretty unusual for me. I did have a pair of red socks that I’d always wear when I was going away on a journey, although at the time of writing I was probably already on RTS mk II, due to wear and tear. I think this is a fun song, and of course, it’s not really just about a pair of socks.

Kiss At The Station:

Hmm, a weird shallow one. I like the drive of this song, but of course the train noises are pretty cheesy. Never mind the “world music” break down in the middle. Too many bad influences converging into one song… The song isn’t really about anything other than the obvious. I did write it on a train, and I was on my way to visit my girlfriend.

Carry Me:

I didn’t want to put this on the album as it felt a bit weird. Most folk that heard it seemed to attach to it quickly so I went along with them. It’s hard describing this song because one read of the lyrics tells you exactly what it’s about. The shattered dreams of childhood, etc, growing old, watching Bryan Ferry and Duran Duran videos and thinking this is what adult life is like! It’s not a negative song, just a bit mopey, trying to capture a feeling that I think everyone of my generation has.

Zero:

Probably the most fun I had on this album. Getting drunk and listening to old Madonna stuff. The lyrics are all over the place, but all relevant to me. I do have a habit of driving to the old houses I’ve lived in when feeling down or confused etc. I had a period of a few months where bad things always seemed to happen when it was a waxing gibbous moon. The outro is supposed to be comforting, not sure if I managed this though. I hate explaining songs, it’s like dancing to architecture….

Stop Doing Be Good:

Probably my least favourite song on the album, it’s a bit preachy and angsty. I like the loud bit though. I hate the way my voice sounds.

Don’t Want To Sleep Tonight:

Show me the way to go home? A nice wee song about staying up too late and not looking forward to the next day. Lovely stuff. I suppose it’s also about being unsure of where to go next musically, and feeling like some of the decisions I’ve made were wrong. Not having respect for my reasons for writing songs sometimes. Feeling like I’ve sold out a wee bit because of the Xmas stuff. All lies wrapped up in lies of course, so much so that I don’t even know what I was trying to convey.

Shadows:

A worrying Fratelli-esque beginning to this song. Or rather, a cross between Bugsy Malone and Who Let The Dogs Out? Actually one of my favourite songs and I love playing it live. It was hard work not to make the mid-section go down a cabaret “I Love You Baby!” route. But avoided all the same. I wrote this song about trying to lift my lift out of a mire, and in doing so succeeded. There’s a lesson there.

Ballad Of Fuck All:

On being a bored and depressive musician who’s left at home all day to look and whine into the abyss, waiting for my partner to come home from her job in the real world. Obviously written on a bad day. Which isn’t every day.

Box & Knife:

Unwrapping birthday presents can be so much fun. Me fannying about with layman synths and beats also. Reincarnation? Feeling eternal? Not feeling enough?

Made Up Your Mind:

Here the hero of the piece wonders what the outcome of a lover’s decision will be, asking the question ” Have you made up your mind yet?”. Deep stuff. I wrote this song the night before it was recorded and didn’t want to spend too much time battering it into shape or trying to sing it properly. I think it sounds nice ‘n’ raw.

Subset Of The World:

A nice poppy song, fresh and simple. The main theme is maybe isolation, feeling trapped in your own body and not being part of the universe around you. Or maybe having to feel like this as a precaution. I had a dream where the whole of the universe was inside the body of a woman and I was outside and separate, but also my own universe. And she wanted a hug. Freud? It’s basically a pop song about evolving consciousness.

Love On The Run:

I’ve no idea what this is about. Being a crap friend and relative? Being too cold sometimes? It’s just words and music, man. I don’t like the line “don’t fuck off, I need you to stay”, it makes me cringe every time, but I didn’t change it for some reason.

Malcolm Middleton on Myspace

We love Rock Plaza Central. They’ve been a bit quiet since they released their previous album, Are We Not Horses, a couple of years ago, to critical acclaim not just on a very young TLOBF, but also on Pitchfork. They’ve shed a few members, left their record label, but have returned with …At the Moment of our Most Needing, a stripped back, inspiring slice of Americana that adds plenty of Brass to their ramshackle sound.

With the album released in the U.S. this month, and a UK tour and release being muted, we got RPC main man Chris Eaton to provide us with some insight to the tracks on his latest masterpiece…
“I find the process of writing about our songs to be exhilarating and confusing and pointless. All at the same time. So much of what we’re trying to accomplish is a collaborative process with the listener, providing imagery and layers of my own life mixed with metaphor that can be interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways, depending on the listener’s own background and present state of mine. So me trying to explain what the songs are about… well…  ” – Chris Eaton June 2009.

Oh I Can
Touring lately, though, and playing the songs back to back with songs from Are We Not Horses and The World Was Hell to Us, I realize how often I talk about leaving home. There are so many assumed rules in life, and one of those growing up seemed to me to be that I would have to leave my home on the east coast (Sackville, New Brunswick) for a larger city if I wanted to make something of myself. Those handsome men, they will tell you that. And so you go off looking for adventure, with stars in your eyes, just because of the stories you’ve heard about “away.” That’s how Maritimers refer to non-Maritimers. They’re from away.

“I can bear a hill” is a line from Faulkner’s Light in August, which inspired a lot of this.

A Mule on Fire
One of my favourite lyrics from another song ended up being the title for this instrumental. There’s something so tragic and beautiful about that image for me. The mule just never stops working, even when everything – including himself – is burning down around him. It might best symbolize that simultaneous mix of hope and despair that I’m constantly trying to capture.

As a side note, one of my favourite things that I personally played is in this song, on the electric guitar. And while it sounds really cool, it’s purely the result of the string getting caught on the edge of the fret and then me trying to unhook it while everyone else is still playing.

Handsome Men
This was the first song written for the record. At least the chorus and verses. A lyric about handsome men had hit me from some jazz tune that I can no longer remember, and resurfaced when playing the tune to the rest of the band. I had also just seen There Will Be Blood, and related to it on many levels.

The bridge came later, sort of spontaneously in a performance. We’re mostly big fans of a Canadian band from the 90s called The Rheostatics, and one night started singing the lyrics from a song off their Whale Music album called “Queer”. I ended up rewriting all of that, but in a tip of the hat to how they used to frequently incorporate the lyrics from other Canadian songs and poems – a game I also like to play, using David Bowie and Alan Parsons Project on Are We Not Horses, among others – we kept the first line of “Father raged like a soldier,” then followed it with a Gordon Lightfoot reference, just to be über-Canadian. Again, a song about leaving: “The day he told me there was more to there than here.”

It’s fun to watch people dance to a rock song in a totally fucked up time signature.

O Lord, How Many Are My Foes
Originally came into being when hanging out with our friends Sgt Dunbar and the Hobo Banned in Albany, NY. We decided to sit around one day and record some stuff, and this came out, although most of the lyrics were pretty horrible (e.g. “Where’s the one that I love best, where’s the one who made this sweater vest”, and something about a magic bus), and I think the only lyrics that I kept were the first lines of every verse.

Good Enough
Part of this song has existed for some time. Or at least the lyrics have. The rabbit ‘neath the lion’s paw knows the world is good enough. And the sparrow in the housecat’s jaw sings the world is good enough. Or something like that. I think they even appear on a recording done at the home of No Love For Ned. My neighbourhood is amok with feral cats. Or at least outdoor cats. Millions of them. And I’m constantly trying to save the birds from them. But even in that horrible death, I’m sure the birds should realize that they had a lot of good times, and should not regret having been a bird.

Country C
Found an old live recording from the early where we suddenly did this, and it was so pretty and seemed to capture the mood of the album so exactly, with the right breath of air to the intensity around it, that we decided to do it again in the studio. I think it captures what a lot of people tell me they like about the band: that we’re just people playing music. No artifice of things built strategically track by track. Just four people moving their fingers together.

Them That Are Good…
When you then return to your home, after the hunt, empty-handed, how will people view you?

The Wrong Side of the Right and Holy Rider
I like to win. To an unhealthy degree. To the point where I will argue for no good reason, even if I don’t always think I’m right. I would like to stop that.

The Long Dead March
Scott had originally intended this to be called “The Strong Dead March”, after the poem by Walt Whitman. I actually mis-wrote it when submitting the titles to the CD designer, but then felt that the music was already so proud, and using the word strong would just be hitting you over the head. I think of it sort of like Lady Godiva, who is forced to go through town naked, but she bares the shame with such pride that everyone else ends up averting their eyes. A real companion piece to “Them That Are Good…” Scott also has other plans for it, and it will undoubtedly resurface again some day as the Strong Dead March on one of his own albums.

We Are Full of Light…
Where the album gets its title. Sometimes it’s hope that blinds us and steers us wrong, just when we need it most. Written the night before going into the studio. More fun playing music at the end.

Wherever You Are, I’m Home
Lover, you have left such a mark on my life, and improved it so immensely. Everyone in the world seems to be searching for something. Perhaps they have already found it.

The Hot Blind Earth
Another Faulkner quote to start the song (“like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth”), and the “step crow child” comes from a mix of a Solomon Burke tune (or rather a Dylan tune, I think, as sung by Burke) and Crowchild Way in Calgary. In fact, there was a point when I thought the album was going to be called Crowciao, as an homage to the way that Burke says “child” in that song.

Rock Plaza Central on Myspace

The Wave Pictures (l-r: Jonny Helm, Franic Rozycki and David Tattersall)

If You Leave It Alone the new album by The Wave Pictures was released on Monday (4th May) via Moshi Moshi. The speedy  follow up to last years remarkable debut Instant Coffee Baby was reviewed here on TLOBF a couple of weeks ago by Simon Tyers. Here, David Tattersall – the bands frontman and lyricist guides us track-by-track through the new record.

1) IF YOU LEAVE IT ALONE – “The title track is also the first track, and it’s a good, long, sad song in which, amongst other things, I describe the contents of my fridge.”

2) CANARY WHARF – “I once went and sat in Canary Wharf underneath the big screen with the stocks and shares on it, and made notes.  A simple, little two-chord minor key song. It’s almost more of a doodle than a song, Toby Goodshank is a special guest on this recording; his harmony vocal part makes the chorus seem more like a chorus, which makes the song seem more like a song.”

3) MY KISS – “This is a re-recording of an ancient Wave Pictures song. I really love this song. I think it ought to be really famous and popular, but I suspect it won’t happen.”

4) I THOUGHT OF YOU AGAIN – “A true, long song about a far away friend, which I wrote when we were on tour in Spain and then Sweden. I wrote loads of rubbish, anything that popped into my head, on serviettes that I had taken from gas stations. We had these really long van rides on that tour. Anyway, when I got back to London I edited them down to make a song.”

5) TINY CRATERS IN THE SAND – “The idea of this song is that it is impossible to be in a long-term monogamous relationship without going insane, no matter how much love you start out with. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with that idea… It’s a kind of a marriage proposal song. It’s quite romantic! Let’s go crazy together!”

6) BUMBLE BEE – “A song about depression or about not wanting to get out of bed. It is a re-write of an old folk song called ”Froggy Went A Courtin”. It is deceptively happy sounding. It has some friendly animals in it who offer advice and criticism.”

7) COME ON DANIEL – “I have no idea what is going on here, I can’t remember writing this. When I hear it, I quite like it, but it’s more like listening to some other band….”

8) TOO MANY QUESTIONS – “One of two songs on the album that are written in the first person as someone else… They probably don’t know about this song… Anyway, I’m singing this song as a girl to tell you the truth. When my parents saw me sing this in concert, they thought that I had come out of the closet live on stage.”

9) BYE BYE BUBBLE BELLY – “The chorus and title come from an advert for a type of yoghurt which is meant to relieve middle-aged women of their constipation. The rest of it is completely made up.”

10) SOFTLY YOU, SOFTLY ME -  “This song is very sad to me.  I was trying to write an early 60s type Bob Dylan song, but found it quite hard to do. I ended up with this though, so it wasn’t a wasted afternoon. I love the sound Clemence Freschard got on this one, all the little picky, percussive things. This album owes everything to her.”

11) STRAWBERRY CABLES – “This is also very sad.  Nice horns by Stanley Brinks.  One of the key influences on the horn arrangements for this album was a Lou Reed song called ‘New York City Man’. It’s from one of my favourite Lou Reed albums, ‘Set The Twilight Reeling’.”

12) NOTHING CAN CHANGE THIS LOVE – “It’s nice to do a cover every now and then. Sam Cooke songs are very satisfying to play. So simple and elegant. It’s a nice little goodbye for the album.”

The Wave Pictures on MySpace

Still Flyin’ release their debut album Never Gonna Touch The Ground through Moshi Moshi Records on the 6th April.  The band recently just wowed SXSW, being named as one of the best bands at the festival according to Village Voice.

Still Flyin’ will be back for a UK tour and to play some festivals in summer.
Check out the videos for recent singles as follows:

‘Good Thing It’s A Ghost Town Around Here’

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Forever Dudes’

Click here to view the embedded video.

We got Still Flyin’s Sean Rawls to give us a track-by-track run down of their debut album…

1. Never Gonna Touch The Ground
The doorbell rings and the first group of people has arrived at your party.  They’ve got a twelver of brews with them and your buddy Ice cracks one and hands it to you before he even sets foot in your house.  You’ve gotta put on some jamz QUICK!  The boring haze of everyday life lingers for a few seconds but then everything becomes clear and you realize you are about to have a hammjamm with people that you love.

[This was the song that created this band.  It was a live staple in my bro band Je Suis France and I decided to make a band based on this song.  In the early days we'd start every show with this abbreviated version of the song - kind of a warm-up.  Eventually we got tired of doing that and now when we play it it's the opposite - an up to fifteen minute, sprawling, ridiculous version only brought out during the encore.]

2. Following The Itinerary
A slew of people show up all at once and you are starting to feel your party high.  Hugs and high-fives and fist-points to so many friends, a lot of which you wished you saw more often but are glad to be hanging out with tonight.  Even your weird neighbor who stole your dog’s frisbee shows up, but you don’t worry about that trivial shit.  This is life.  This is living.  You march right up to the dude, hand him a brew, and cheers him.

[This one is about the tour itineraries our guru writes for us when we head out on tour.  As if we weren't busy enough jamming life to the bone and playing tons of shows and trying to keep everyone in the same town, our guru gives us a list of objectives that always enhances the already-awesome experience.  This song is about the joy we get reading the itinerary for the new tour, and in turn the joy of being on tour, and really just the joy of being with loved ones.]

3. Forever Dudes
Your party high is quickly spreading to a party-wide party high.  Everyone is feeling the love, smiling, laughing, telling stupid stories, and generally jamming life.  People start tapping some toes, doing some head moves, some low-key arm whips.  You know, nothing too fancy yet.  You notice some of the high-fives seem to be timed with the beat of the music.  Seems like a dance hammjamm is on the verge of breaking out.

[This is the ultimate ode to friendship.  Specifically it's about twenty dudes getting together for a pal's bachelor party - a road trip on a party bus.  The song can also function as a straight-up song about the importance of friends in a person's life.]

4. Good Thing It’s A Ghost Town Around Here
Like wildfire, a dance hammjamm has broken out full-tilt!  Everyone at the party has packed their way into the room with the stereo blasting.  The lights are off and people are going all the way.  Sweatjams.  Elbows hitting people, brews getting spilled, people passing around a bottle of champagne – this is a real dance party.  The floor is shaking.  You think for a second about possibility of the floor caving in but quickly decide it doesn’t matter – it would only make the party more legendary.  Being a good host, you head to the cooler and grab a twelver and squeeze back into the dance party room to replenish beers for dancers in need.

[Whoa here is the first thunderjam on the record.  It's about jamming it too hard and being hungover at work the next day.  Was it all worth it?  Probably.  Besides, it's a ghost town at work.  No one's around so it's easy to just put my head down on the desk and rest.]

5. The Act Of Jamming
After the pure sweatjam of Ghost Town, some of the more out of shape people need to catch their breath.  Some others need to step outside to cool off for sec.  Even more need new brews.  However, a lot of other people are frothing at the mouth for more dancing.  An off-the-cuff goof-off jam starts.  It’s funky, it’s got some rhythm.  You look around and people are doing some stupid dances and laughing.  This night is going good.

[This song is literally the act of jamming.  At practice we sometimes devolve into jamming on some dumb riff and laugh afterwards.  This is us doing it in the studio.  Figured some people might need a break after Ghost Town.]

6. The Hott Chord Is Struck
People start returning to the dance room after their various breaks.  The next tune come on and it’s sweatjam world again.  You have to open the windows – shit is getting steamy in there.  At the end of the song everyone starts chanting along with the record and stomping on the floor.

[This is a tribute to some inspirational songs to me.  Trying to feed off of their good vibes and thanking them for it.  The songs referenced in the lyrics are Electric Avenue by Eddie Grant, Funkytown by Lipps Inc., All Night Long by Lionel Richie, Walk Of Life by Dire Straits, Turn To Stone by ELO, and What A Fool Believes by the Doobie Brothers.]

7. No Go-Kart Ideas
After the sweatjam, people pile out of the party room and spread out throughout the house and porch and yard.  Everyone needs a break after that last one.  You get into a funny conversation about all the crazy things you used to do as a kid, like the time you tied a rope above a trampoline and attached a bungee cord between your belt and the rope and jumped really high and in slow motion on the trampoline, until the bungee cord snapped and hit you in the back of the head and you had to get stitches.

[When I was a kid we had a term called "go-kart ideas".  It was named after the kid who would in all seriousness tell you he planned to build a go-kart complete with smoke screen, oil slick, weapons, etc.  You knew it would never happen but the kid was serious about it.  This song is about following through on all the crazy promises you make, no matter how unlikely they may seem.  The band Still Flyin' seems like a go-kart idea, but we exist.]

8. Haunted Houses
The stories continue amongst friends and you guys make some crazy plan to go to explore the abandoned warehouse after the party’s over.  Some people are too scared but it only makes you want to go even more.

[This song is about my extreme love of haunted houses.  My favorite thing to do is get the crap scared out of me at a haunted house.  It's a brooding yet fun song, which is exactly what I like about haunted houses.]

9. Dead Memory Man
The first chord slams of the next song start and people start screaming and sprinting towards the dance party room.  Some people are struck so hard by the jam bug that they don’t even try to get to the dance room and just start contorting right where they are in the kitchen or bathroom or street in front of the house.  People are ready to get down after that two song breather and they take it all the way, pushing it further than they thought was inside of them.  After the song’s breakdown people start crowd surfing.  One wild dude licks the ceiling.  Someone punches a hole in the wall.  Some other stuff gets knocked over on accident.  Brew and bottles are passed around the crowd liberally.  Everyone is at their peak.  You are so glad you had this party.

[We we play live I sing through a delay pedal called a memory man.  So much beer gets spilled onto it that it breaks pretty easily.  This song is simultaneously about that and about not remembering things after drinking too much.  I tried to get every lyric to conceivably be about either thing.  A dark tune but also a true thunderjam.]

10. Ginkgo Biloba
The party is winding down and people start to say their goodbyes and head into the night.  The last tune drained them of all their energy and the party is coming to a close.  A soft jam puts a good capper on the night and everyone is thankful for the great party.

[This one's about having a terrible memory in general.  One time I forgot the name of the town I was born in and was too embarrassed to ask my parents.  After a month it finally came back to me.  I only lived there for less than a year but still...  I started taking ginkgo biloba pills to give my brain some help but I couldn't ever remember to take the pills.]

11. Aerosmith, Take Me To The Other Side
The next morning you wake up and even though you’re feeling pretty rough, you have warm feelings from the night before.  You start cleaning up the house a little bit – picking up the beer cans mainly, and the post-party-reflection mood has you feeling so right that you want one last jam.  You put on the last song of the record and it does the trick.  With the long drone out ending, the house is clean and life is exactly what you want it to be.

[The last song is a metaphorical song about wanting to be famous and doing anything it takes to make it to the bigtime.  Aerosmith seemed like the best band to sing about but you could exchange their name with Creed or Fall Out Boy or Coldplay or Matchbox Twenty.  Creed, Take Me To The Other Side wouldn't sound nearly as good though.]

Still Flyin’ on Myspace

Their second album, The Law of The Playground, was released on Monday. What better time to hear all about the inspiration behind each of the tracks! We caught up with The Boy Least Likely To and asked them to give the low-down on each of the tracks.

Saddle Up – Lyrically I knew I wanted the first track on the album to begin where the last album ended, so I purposefully included echoes of and references to the themes of the first album. There’s this brilliant moment right at the beginning of the first episode of season two of buffy the vampire slayer where buffy turns to the camera and asks if willow and xander missed her, but because she says it to camera it’s as if she’s asking the audience watching. I wanted this song to work a little bit like that. I like the lyrics about not being a success but still making someone happy.

A Balloon On A Broken String – This is the second A side of the double A side with Every Goliath Has Its David. It was almost called A Balloon On A Borken String, because whenever I try to type the word “broken” I always type “borken” instead. I remember reading in Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland about a complex computer program called misspellcheck, or msp, which is used by the secret service to identify people. The basic premise of msp is that everyone consistently misspells the same words when they’re typing, regardless of how good a typist they are, and that these patterns of misspelling are unique to every individual. It’s a bit like spellcheck I suppose, but if it finds a word that is spelt wrong it doesn’t correct it, and it takes account of punctuation and typing speeds too. According to the book it only takes about two hundred and fifty words of typing before it can identify you. As well as misspelling “broken”, my other typing idiosyncrasies are that i consistently mistype “always” as “alwasy”  and i often put an “e” on the end of the word “both”. I also often type the word  “interesting” without the second “e” as “intersting”. Which is intersting. The song itself is just about what it would be like to be a balloon. It was written quite a long time ago and it was one of the first songs we finished for the new record.

I Box Up All The Butterflies – I think we knew how to record things a bit better by the time we came to make this album, and we were co producing the record with a friend of ours called Jamie Johnson, and he seemed to know what he was doing too. So I think our sound is slightly more refined, although I think it’s still sits very comfortably alongside all the songs off the first album. This is one of my favourite songs when we play it live. It just seems to come alive and I can’t help myself. It sounds so full but it has a lot of space in it at the same time. Also it’s got a recorder solo on it, played by amanda applewood. I wish all our songs had recorder on, but I suppose that would be a bit much. The song is just about loving something in the wrong way, being overprotective and possessive and squeezing all the life and energy out of someone. It did have lyrics for a third chorus too but i didn’t think we needed a third one so I deleted it, and then when we came to record it pete decided it did need one after all but I couldn’t remember them, and I’ve never been able to since.

The Boy With Two Hearts – This is probably my favourite song off the new album. We recorded all the brass parts with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, which was such an amazing thing to be able to do. When we first decided that we were going to use brass on this new album I knew I wanted them and I was so excited when we found out they were going to do it. We didn’t want the brass to be bombastic or polished, we wanted it sound like quite a traditional brass band. I remember when pete played me the demo, it was quite mournful in a really sweet way and I ended up writing relatively simple words for it. It sounds quite sad and Christmassy, and it reminds me of the theme tune to The Flumps but I don’t expect anyone else will think it does.

Stringing Up Conkers – I remember sitting upstairs in the studio, in a room where we used to store all our equipment writing this while Pete was recording the demo for Saddle Up in the studio downstairs. It’s about feeling out of control and powerless in the world and how sometimes the only way to feel anything is by controlling the tiny little things that immediately surround you.

The Boy Least Likely To Is A Machine – Instrumentally this is probably the most complicated song on the album. There’s just layers and layers of things going on. Our friend Andy came in to play the drums on it and I think they’re absolutely amazing too. It actually sounds like an out of control robot is playing them. I wrote the lyrics while we were stuck signed to our old label. I was completely disillusioned with everything. I always thought a record deal was everything I’d ever wanted. It was as if I’d spent my whole life dreaming about something, and now that it was actually happening I couldn’t believe how unhappy it made me. I didn’t ever regret signing with the label, because there isn’t any point in regretting things, but every day I would wake up and wonder how my life would be different if we hadn’t done all the things we did. The title was originally earmarked for a remix album we were thinking of putting together.

Whiskers – It’s just a song about having a friend when you’re young and growing apart from them as you get older, and about lots of other things too. It’s one of Pete’s favourite songs on the album.

Every Goliath Has Its David – This was one of the last songs we recorded for the album. We added it on at the last minute and then it ended up being the first single taken from it as well. There aren’t really any drums on it. It’s all radiators and stamping on the floor, as well as some of our best clapping ever. It’s a song about fighting, but then most of our songs are.

When Life Gives Me Lemons I Make Lemonade – It’s a song about making the most of what you’ve got, and I wanted the lyrics to be slightly over the top and silly, because for me it has the saddest line from the whole album in it halfway through the second verse when it mentions going to places in your dreams that are hard to get back from, and I really wanted it to jump out from the rest of the words around it. When pete first played me the demo I thought it sounded like a song in three parts and I loved the riff, because it reminded me of something that Queens Of The Stone Age might do if they used banjos, and I always imagined a barn dance being danced to it when I listened back to it.

The Nature Of The Boy Least Likely To – This turned out to be the very last song we recorded for the album. It was a song we’d been thinking about doing for a while but it took me ages to be happy with the lyrics. When I listen to our songs I always have a specific picture in my mind of exactly what or where I’m singing about, and I always think it’s odd that nobody listening will ever imagine the same images when they hear it. I have a very specific idea of what the cricket pitch and the swing seat and everything else look like when I listen to this song. When we first started recording we were planning on calling the album The Nature Of The Boy Least Likely To, but by the time we’d finished it the title didn’t really fit with the way the rest of the album turned out. If we hadn’t taken so long to make the record it would probably have still been called it.

I Keep Myself To Myself – It’s just a song about clamming up and never allowing yourself to feel anything in case you feel too much and end up getting hurt, but it’s also a song about being stubborn about the things you believe in even if it cuts you off from other people. I think this song is the best example of the lyrics and the music doing completely the opposite thing, which is kind of what we do quite a lot. The lyrics are quite bleak and miserable but the music is really upbeat and cheerful, almost idiotically so. We didn’t finish recording this until just before Christmas two years ago, because I kept changing the words and it was only when I’d written these ones that I could finally listen to the song and be some way towards being happy with it. I always wish I didn’t change lyrics after I’ve sung them all, but I always do and it ends up being really painful and annoying for everyone.

The Worm Forgives The Plough – I love the guitars on this, which is lucky because there aren’t many other instruments. This was another song that was mostly written quite quickly after the first album had come out, and then I spent a long time rewriting the whole of the first verse, but then pete persuaded me that it had actually been better as it was so I changed it all back again. I’m pleased I did that now. This is probably my other favourite off the new album, if I’m allowed to have two. It’s about being made more vulnerable by the very thing that’s supposed to be protecting you and it’s about taking revenge on the world.

A Fairytale Ending – I still find this song too sad to listen to sometimes just because it reminds me of when I was incredibly unhappy with everything that was going on around us with the label. I always knew it would be the last song on the album. I guess no other song could end it really.