The Besnard Lakes have deserved to win two of the last four Polaris prizes. This is a true fact.
Only a Canadian would not only work on their vacation, but do work that required them to talk to a member of a demographic who put them within arms reach of the Polaris Music Prize twice and arguably robbed them of it. Olga Goreas fought a weak cell phone signal after a short vacation to her namesake.
Not really to her namesake personally, but to the namesake of her band, The Besnard Lakes. “The people who run the joint, they know us. They’re well aware that we’re in a band of the same name,” said Goreas. “They’re very welcoming and nice to us. We just like to go camping and fishing. It’s good.” The break was likely needed. Touring almost non-stop since the release of their last LP, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night, it stands to reason that a little relaxation might be nice.
The husband and wife vocalist/instrumentalist duo of Jace Lasek and Goreas so often play with themes of loss and solitude, it also stands to reason that being hounded by fans on vacation might be a bit of a drag as well. Goreas disagreed.
“It’s always kind of surprising to us that people could know who we are. It’s always such a thrill and a joy. Canada is a pretty small country when it comes to it. There’s only so many people. There’s way less than 6 degrees of separation. It’s been great so far.” The size of this country might only be matched by the sheer amount of countries the band toured in the last year. “The last year was completely amazing. We went to Australia, we played in China. That was definitely a first and I don’t know if we’ll be allowed to again.”
In the short spans not filled with touring, the band has set its sights on scoring film and television. With expansive, moody textures and compositions on their records, they seem like a sure fit for a certain kind of movie. The band caught the attention of actor and new director Mark Ruffalo and scored his directorial debut, Sympathy For Delicious, which picked up a Special Jury Price at the Sundance Film Festival upon its premiere. With one more upcoming feature and a National Film Board gig scoring the web documentary Welcome To Pine Point (which will spawn a companion EP), Goreas says it’s an experience she is keen to revisit.
“They were both amazing experiences. I like the process of scoring a movie. I like having something visual to follow,” said Goreas. “There is a little bit of a difference between the albums we put out and the CDs we release. I enjoy doing both of them a lot, I would definitely see (us) doing them again.”
Heading back out onto the road with songs already committed to albums and new ones not yet fully formed, a sense of unease with where the songs were left must (and does, in some bands) fester. Goreas disagrees with this as well.
“I’ve never really had that feeling,” she said.
“The song does sometimes become something a little bit of its own and it has its own power and purpose. I’ve had people come up to us after shows and say ‘Man I love your record, but seeing you guys live is just beyond what the record is.’ That’s cool with me. I like that you can keep adding to it to make it something powerful on it’s own.”
This is one of those interviews where I’m dry. Dry mouthed, dry witted and dry with my questioning. I don’t try to be, but I’m so intimidated by a major figure of my adolescence that I freeze up. I always think it might be to deprive whichever purveyor of Clinton-swooning of the opportunity to be a dick and shatter my fantasies about them. Luckily, Zach Condon of Beirut (who wrote my second favorite song of all time and one record in my top ten) was not a dick. Quite the opposite. Coming fresh off a stand overseas and probably jet-lagged to hell, he gave a great interview, despite my efforts to sabotage it with nerves. Originally appeared in BeatRoute Magazine.
“It’s a tender moment when you reveal your new song,” says Zach Condon. The leader, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist behind the bedroom-project-turned-group-effort Beirut has returned to touring after a long hiatus following his well received sophomore album The Flying Club Cup. Exhausted by the rigours of an extended tour, they’re supporting their latest LP, The Rip Tide, with renewed energy. “Flying Club Cup and the other things took me for a ride and I knew if I was going to do it again I was going to need a rest.”
Their first LP since 2007 and separated a half decade from the breakout Gulag Orkestar, The Rip Tide represents a culmination of sorts. While Gulag Orkestar, The Flying Club Cup and the 2009 EP March of the Zapotec were preoccupied with regional sounds, The Rip Tide compromises that conceptual thread in a gluttonous way – it combines everything. “I knew about a year ago what I wanted the album to sound like. I’ve flirted with a lot of styles. Musical growing pains,” says Condon. Through all the variation, he recognized there were commonalities in his work. “I just noticed that there’s a thread that connects all of them, even if I’m recording with an 17-piece marching band from Mexico.” In that sense, The Rip Tide had a harbinger in a single the band released in 2007. “It has a similar melodic feel as ‘Elephant Gun’ does. I just though with this album I wouldn’t try to fight it and just try and remain as true to that sound as possible.”
Along with the broader sound comes broader cooperation with a band for Condon. “When I started writing music, I didn’t have peers that wanted to play what I wanted to play, that wanted to share my vision,” he says. Now, with the help of a group including Kelly Pratt (Arcade Fire, Team B), Condon can realize what was impossible just a few years ago. “Even though I wanted an orchestra, I was stuck with only myself. Now I have that orchestra and it would be a shame not to use it.”
Another first for Condon is releasing this LP on his own label, Pompeii Records. He insists, however, he did not experience an angry break with his previous label partners. “I really liked the labels I worked with, and that might have been the problem,” says Condon. He explains the desire to do it on his own. “You get into these relationships and friendships with these people that you work with on a day-to-day basis with these labels that you work with. There’s pressure from above and they will have to betray that relationship on a daily basis, asking you for favors that you and they both know you don’t want to do. It becomes a stressful thing trying to please everybody and not feel used. I realized I could either be cold hearted and distant or do it myself.”
The Rip Tide finds it’s climax with the track “Vagabond,” which breaks with Beirut tradition and eschews the foreign for an seeming foreign to Condon – home. “I’ve been going home a lot recently, to see what it feels like as an adult. I felt complete isolation from the city culturally. There was always this sense that even the city I was born in, I didn’t belong in. I felt culturally adrift. I think that’s why I ended up travelling so much, to try and find a home.” The image of a drifting vagabond is apt. “I just have the tendency to run from situations of authority. I have all my life. It’s kind of embarrassing now that I’m an adult, but it goes all the way back to me dropping out of school at 16,” says Condon.
The late night talk circuit may be a fading institution, but for the families of your average workaday musicians, that introduction by Conan, Letterman or Fallon might still be just the thing that convinces them that silly band of yours is a real thing.
“I had like various stages of that. My dad treated me differently when he saw my picture in Rolling Stone. He was like ‘Wow, you’re not just kidding around,’ ” says Ian Williams. He plays with a little band of massive acclaim called Battles, and they just released a tremendous new record called Gloss Drop. Still, in this world gone mad, it takes television to justify music. “It’s exactly the thing that translates to your aunt.”
Battles catapulted into the minds of music fans everywhere with their debut LP, Mirrored, in 2007. Less carrying the torch of the post-rock that came before it than snuffing it out and lighting a new one, it was a towering work, but nonetheless one that took a scenic route into the ear holes of the non-music nerd public. Appearing in everything from commercials to British teen soaps to video game soundtracks, standouts “Race : In” and “Atlas” were some of the best songs people had no idea were not written specifically for a product.
“You need strange new platforms to get your music out. People release their CDs now inside of magazines,” says Williams. He owes it to the loss of the small town (and even big city) record store, a much belaboured point, but sees the circumstances of their loss as a pyrrhic victory for musicians. “In some ways I’m not disturbed by what’s happened in the music world. In one way I think a band like Battles in a strange way, actually can get on Jimmy Fallon and other TV shows now. If you imagined 10, 15, 20 years ago, I think that there would have been more gates closed to us,” he says. “Our music would have been considered a bit more outsider. Now it’s not like Metallica has it all locked up because their publicist and manager have deep pockets. I think it’s healthy.”
From hearing Battles on the LittleBigPlanet soundtrack to hearing the album in full, a common reaction swells from new mainstream audiences: Where are the lyrics? Williams, who has played in bands similar to Battles dating back to the Tortoise-led instrumental rock movement currently monopolized by Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, sees this challenge to ubiquity archaic. “I’ve been playing instrumental music since like 1992 in various bands. I remember instances in the underground indie world where it was a novelty not to have vocals and everyone was talking about that. Now that gimmick – well, it’s not a gimmick – that’s not really seen as a novelty anymore. It goes without even mention,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s shocking just within the bubble of underground indie trendy. I don’t even know if it’s shocking to your average guy in the suburbs who goes to an Aerosmith concert.”
Unfortunately not reflected in this interview is the 20 odd minutes Darnielle and I spent talking about the Stanley Cup playoffs and his love of the Carolina Hurricanes.
By now it’s pretty much accepted that somewhere after Dylan on the mythic “Important Songwriters” list, John Darnielle’s name pops up. In that vein, over the last decade of making music he’s created somewhat of an Electric Dylan controversy for himself -instead of switching from acoustic to electric guitar, however, he’s graduated from solitude to team-building. The man who used to walk on stage alone and wryly introduce himself as “The Mountain Goats” can now justify the plural, adding Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster to the permanent roster, and their latest album, All Eternals Deck, reveals the fruit of those changes.
“We like playing together. It’s underreported,” says Darnielle. On the eve of a European tour behind the new album, Darnielle maintains that the change has been a welcome one. “And I don’t want to say that because I’m grateful for any reporting I get – but people don’t seem to notice that we’re a good band now and play well together. We do a thing that is musical. It’s not just about me doing my lyrics. About three guys playing together. When I have no voice, we can still play, and we can do the thing.” Darnielle admits, however, that a great deal of the band’s appeal still comes from his lyrics and singing, but not his voice. “People aren’t listening to me for my voice,” he says. “Half the reviews you read lead talking about how bad my voice is. The timbre of my voice is a take it or leave it proposition for most people. Singing and phrasing I feel I’m pretty good at.” It’s this reason why he does not insure his voice like many vocalists. “If my voice goes, I will still be able to do what I do. If I were a real singer, if I were Liza Minelli, I would insure the shit out of my voice.”
Though it might go without saying for an artist that has been making music solo for longer than many bands exist, playing with a group doesn’t make playing live a more comfortable prospect. “I’ve always been comfortable on stage. I enjoy being on stage. From the first time I stepped on a stage, I said ‘I like this’.”
Set to burst into the mainstream with his new film, Looper, director Rian Johnson has a few sterling credits to his name – the gritty high school detective noir Brick, the colorful international caper flick The Brothers Bloom, and a somewhat unlikely team-up with The Mountain Goats, Johnson’s favorite band. “In 2003 or 2004, my wife and I went to see Brick. Great movie, and the credits are rolling, the credits attribute the music to the “Hospital Bombers Experience”. And I was like, ‘Wait just a fucking minute here! I made that name up!’ And my wife was just like, no, no, no, I think that guy wrote to you at some point. And I was like ‘oh no, somebody I forgot to write back to!’” The experience was a positive one, resulting in the live performance film The Life of the World To Come. “You have all these names who are legendary names, but Rian is one who is a legendary name who isn’t legendary yet.”
All Eternals Deck is another riveting record from Darnielle, with all the lyrical eccentricities his fans have come to expect. But even with all the new changes, some things will always stay the same. “The lyrics, that’s still between me and the spirit of the universe. It’s very much a mystic pursuit with me. I don’t ask for anyone’s advice on the lyrics,” says Darnielle.
“I sit there with my thoughts and images. I do feel freed to write lines with more space in them.”
Sex With Strangers is killer. I can’t wait until my schedule lets me dance like there’s ass in my pants at one of their shows at long last. Their new record is a blast, and they’re some super nice guys. I had almost an hour and a half of interview here and it was a tough time cutting it down into a paltry 600 words. Always a good sign. Bandcamp embeds are tricky for me, so listen to this while you read.
There was a shift, somewhere. Disco died and rock decided that candy pop and Britney Spears were not going to have the a new monopoly on the dance floor. All of a sudden, boy bands were washed up and guitars were marshaling parties all over again. LCD Soundsystem was hitting big and the airwaves were saturated with House of Jealous Lovers. On the west coast, that torch is borne in a big way by Sex With Strangers, and their mission to get you dancing and thinking about….robots.
“I’m a pretty shallow person,” says Hatch Benedict, Sex With Strangers’ vocalist and frontman. Coming off a trilogy of records ending with 2009′s Tokyo Steel, Sex With Strangers puts to bed one narrative arc involving sexy robot ninjas and start something new. “I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable doing songs about me and my life, my friend here and his life, and stuff like that. I’ve always been fascinated by telling stories.”
Their new record, Frontier Justice, covers some new, familiar ground, a sort of Road Warrior story set in the Pacific Northwest. “These kinda two tribes that are battling each other for possession of the land or whatever. In between these two lovers, a man and woman with these mysterious powers and they’re basically going to these villages, driving up and down the coast and when they come to a village, bad things happen. Then these two tribes sort of realize ‘Okay, I know we’re battling but these two people are doing something crazy.’”
It sounds eclectic, but you shouldn’t think too hard about it. Hatch isn’t. “When we’re writing songs, I don’t take the the lyrics seriously. So I put together kind of sketches and ideas of songs and I’ll come back with all the words and say ‘Alright, here’s ten songs with lyrics, now make a story out of that.’ So it’s kind of a reverse thing. So I won’t go necessarily in there with a story. I’m always like ‘Oh shit, I need to come up with a story.’”
The lyrics don’t seem to matter to the man who writes them, but they matter on the dance floor. That lyrical quality that cuts through the fog of sweat and cologne, that pushes through and stands between you and whoever or whatever you’re grinding up against is present throughout Frontier Justice and the entire Sex With Strangers discography. It’s the “All My Friends” effect: the heat of the moment might wash out the context, but nuggets slice through and elevate the proceedings. Not that the musical base needs it, but it’s welcome.
Co-founder Mangus Magnum talks about the production of the new record. “This album we tried to get a more raw feel. We increased the focus on bass. This is our first album with live drums. There’s no real master plan.” No plan. Not taking it seriously, but serious music coming out. So what’s the secret? Benedict and Magnum answer simultaneously.
I love me some Two Gallants. The Throes is one of the best records of the last decade. Originally appeared in Beatroute Magazine.
Once, a band break-up was terminal. Any amount of time passing where news was unforthcoming about material in the works was another grain in the distressing end of an hourglass. Fortunately, the industry moved past the bonded church marriage stage of band interactions and embraced with open arms civil unions – shacking up and open relationships that let bands wax and wane rather than smash their head against a console until The Spaghetti Incident came out. Record, tour, relax, do other stuff, come back. Boomerang musicianship is the new norm, and just as their “comeback” tour ramps up, Tyson Vogel of blues rock duo Two Gallants reflects on coming back from what used to be the brink.
“We’re pretty excited about the whole thing. It comes naturally with a mixed bag of emotions. It’s been kind of a long time,” Vogel says. As the most dedicated-to-a-vision member of the Saddle Creek roster, news that Two Gallants would be taking some time apart after a string of lauded releases was cause for some concern, even if that concern did not penetrate the band itself. “We went off and did our thing for the past couple years and came back with like, a totally new understanding of ourselves and music in general and the music that we make together. It’s really invigorating and kind of intimidating.”
The break commenced after touring behind their 2007 self-titled release – like The Throes and What The Toll Tells before it, a bourbon soaked blues marvel, with rich narratives and six-gun smarts – didn’t go exactly as planned. “We hadn’t really planned on taking so much time off. Everything with Two Gallants has always been really organic for us. So I mean, the last three years had been really intense.” Personal issues and the demands of touring led to the prolonged absence. “We kinda needed to just step away and try to like, regroup a little bit individually so we could keep things healthy.”
Contributing to the hiatus was a string of unfortunate occurrences and a couple of loud, distracting events. Van breakdowns were just the start of it – album standout “Long Summer Day” on What The Toll Tells met a string of critics ignoring it’s southern fried narrative and instead vacantly decrying it’s use of the word “nigger.” Around the same time, a noise complaint was served by a Houston police officer that chose to physically stop a Two Gallants show, assaulting both members of the band. “It was never like really shy of strange happenings. Those were just one out of quite a few bizarre experiences. It definitely added to it. When the Houston thing happened, the events kept leading to pending disaster. We had to sort of step back and take a good look at why we were inviting such shaky things.”
Their time apart invited the other new norm of band life – side projects. Vogel flexed his compositional muscles with Devotionals while partner in crime Adam Stephens cracked out a solo record. “I think it was really necessary for him as well. The songs he wrote on his own were very different than we would have written. I think we both achieved something that way. With the new understandings, there’s a new quality.” Those new understandings, Vogel says, light the way forward.
“We want to do things differently because we don’t want it to happen the way it did before. We weren’t very healthy individuals when we took a break. We both have gotten over some hurdles and want to keep it in the past.”
I didn’t know a hell of a lot about Neon Indian before I was asked to write this story. My previous listens were too flippant, I think. Psychic Chasms is certainly not what I reach for, not at the top of the party stack, but it is pretty incredible.
Stepping in to research though, this fake “chillwave” discourse washed over me. It was really incredible the way people frothed at the mouth to slap the label on his stuff. There was no discussion of the incredible maturity of the record, just about how cool it was. That’s really what it all came down to: it was cool. Oddly, the person making that cool record is so far above all that bullshit it’s scary. Does that make him transcendently cool? I think probably.
It’s a conversation involving everybody except those involved. The genesis and subsequent disavowal of chillwave all took and takes place online, a preening mass of genre argumentation and classification concerning the heavy hitters of a sonic Furby, too trendy to sustain itself and destined to collapse under the weight of its ironic baggage. But these are the shrill inventions of commentators, as evidenced by the deep calm of the fake genre’s favorite son, Alan Palomo. The Neon Indian himself, he’s mentioned in any worthwhile breath on the subject. Wise beyond his 22 years and a scarily thoughtful individual, he breaks with the loud lo-fi chorus by starting most sentences with the words “I think,” and instantly convincing you that’s true. Recording his follow-up to the 2009 breakout hit Psychic Chasms, Palomo doesn’t let those voices affect him as much as they’d like to.
“I think for the longest time I told myself, regardless of the way things might unravel that I will just follow the same trajectory. I mean obviously influence is always going to be there,” says Palomo. Fresh from recording a collaboration with The Antlers on a yet to be released track and speaking from his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, he admits that his influences are much more personal than aesthetic, but his past success still informs what he creates. “I try not to think about it, but there are those moments when you come up with something unusual that you might like but you might wonder, well… I’m sure there are some people that would appreciate some more sonic nonsense, and others that are just looking for the clear cut single. I get the most joy out of music when I play with that impulse and see what people project onto it.”
The yet-to-be-titled sophomore release from Neon Indian led Palomo away from the New York breeding ground that claimed it to an unlikely Scandinavian cradle. “I did most of the writing in Helsinki. I have a little studio or an efficiency apartment up there with all my synths and I set up a little work station in the living room and got into the headspace of making music there.” The locale caught his eye during an extended tour in support of Psychic Chasms. “There was something always really bewitching about that city that made it a… I don’t know, just a really suitable place to take some time off. I had spent most of the year touring and the notion of kind of being in solitude for a little while in the winter months sounded like a real placid way of stirring up some new ideas for the record.” That headspace wore itself thin, however. “I think people tend to romanticize solitude. I think it was more conducive to personal development than album writing. It kind of ended up getting dark at certain moments just because of the lack of sunlight and the negative Celsius weather.”
The danger with any sophomore release seems doubled lately. Artists have their entire lives to work on their first great masterpiece, and then just a year or two to follow it, undertaking complex baker’s math to innovate while not alienating their base. Palomo is attempting just that in the age of the buzz band and the “Best New Music” tightrope, aiming for a new, dynamic sound. “The first thing that really came to mind as far when you think of lo-fi records with dynamic, a lot of post-punk comes to mind. It is like, in a way, an electronic post-punk record.” This is not to say that the frigid European north turned Neon Indian into a completely different animal, he says. “I think a lot of the influences are still there, but I think when I got there I was listening to and revisiting a lot of post-punk records, enjoyed previously. In my head I was coming up with these songs that were essentially guitar songs but I don’t really play guitar (laughs).” Like most things, Palomo is calmly aware of the dangers of a sophomore reinvention. “It’s a little bit more of an expansive sound, which in some ways can obviously come off as kind of a cliché when somebody is talking about a sophomore record. The idea right from the get-go was, I definitely am somewhat rooted in lo-fi recording and get some pleasure out of that aesthetic as far as the sonics go, but I definitely wanted it to have more dynamic because there was some sounds I was hearing weren’t translating.”
With all the expansion, it helps to look back at where he’s come from. Neon Indian caught ears with it’s innovative soundscapes but kept them with honest emotion. The moody vocals and stained-glass nostalgia colored Psychic Chasms, but the idea of writing specifically about a scene or event in his life is lost on Palomo. “I think obviously when I write a record, at least lyrically, I have to shoot from the hip. I can’t write lyrics based on any kind of abstraction, or I can’t write a song about a rock in a pond, you know? I think the music definitely reflects my current disposition and that is definitely in and of itself a scrapbook or a document.” That too will undergo a change with his new record. “I think that idea is still the same but I don’t think it’s necessarily as nostalgic.”
The lo-fi, bedroom-recording aesthetic runs up against a certain philosophical wall after a successful record and tour. Does the destruction of the poverty aura surrounding the movement become a concern of authenticity? Does the sound ring false if money can be spent on its curation? Palomo is unfazed. “I think, obviously this time around I do have more resources and to just sound exactly the same would not be entirely representative of some of the things I could do. I don’t necessarily think it’s contradictory, it just depends on what the equipment is and what it’s meant to do, or what it’s not meant to do, more importantly.” Lo-fi chic is another abstraction Neon Indian just doesn’t subscribe to. “I think playing with fidelity is an aesthetic choice to begin with. I think if I wanted, if originally Psychic Chasms was meant to sound better or different it would have. I think because my background before Neon Indian was kind of more rooted in dance music which is just kind of obsessing about production.” That stifling attention to detail is what attracted Palomo to the “kind of aloof, carefree take on the arrangements and sounds,” Psychic Chasms made gospel. “The ideal was to never slow down the momentum,” he says. “This one, by design because I’m trying to make sounds that are a little more focused or are used a little more strategically, any way you cut it, it was… you would have to sit and really tinker with the sound. You would get to a point where the initial spark of it wasn’t there.”
What is it that allows someone so young to ride so firmly in the eye of a storm created around him? The coping mechanism could be credited to another musician in the family, the Palomo patriarch dabbling in Mexican pop music before Alan was born. Making music accidentally perfect for pissing off squares and one’s parents (a distinctly retro and seemingly forgotten notion), Palomo insists they’re open to his endeavours. “The comments I hear are like ‘why is your voice so obscured? You have a beautiful voice! You shouldn’t put too much effects on!’ The kind of stuff where you’re like ‘Daaad! It’s supposed to sound like that!’ ” Their interest is probably more parental than musical though, Palomo figures. “I think because I’m doing it, they definitely try to branch out and really listen to it. My dad’s done music his whole life, so the bridge isn’t that wide.” The acid narratives are another story, though. “I guess that’s just the kind of thing you don’t talk to your parents about.”
A savantish, centered 22-year-old riding the eye of a manufactured sensation, Palomo translates that advanced maturity into his work: it endures, and will endure when their chillwave enters the elephant graveyard alongside ragtime and trip-hop. “I didn’t really set too many tangible goals or expectations, it was just, they’re all rooted in the music itself. There’s nothing I can be prouder of than whatever comes out.” The hyperventilation is not his, and the quick route to cool is a selfish dedication to the art, one he navigates easily. Its future?
“I’d like to be hanging out in Texas, eating tacos with my friends.”
I god damn love Man Man. I’m biased. Six Demon Bag is in my top ten records of all time, so talking to Honus Honus was a real bucket list moment for me. Their new record, Life Fantastic, comes out tomorrow and is incredible. I can’t wait for people to hear it.
“For the tenth time, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It’s as odd a way as any to be greeted on the phone, but not for Ryan Kattner, better known by his pseudonym Honus Honus and as frontman for the experimental psych-pop band Man Man. Whether this was purposefully zany, an attempt to put me off my guard or a successful attempt to inspire an opening paragraph such as this, I never found out.
On a break from near constant touring on the eve of the release of their fourth album, Life Fantastic, Mr. Honus reflected on the new record.
“I’m really psyched about it. I’m excited to see how it’s received. I really hope people listen with open ears instead of being like ‘Another Man Man record!’ We put a lot into this one. Not that we didn’t with the other ones, but a lot of different energy on this one.”
Starting with the 2004 release of The Man in a Blue Turban with a Face, Man Man has traded heavily in bizarre, catchy baroque pop and a live show that sets word of mouth and blogs blazing. Like an energetic, (more) inscrutable Mr. Bungle in dayglo warpaint or the score to a David Lynch world conquest, their breakout 2006 release Six Demon Bag may have finally been bested with their latest. “I feel like we’re getting better and better at what we’re doing,” says Kattner.
Teaming up with Mike Mogis, of Bright Eyes fame, as producer, Life Fantastic puts front and center the elegant songwriting and emotional depth that made Six Demon Bag a critical and cult darling. Their first time working with a producer, Honus Honus sees it as a positive experience. “We needed to have some outside ears, and someone with a chainsaw to attack our songs.”
The new focus is apparent. “Dark Arts” is a marvel; its piano ambush intro melting into a frenetic, hellish tango, with Honus Honus crooning “These days I feel like a pariah/an albatross with my feathers on fire.” Its contrast with the soda shop sing-along “Piranhas Club” and the career high “Shameless” is stark, but all three represent the core of the Man Man philosophy: intimidating musicianship producing challenging pop with a deep melancholy that never bogs down the dance floor. It’s a trapeze act with no net and Man Man navigate it like Flying Graysons (without the fall, naturally).
“It’s the whole reason why I got into playing music,” says Kattner. “It was to get these things out of my system. It can be transformative. For me, it’s getting some baggage out, but for some people that could be a fun joyous song. I appreciate the challenge of a melancholy center being wrapped in birthday wrapping paper.”
Central to Man Man’s growing legend is their marquee live show. “We have fun playing music together. And we’re really fortunate to do it as long as we’ve have and that there’s people that support what we do.” The stage climbing, diving and intense bandmate interplay of their shows has been the sustaining force of their career. “We feel like, even four records in, we’re a word of mouth band. It’s the gospel of what we do.” Kattner insists. “We don’t wanna get complacent. You gotta have the hunger.” It’s something he’s keen to do for the foreseeable future.
“Fuck, I don’t know what my marketable skills would be at this point. I don’t know what the demand is for someone who wears dresses on stage and looks like a maniac and sings sad songs.”
I really loved that first Saw flick, so I jumped at the chance to talk to the guys behind it. Insidious is flawed, with a ton of startle horror, but at it’s core has great practical effects and filmmaking techniques. It’s the most fun I’ve had at a big horror flick since The Descent.
Like most revolutionary horror franchises that push past the boundaries of a trilogy (and even moreso the ones you can’t count on both hands anymore), people forget just how groundbreaking they were. Certainly Saw will be remembered alongside Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street, but where those franchises fell to camp, Saw fell to blood. Giving rise to a slew of “torture porn” pretenders that peaked last year with the fascinatingly abominable A Serbian Film, Saw was a revelation in a stagnant genre. Somewhere along the way, however, the focus became the gore and blood, the two least frightening parts of Saw. The creative team behind the revolution, screenwriter Leigh Whannell and James Wan attempt to capture the riveting psychological horror that set Saw apart with their latest film, Insidious.
“I think that’s partially what I want to prove with Insidious is that it’s possible to make a scary movie without blood and guts,” says Wan. With his partner Whannell, Wan has crafted a horror film that is mindful of convention, but aggressive in it’s subversion of those tropes The story of a young boy’s mystery coma and the spiritual infestation at the root of it pulls the very best of Poltergeist into the the modern shell of The Ring caliber art direction and bowstring suspense. He claims the Saw sequels missed the true horror core of it’s origin. The fear in Saw never came the blood, but the simple query “do you want to play a game”; the use of a bandsaw to cut off a limb was never near as scary as the threat of it’s presence. “There was scary things in the first Saw film that people now forget. All they can remember now is all the traps and the blood and guts of the sequels. That was never the focus of the film. I wanted to go back and do something that was scary again, but without all the trappings of what Saw had.”
That the partnership between Whannell and Wan that started in film school is obvious. The academic attention to horror detail and history is plain in Insidious, and is in some sense a return to Hitchcockian suspense techniques and tone seen in Saw. Starring Patrick Wilson (Watchmen, Hard Candy) and Rose Byrne (Damages, 28 Weeks Later) as the doting parents who must contend with the cleverly realized spirits harassing their family, Insidious is as inventive and flawed as their previous work. From the brilliant throwback title card to the daring sequences of terror in broad daylight, Insidious plays fast and loose with hackneyed horror. “We want you to be uncomfortable in all scenarios. We don’t want you to take a breather when morning comes,” says Whannell. “You know a film is good when it has you scared in the daytime.” While one horror trope Insidious does not eschew is tripping on the hem of it’s dialogue, it’s effectively plotted, it’s startle-moments and aural stingers balancing nicely with eye-popping fever dream art direction.
Working with a budget even less than that of Saw, Insidious flaunts ever dollar on screen, becoming the best major horror production since The Descent graced screens. Wan and Whannell claim the restrictions enabled that success. “Leigh and I wanted this to be a low budget film. This is way smaller than Saw, and Saw was small. I actually find that when you have a finite amount of tools and toys and budget to play around with you actually make a scarier film,” says Wan. Whannell adds, “The difference I saw with James is that with Saw, he was frustrated with the lack of budget because it was preventing him from getting all these shots he had in his head for years. On the set of Insidious, he was reveling in it. He was reveling in the spirit of the thing. I think he was sick of development hell. I think that instilled in James a sense of ‘I just wanna go and shoot something!” It’s an adventurous attitude that bleeds into the film. “So instead of saying ‘oh man, I can’t believe we can’t get that crane shot’, you’re just like, fuck it. Let’s just grab the camera and do it.”
He continues, laughing. “Film school. Film school spirit.”
I used to listen to The Dears a bunch, but one song in particular. When my hetero life-mate Tiffer and I were making a video together for our high school graduation, I was of the opinion that it should have been an upbeat affair ending in a devastating montage to their track “We Can Have It”. That never materialized, but I remember summer nights with the windows rolled down listening to that song. Not particularly good times, but good memories. I was pretty excited to do the interview, is what I’m trying to say. Originally appeared in Beatroute Magazine.
There was no finger tattoos reading “ELWOOD” or jail time that threatened and disbanded the previous version of The Dears. But the resurgence of the Toronto rockers and their shiny new line-up came about in a decidedly Blues Brothers way. Talking just days after the band’s second appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman and the release of their fifth LP, Degeneration Street, frontman Murray Lightburn notes a marked difference from the new group and the one that years earlier experienced a messy mutiny almost took down the band from the inside.
“The spirit of the band is significantly renewed. The band that was on Letterman a few years ago was feeling quite defeated. The spirit of the band was feeling pretty down.” The problems within the band threatened to end the way the band was, but according to Lightburn, never threatened the band directly. “You always hear about some bands not getting along, but they still go forward, or they break up. For myself and Natalia it wasn’t really a choice to end The Dears. We didn’t feel like we had that right. It wasn’t really entirely up to us.” So, the pair did like Jake and Elwood and put the band back together.
The new lineup for The Dears isn’t coming in completely fresh. With the exception of drummer Jeff Luciani, the group all have some tie to the band’s shared history. “[Robert] Benvie toured No Cities Left, [Patrick] Krief toured No Cities Left, Gang of Losers, played on Gang of Losers, and everybody played on Missiles. There’s a deep connection. Roberto played the very first Dears album.” The new blood doesn’t stick out, Lightburn says, remarking that Luciani has “been amazing, an amazing addition, he fits right in there in spirit and attitude”.
Getting the right people into position wasn’t a simple prospect, however. Each member had some hurdle to clear before they could be added to the roster. Benvie was the most fortuitous addition. “We kind of saw the writing on the wall. The bass player that committed to playing on Missiles quit. So when she quit, we needed a bass player for the North American tour. So we said ‘for kicks, why don’t we ask Benvie, that could be fun’. So we talked to him, and as luck would have it, his job and commitment was ending the very day our tour was beginning in Toronto. So he quit his job and went straight to sound check and got on a bus for a six week tour.” At the end of that tour, Benvie expressed interest in joining the band proper.
Roberto Arquilla was long a de facto member of the band, but never consummated the partnership. “When I sent him a text, it was funny. We said ‘look man we got the crew together, this is it, are you in or out’ and he said ‘at the moment I have to say I’m out’. So we get this other guy in, send him an email saying ‘welcome to The Dears’ and literally 24 hours later Rob comes over and I’m like, ‘what’s going on here’ and he’s like ‘alright, I’m in!’” His addition to the band was a personal victory for Lightburn. “I’d been waiting for him to say that for about a decade”.
With the pieces back in place and on the legs of a brawny, demanding new album, The Dears might not be on a “mission from God”, but are ready for anything “One of the things I learned after making Missiles was that The Dears could withstand pretty much anything.” Lightburn includes time in what they weather.
“I’ve committed myself to being the lighthouse keeper until…until I’m gone.”