Interview for The Skinny

Just over a year ago I spoke to Yeasayer singer Chris Keating, and, as well as stories of hanging out with Beck and crossing fingers for Barack, he had this to say about his band’s recording plans: “On the last record I feel like we made a lot of mistakes, but I’m happy with the way it came out… we don’t want to remake that record, but we don’t want to start from scratch either.”

Skip forward to September 2009, and guitarist Anand Wilder confirms that the band are putting the finishing touches to the long-awaited follow-up to All Hour Cymbals. “We’ve almost finished it. We had our last celebratory day of mixing yesterday and then we’re shooting a music video in LA in the next few days, and then we come back and then we’re doing recalls of the mixes and hopefully we’ll be able to finalise it by the end of this week.”

But how have the Baltimore-via-Brooklyn psych-funk scientists been occupying themselves for a whole year? Well, they contributed a new song for the Dark Was the Night charity compilation, Keating and bassist Ira Wolf Tuton worked on Bat For Lashes own second album, and Wilder started composing a suitably far-out sounding musical. From February, however, the three founding members of Yeasayer (drummer Luke Fasano has fallen by the wayside) finally turned their attention to their sophomore LP. “Um, well it took a long time because we basically had a lot more time to spare, and we had a little bit more money to play with,” Wilder says. “We weren’t working jobs or anything, so we pretty much just bunkered down in Woodstock, New York.”

The setting, aside from any obvious hippy connotations, had the facilities the band needed. “It was a house in the middle of nowhere, but it belonged to this guy who used to drum for all these big huge acts like Hall and Oates and Peter Gabriel,” Wilder recalls. “So he had tonnes of amazing microphones, all these different guitars, all these drums… It was the perfect environment for experimenting. All the songs went through many different stages, we’d scrap ‘em and start over again.”

After three months of no-pressure experimentation, the band gauged public reaction to the new songs at summer festivals like Bonnaroo and Pitchfork, before going back to hone the raw material. Again, they enjoyed a new-found freedom. “I think the last record was like a series of good ideas,” Wilder says. “I think people got it, they thought, oh they’re combining these different genres and playing with it, but I don’t know if necessarily it ever sounded that great. With this one we’re really focusing on each individual sound being perfect and stripping it down… We’re kinda getting over that whole ‘wall of sound’ thing, and trying to do something that’s lush but a little bit sparer, a little bit more pleasing to your ears.”

Despite the current trend for novel release methods, from pay-what-you-choose to coffee shop record deals, the band want to keep it old-fashioned. “I’m hoping it’s normal!” Wilder laughs. “With the last record we still don’t have vinyl to sell on our tour… So for me I’ll be impressed if, on the day our album comes out, we have vinyl, we have a CD to sell, it’s all up on iTunes, and we have a new website. I’ll be really happy to just think, oh we are a real band!”

As for a working title, Wilder stays tight-lipped. “We do have one but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it. It’s something very different, it’s good… It won’t be a surprise let’s just put it that way.” So no album title, no details of a new record deal (although the US/European labels “will be revealed pretty soon”) and no due date more accurate than early 2010. What is relatively certain is that Yeasayer will support Bat For Lashes at a couple of shows in Scotland this month, and Wilder will have some words with Natasha Khan: “I didn’t do anything on her record so I’m gonna have to give her a hard time for not asking me!”

The Victorian English Gentlemens Club

Tonight I was doing a little research (Google searching) about Cardiff art rock band The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, as I have to review their new album. On their Wikipedia one of the references is to an interview I did with Louise for The Skinny three years ago. Imagine my shock when I clicked the link, only for ‘Page Not Found’ to glare back at me. So like a diligent internet librarian, I’ve recreated that article in all its dubious, novice-writer glory…

“Our first intention is to be poppy, and our second intention is to avoid being cheesy.” To be honest, such humble intentions hardly begin to explain the deranged brilliance of The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club, but that’s how bassist Louise Mason describes their method to The Skinny, talking on the phone from her adopted hometown of Cardiff.

An authentic example of the much-touted art-rock band, the three members that combine to make VEGC – Louise, as well as Adam (guitar, lead vocals) and Emma (drums) – met at art college in the Welsh capital, although they’re all actually English, a fact which only half-explains the mock-refined band-name. “Adam used to paint these really weird Victorian characters at college, so at first we called ourselves The Victorian Painting Club or something like that, then took it from there.”

Before the naming stage, the trio were united by their shared enthusiasm for a certain art-rock predecessor. “The band was actually formed through our liking of Ikara Colt,” Louise recalls. “Me and Adam liked them and we bumped into Emma and she was massively into them. That’s how we got in touch with the label as well [VEGC are with Ikara Colt’s former label, Fantastic Plastic] and how we got signed in the end.”

Louise may cite influences like Sonic Youth and such post-punk notables, but VEGC are about as unique as it gets these days. Soundbites to describe their absurdist fare don’t come easily. The Pixies refracted through the mind of Spike Milligan? Nirvana soundtracking one of Terry Gilliam’s cut-and-paste animations? On songs like ‘My Son Spells Backwards’ and ‘Amateur Man’, VEGC gleefully twist the rules of pop-music with their discordant guitars, jarring vocal harmonies and nonsense lyrics – yet somehow it’s still pop. “We’re not especially technically talented, so we’re forced to use a lot of weird vocal things to experiment,” Louise admits in her modest, untouched-by-fame manner.

On a first listen, VEGC can seem unnecessarily off-key, or just wilfully all-over-the-shop, but repeated listens will reveal the strangely coherent tunes like bright pearls peeking out of dirty shells. “We don’t want it to be overly accessible but we like our big hooks I guess.”

With the album already sparking off a modest buzz in broadsheets and web forums alike, VEGC hit the road on a nationwide tour during September and October to soak up some of the attention. Just don’t expect them to look happy on stage. “We come across a lot more aggressive than we do on record. None of us are stand-up comedians so we keep the chat to an absolute minimum.”

Never ones to rest on their laurels, Louise and band are already back into a creative gear. “Even before we finished recording the album we were writing again. The difficult second album thing is kind of obvious really, because when a band stops writing and only does the promotional side, that’s when it goes wrong. We’re conscious of that and we just carry on battering them out.”

From The Skinny, September 2006
The new VEGC album, Love On An Oil Rig, is out on 7 September (2009).