Middle Class Fashion (“I freaked out when I heard Sawhorse, cos I grew up listening to Ludo and he recorded their first album,” admits Lindhorst.) Thus began work on the follow up to their debut. “It seemed like it came a lot faster this time,” says McClelland. It also came in a flood: Malzone started writing songs and just kept going even after they’d jumped into the studio. Even as they worked on their album in December, the band wrote and released Sentimental Single, a six-song holiday EP, without breaking stride. Soon the band was figuring out what to do with the 20 songs they’d recorded. “At a certain point you want to say, ‘Let’s stop making more songs so we an focus on these here,’” says McClelland, “but then every new song would be better than the last song, so...” “I would bring it to them and it would just evolve so quickly,” Malzone says. The band all agrees that the new album is a step forward for them. “I think the songs are a little more—I hate to keep saying ‘evolved,’ but I felt like Girl Talk was kind of simple song topics: heartbreak and a little bit of anger, even though it was these cheery pop songs,” says Malzone. “And I feel like these songs are a little darker, but a little more past the anger.” “More like not being angry anymore, and more like coming to terms with things you were angry about,” offers Vaughn. He shrugs. “I’m just quoting you, those are just things I’ve heard you say.” That’s fair:
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Vaughn and Malzone are a couple, so privy to a good bit of one another’s thoughts. “I’ve noticed that in a lot of the lyrics,” says Lindhorst, the new utility player responsible for additional keys, tambourine and harmonies live—and who thus had a fair amount of listening to do to catch up with the rest of the band. “I listen to Girl Talk and then to the stuff that you’re recording now and it’s...it’s just personal experience that’s evolved more than anything. The tone of the songs, I feel, is way different.” One would hope that a recording at an expensive studio would have a tone distinct from the home recording. And it does: the new recordings allowed Lindhorst access to McEntire’s gorgeous old Hammond B3, as well as all the keyboards a self-identified “Miss Synth Nerd” could hope to caress. But it’s also true that the content has changed. While live mainstay “Stuck” carries right over from Girl Talk, new songs “Go Phantom!” and “Holy Mother” read as character pieces quite apart from the earlier studies in heartbreak. And the chorus of “Everything”—”Don’t look away now, everything will be explained”—feels meditative and learned the hard way. The bass guitar gets more expressive on these songs, too, carrying some of the emotional weight in the instrumental passages. Meanwhile, the roots of the high-flying harmonies behind the line “I’m the tired host of your holy ghost”
in “Go Phantom!” are equal parts religious and cinematic. There’s still a flavor of bitter truth in the lyrics and their delivery, but they seem directed less at a disappointing lover and more at the weird old world itself. And, of course, they’re still as catchy as ever. The new album is coming together quickly—all twenty songs are tracked, and now it’s down to the mixing and song selection. The goal is “thirteen or fourteen songs,” says Malzone. Since most Middle Class Fashion songs clock in ahead of the three-minute mark, that would make for a brimming but not overstuffed collection. Wisely, the band declines to say when they think the new album will be out—”It’s so hard to set any kind of a date cos you know you always end up going past it,” says Malzone—but the goal seems to be a springtime release, followed by more touring. The last album benefitted from McClelland’s fascination with laptop recording; this time he is delving deep into video production. “I’m going to make sure we get a lot of videos up for this record,” he promises. If the last album was any indication, 2013 should be a busy year for Middle Class Fashion, and there’s no lack of new goals to set—including, one hopes, an Australian tour leg. Middle Class Fashion plays Off Broadway Feb 1 with So Many Dynamos and Née. Get there early, it’s almost certain to sell out.