4. The National – Trouble Will Find Me (4AD)
5. CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe (Virgin / Goodbye)
“A
lot of electronic bands these days, not wanting to name names, they shy away from the melody, shy away from the song and it becomes all about how the song is arranged or about interesting production ideas. They forget that the song is the basis of all of that. So while we were recording this record, we made sure songwriting was at the forefront.” Martin Doherty is ticking off the freeway miles on the CHVRCHES tour bus, a triumphant show at LA’s prestigious Wiltern Theatre behind him. Next stop: San Diego. For an act who were, in his words, “a studio project” a mere year or so ago, the transition to becoming one of the UK’s best-loved bands is something he’s gradually becoming accustomed to, but it still feels distinctly odd. Oh, and there’s that growing US fan base to factor in, too. “It occurred to me last night while we were onstage that we came to the States for the first time in March and played a 300 capacity venue in LA. This is our third time here, and now we’re filling a 2,400 capacity venue.” He trails off. “It’s, you know, a lot to take in at times!” Debut album The Bones of What You Believe set the task of squaring up to established live favourites like The Mother We Share and Lies, didn’t shirk the challenge. “We paid a lot of attention to the idea of not necessarily aiming for anything commercial or a hit, but concentrating on foreground and melody at every opportunity,” says Doherty. “We’re not afraid to let a melody be the key to a song. That’s what we’re about first and foremost: you know, just writing the tunes that we hope can connect with people, the idea that the song can be dressed in whatever way and still stand up on its own.”
3. Factory Floor – Factory Floor (DFA)
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o borrow a song title from Factory Floor’s self-titled debut album, there are two different ways you can approach being in a live band. You can refine your studio technique, recording and tracking each minute element of your sound, and archiving the material. Or you can throw yourself into the crucible of live performance, embarking on soaring, extended jams that guide your process when you finally return to the studio. Factory Floor have done both – during the making of Factory Floor, the band lived, worked, performed and recorded together, taking hundreds of hours of recorded performance and then stripping it back into the gleaming, polished
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Recover, released in the spring, and the first track to appear from the album sessions, was deliciously simple in both melody and arrangement and yet seemed to arrive bearing half a dozen spiralling hooks. “Yeah! We always approached that song with the idea that there would be two steps of the chorus. So that when the listener settles in to the first ‘If I recover…’ section, there would be another gear. That ‘double chorus’ thing, we use it a couple of times on the album, but Recover is the one where we got it closest to what we were aiming for. And, you know, why have one chorus when you can have two, right?” But where TBOWYB really succeeds is in how, as with the best (in Neil Tennant’s words) ‘tragi disco,’ it plays with shadow and light. Behind every euphoric synth wash or dizzying battery of beats lurks Lauren Mayberry’s brooding, knife-edge lyrics. “Absolutely. I think you’ve touched on something that was always in our minds while in the studio, which was to try at every possible juncture to balance any kind of lightness or sweetness with a darker edge: whenever we were at our most poppy, to be singing non-standard poppy lyrics. The lyrics are really important to our band. You take a song like We Sink where the melody is at its most simple and accessible and Lauren’s singing ‘I’ll be a thorn in your side until you die.’ We tried to use that kind of juxtaposition wherever possible.” It’s a genuinely triumphant debut and, for the converts, something of a relief that CHVRCHES had enough up their sleeve to deliver on all that promise. Hopefully, the band has had time to look back similarly and take pleasure from the results. Doherty is philosophical. We’ve been here in America for a few days and for the first time I’ve been able to take a look around and see how well the album is selling and see how many people are coming to the shows and derive some satisfaction from that because, well, this is what we always talked about doing and it seems to be happening. Which suggests we got something right!” [Gary Kaill]
walls of noise, techno, disco and post-punk that make up their angular, minimalist debut on DFA Records. In public, they’ve taken these blueprints as a starting point for wildly energetic improvised performances, devastating crowds at raves, nightclubs, festivals and art galleries with their lean, modern take on industrial music. “It’s about locking in with each other, it’s a lot more rhythmic,” says Nik Void, singer and guitarist (although these roles shift and mutate, just like their live excursions). “You get the sense that you are taking off in an aeroplane, that’s when it really starts to happen. It’s still down to chance what any given show will evolve into. We still push it, we’re still bringing in new sounds and bits of equipment as we go along, just to keep it fresh, and mess about with it a bit.” Is that sweet spot, where the three members lock into a new rhythmic plane and focus all of that intensity, getting easier to reach? “Definitely,” says Void. “The final member of the
Photo: Ryan McGoverne
hen his wife Joy Davidman died after three years of marriage, C.S. Lewis recorded his grief in a series of journals, published pseudonymously in the early 1960s. In the fourth and final diary dedicated to the subject, Lewis wrote on the immensity of his theme and the depths of its reach. ‘I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow,’ he reflected. ‘Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process.’ The quote came to mind in May 2013, when The National set up their instruments in New York’s MoMA PS1 gallery and proceeded to play the same song – High Violet’s Sorrow – for six hours straight. Over and over and over they struck up the same beat, the same chords, the same sadness, as if picking a scab or etching a deeper and deeper trench. More than 100 times, vocalist Matt Berninger repeated his weary mantra: “Sorrow found me when I was young / sorrow waited, sorrow won.” A fortnight later, Trouble Will Find Me was released. You don’t have to dig deep to hear echoes of that same stinging emotion, with Berninger intoning ‘I didn’t ask for this pain / it just came over me’ on Pink Rabbits; declaring ‘I do not know what is wrong with me / the sour is in the cut’ on Graceless; threatening ‘If you lose me, I’m gonna die’ on Heavenfaced; and so forth. It seems that, whatever the intentions of the Sorrow-full marathon, scouring the slate wasn’t among them, with familiar themes revisited across the album: regret, self-doubt and melancholia, but also hope, tenderness and lust.
But then The National have always been a band of subtle revelations, with each new release a refinement of the last rather than a sudden shift in gears. Their sixth album continues this tradition: it softens its immediate predecessor’s more brazenly anthemic urges, but retains – perfects, even – the core qualities that have brought them to this point. The results are understated but profoundly impactful – see, for instance, the shimmering guitar that climaxes I Should Live in Salt’s penitent pleas, or the way Berninger’s baritone is buffeted by Bryan Devendorf’s pitter-patter drums in Demons’ one-line chorus. Despite confessions of awkwardness and discomfort in the lyrics, Trouble Will Find Me is the sound of a band with confidence in spades, and the courage to keep picking at the things that hurt to see what’s underneath. [Chris Buckle] americanmary.com
Photo: Georgia Kuhn
Photo: Ann Margaret Campbell
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band is the music, it controls us sometimes. It’s all analogue based, and we don’t do anything preprogrammed, so it will always be touch and go what’s going to happen. The majority of the time it works, because we’ve been playing together so long – it’s become our own language, it’s how we speak to each other.” Minimalism and repetition are the foundation stones of Factory Floor’s sound. Eschewing song structures, chords, complex shifts in timing and melodic progression in favour of locked, building and mutating rhythmic patterns, spectral snatches of vocals and brooding slabs of noise, Void is passionate about their approach, and the dividends it pays to strip everything back. “It’s like starting anew,” she says. “It’s like punctuation in a way, all these guitar hits, the amps with feedback spewing out, or Dom’s electronic arps getting more acid, this all brings in melodies, although not a prominent melody.” When The Skinny first spoke to Factory Floor
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in the summer of 2012, it was from the London warehouse where they ate, slept and recorded their album – there was a sense of it being a tightly-knit family as much as a band. Now, only Gabe Gurnsey remains in the warehouse, with Void and Dominic Butler having moved away. “It just felt like, for me personally, it was time to move on once the record was finished,” says Void. “I felt like I was ready to move away from it and set my sights on the next chapter. Gabe stayed on, but unfortunately, it’s being demolished in January. I think we might have some big parties in there before it gets torn down.” Factory Floor, having established their identity and nailed their process, are ready to be themselves. “We feel a little bit more confident now,” says Void. “We know our fans, we know what we do.” [Bram E. Gieben] Factory Floor play Liverpool Kazimier on 5 Dec and Manchester Gorilla on 7 Dec soundcloud.com/factory-floor
THE SKINNY