Animal Collective

illustration by Phil Dunne

Ten years ago the good ship Animal Collective began its musical voyage, embarking into a deep ocean of avant-garde noise, bubbling psychedelia and whirlpools of high-frequency delirium. Year by year, release by release these four adventurers sailed ever-closer to their eventual destination, distracted by an Odyssey-like saga of encounters- the Sirens of synths-pop, the many-headed monster of freak folk, the divine seductions of ethnomusical experiments. In 2009 the band finally sailed through their water curses and found themselves in the shallow waters of a sunny lagoon. Disembarking from his well-worn vessel, Admiral Avey Tare regaled us with his adventures, told us his itinerary, and what they make of their new environment- Oh, and didn’t they lose a man overboard?

Hey Dave. Dave or Avey? Do you have to be in character to do interviews?

Haha, Dave is cool.

First of all I have to give you a collective thanks from the people in Dublin who got to your last gig, I think it’s pretty much everybody who was there’s show of the year.

Oh man, that night was such a mess. By the time we finally got to the venue we were exhausted, but really psyched up to play as good a show as we could, especially since we had such bad luck the last time we came over when I was sick. We wanted to just get out of our minds, and get everybody else out of theirs too. We ended up getting an amazing energy from you guys, it was genuinely one of our highlights of 2008 too. We’re looking forward to coming back in March and making it up to all the people who’ve missed out so far though.

If that show was a high point of 2008, I think Merriweather’s already in contention for the defining musical happening of 2009…

Awh man, thanks, we’re so excited for it.

You’ve talked about your music being certain colours before- What colour do you think Merriweather is?

I guess I see at as two different groups of styles, two different groups of colours splitting the record. Overall we talked about it having a lagoon quality, like a shallow lagoon with lots of blues and greens, quite tropical and shimmering, anything you’d see in a coral. So we see a lot of it as having a blue-green quality, but then a bunch of songs are more earthy.

When I talked to Brian (Geologist) when Strawberry Jam came out he explained the relation of the texture of that album cover and the sound inside, on Merriweather were you trying to create an optical illusion sound?

I think that particular optical illusion reminded us of that aquatic feeling, the waves of it, the shimmering, and the sense of being underwater. That’s why were so partial to it and decided to use it.

The visual record you’re working on now, is that following the same line of effect?

That’s a collaboration with our friend Danny. The music and the film are really joined together, it’s a little more experimental. We want it to be really difficult to seperate the images from the music. Because of that it’s a sort of different experience, compositionally. It’s not very song-y, but it still sounds like Animal Collective. And there are a few sweet pop moments on it.

Talking about the aquatic sound, I thought Water Curses was about as wet as an album could get, but Merriweather takes it to a whole different level…

Hahaha, I know! We did too…

What is it about that echo effect that attracts you?

I dunno. I guess with Water Curses it was a little more predetermined. It was called Water Curses from a joke phrase that came up during Strawberry Jam when all these tragic events seemed to be happening with water. There was a flood in the studio, and we kept spilling liquid on stuff and things like this…

And it start seeping into the sound through the mic inputs?

Exactly! Everything we came up with started being like that, people would come up to us after shows and tell us it was like being underwater.

Is Merriweather a more electronic version of your more acoustic stuff, if you get me? Song-wise it’s a lot more along the lines of Sung Tongs, say, but it also sounds like your using more samplers and electronics.

Oh totally, we’re approaching an electronic album in an organic way. Even though we’re utilizing a lot of the samplers we want to gel with each other in a more natural way. Plus a lot of the sounds we’re sampling are acoustic instruments. Lots of string, guitar, drum samples. And I think the sound reflects that.

How does the album name reflect the music within it?

Well Merriweather is this venue in Maryland we’re all aware off from that we went to shows in when we were younger. There’s this rumour going around that we saw the Grateful Dead there when we were kids, we actually never did. I think the Dead were actually banned from playing there! The venue’s in a sort of planned community, and a lot of the community bands were from there and none of them liked the Dead at all. But the name signifies the ritual of listening to music outside. Merriweather has this really large lawn you can sit on and chill out during the music and enjoy the atmosphere. When we were younger and listening to some Neu! track or something with a big guitar solo we’d say “Man! This is so Merriweather!”. We often got into music that way, when we were younger, from just hanging out outside and listening to all kinds of new stuff. So we picked it because it had a really personal meaning but is about that communal feeling.

Do you think the album’s so Merriweather then?

I think it has this pretty epic quality. A lot of the early takes of our songs we noticed seem to come from the outside, or would descend on your, like ‘In The Flowers’. We also really liked that it had the word ‘weather’ in it, because we started attaching different weather patterns with the songs, tornadoes, hurricanes and tropical suns and stuff like that, since when we recording the weather was pretty drastic- We had to shut down the studio because of a tornado at one point.

Lyrically and musically speaking, a lot of Animal Collective’s stuff is always innately linked with nature. But, apart from Noah, you guys live in New York City. Is it sort of escapist that your songs are so set in this less man-made universe?

In New York sometimes you do forget you’re part of nature sometimes, and me and Brian are lucky in that we get out all the time to tour, and it is a breather to get out of the city. We’re lucky that we grew up in Maryland, which is where I guess a lot of that stuff stems from.

I read a preview from a big music magazine saying that Merriweather is a ‘landmark American album’… Do you think there’s anything distinctively “American” or representative of America in Animal Collective’s music?

Haha… It’s difficult to say being on the inside, though I think originally I would never have thought that. A lot of interviewers bring up the Beach Boys in regards to our sound. It’s so weird. I know some people think sometimes sounds a lot like Brian Wilson, but it’s still weird. I mean we like the Beatles, probably more so than the Beach Boys, they’re not like our favourite band. I love Smile and stuff, but I would hardly ever throw them on. Someone said to me recently when they were here “The Beatles are so British” but there’s nothing really British about Animal Collective at all, so you must be more American. I guess… We are American, which is probably where that comes from. Something like Summertime Clothes is very New York, lyrically, being about living in a city so hot you need to go outside and walk around in it.

When bands like El Guincho and Ruby Suns and Born Ruffians take that Animal Collective template and run with it do you feel more possesive, or proud that people are using your sound to some degree?

That’s a whole new thing for us, even just talking about it. People bring being highly influential up a lot now… I think it’s cool when bands that are our peers say we’re a really sweet band and are influential to them, because we used to be at the stage where we’d say the same thing about other bands. But it’s not like we’re in a position to point fingers and say “Oh they’re ripping us off”, or anything.

Do you feel in a position of some responsibility then, and any pressure from that?

No, not really. (Contemplatitively) We only really feel responsible to ourselves. Ever since we started we always wanted to be an act doing something singular, something individual, whether we were popular or not. We don’t let other people’s opinions effect us all that much, so long as we feel we’re progressive and moving forward with our own things, being experimental if you want to say that. But we like to feel soulful, make music that comes directly from us, and we’re very aware of being derivative. We want to be Animal Collective.

Is there anything particularly insulting or frustrating critics have said about Animal Collective?

I wouldn’t say insulting as such, but there was a school of people who thought were just a bunch of jokesters, or tricksters taking the piss out of modern rock, trying to poke fun at it. And people who think we don’t work very hard at what we do, that we just improvise and throw everything together, or don’t care what we do onstage. That would be the most frustrating thing, and there are some other smaller things like when we get too associated with drugs, called druggies or weirdos, or people thinking we’re being weird for weird’s sake. To us there’s nothing weird about what we’re doing at all. That and the whole “childlike” thing. So many of our more recent records have been inspired by who we are now and our current experiences, but get tagged with this sort of childlike wonder. I think it is good to view life that way, as if everything is new and untainted but we’re not these guys obsessed with writing about our childhood memories.

I think that’s down to you making a lot more positive and optimistic music than the more cynical-is-cool majority would.

Totally.

Has the band dynamic changed at all since Deakin stopped contributing?

In the sense that he’s a pretty big guitar-orientated part of the band it’s shown I think on this record, but it’s fine I mean, it challenges us to find different sounds and directions, and we’re quite used to that challenge and that dynamic from one of us going away for a while. Not just musically, I mean personality too, Josh is a pretty big personality, especially onstage, his energy is definitely missed by us. But it’s something we’re used to having to work around, and find new ways of filling those gaps.

Have you got any other projects in the pipeline? Would you consider putting out another Pullhair Rubeye record, say?

It sorta depends on what comes up, we’ve been really Animal Collective-orientated lately, especially with this visual project coming up. I know Noah has started working on some new songs, which will probably just evolve over time, he usually takes his time with records. With me collaborating with people like my wife (Kyia Brennan of Iceland swoonsome collective Múm) or my friend Eric (Copeland, of fellow NYC noise-experimentalists Black Dice) it comes down to when I have time to do it, when we’re hanging out, and it’s relaxed which sadly hasn’t been a lot lately. It’s something I do like to do a lot though, so hopefully something will happen soon.

So what do you want 2009 to bring Animal Collective?

Surprises, I hope! I hope it’s as productive and interesting as this one, I’m amazed we got so much done this year. Maybe there’ll be some time off, I do like to relax, to travel a lot, but I do hope we get a lot done.

Has there been anywhere that the band hasn’t taken you on your travels yet that you’d like to go?

I don’t know how possible it is, but I’d really like to play in Africa. I love African music, old folk music, it’d be wild to explore certain areas like that. We’d also like to tour Asia a lot more, it’s something we don’t get to do a whole lot.

Merriweather Post Pavillion is out now. Animal Collective play Tripod on the 27th March.

Gang Gang Dance - St. Dymphna

Gang Gang Dance
St. Dymphna
Warp Records

On this their fourth album (and first on Warp) NYC’s third finest experimental group Gang Gang Dance refine their phantasmagorial charm beyond that of their patchy back catalogue. Like Black Dice, GGD have sometimes existed more comfortably as an idea, or flattered to deceive. St. Dymphna stands out as their first concise and representative statement.
The album opens with an orgiastic double header in “Bebey” and “First Communion”, segued gloriously together with a decimated synth attack and highlighting one of GGD’s two areas of expertise: multi-instrumental frantic rhythm-smithery.

The quartet’s second trump card is its textural adroitness, as highlighted by St. Dymphna’s second movement. An intertwined mesh of vocals make up “Blue Nile”’s sonic pallette, with instruments I can’t claim to know the names of adding in brief moments of melody, while “Vacuum’”manages to be both an exercise in easy-listening music and actually memorable - a feat in itself.

Never one to pander to expectations, Dymphna’s next technicolour drop is “Princes”, a bizarro dub-rap turn with some trance-like arpeggios surrounding the familiar delayed vocal stylings of Lizzi Bougatsos. Delayed drum samples, glitchy electronics, computerized brass riffs and a very definite Warp attitude make up the middle section of the album, before finishing off on the slow groove and ethereally Kate Bush-like “House Jam”, and the Outhud-styled guitars and accomplished polyrhythm of “Desert Storm” and “Dust” .
As with their most common (though sonically incompatible) reference points, Black Dice and Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance thrive on indefinability. St. Dymphna, like the releases before it, is a conglomerate of the most diverse styles carried out with the least pretentious of intents. GGD have picked the wisest time to return, too: the wider indie-mainstream market has opened up to their sound, thanks to the diluted Kia Ora versions of the band’s freshly squeezed psychedelia courtesy of chorus-happy MGMT and Yeasayer. Unlike the contrived inclusion of world music influences in these crossover hit-merchants though, Gang Gang Dance’s stylistic experimentation translates more sincerely, making “First Communion” a guilt-free “Sunrise” to drop on the dancefloor. It’s finally time for one of NYC’s finest outfits to become more listened-to than name-dropped.

Wolf Parade interview

Illustration by Scalder.

From the tangled guitar and synth intro of ‘Soldier’s Grin’ the entire attitude of Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer can be foretold. It plays like a decelerated ‘Fancy Claps’, the Canadian outfit’s most frantic moment on their zealously adored debut Apologies To The Queen Mary; The same playful melodies two-step with each other, but their pace is slower, their movement more intuitively complex, and they’ve stopped stepping on each other’s feet. The teenage disco phase of the Parade’s triumphant indie-rock has come to a close. No more desperate grabs in the dark, no more boundless energy. At Mount Zoomer is strictly ballroom.
In the three years since Apologies earned more swooning looks than Zooey Deschanel at an indie disco Wolf Parade (comprised of the two songwriters Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, ex-Hot Hot Heat guitarist Dante DeCaro, laptop-fiddler Hadji Bakara, and drummer Arlen Thompson) have been elevated to a dizzying plateau overlooking North American indie. Nobody ever claimed they were doing anything original, they were just doing something frighteningly addictive and widely accessible. However, thanks to the band’s 5,201 (approx.) side-projects, Wolf Parade LP2 was as tangible as the ghosts that populate their lyrics. Thanks to a brace of highly-lauded albums from Krug’s Sunset Rubdown and Boeckner’s Handsome Furs hype surrounding what would become At Mount Zoomer maintained its barometer-breaking levels. When the album finally dropped it could only polarize.
Three months after most ears heard the band’s sophomore release disparate opinions have begun to reconcile. What once seemed a contrived attempt to be “difficult” has become a reason to excavate to deeper strata, what was once deemed to be a too obvious division between the two chief songwriters has become an intricate counterbalance, and what was once 5 minutes too long has become 2 minutes too short. Settling into Mt. Zoomer is akin to closing your eyes and falling backwards into the arms of a long-forgotten friend.
We fell into the welcoming embrace of Arlen Thompson, drummer-come-engineer of Mt. Zoomer (and chief resident of Mt. Zoomer itself) as he talked to us about prog, hype and how being half-assed actually works.

Have you ever Googled your own name?

Oh there’s a word for that, I can’t remember what it is… I think I’ve done that like once and was very disappointed.

I just put your name into Google and the first result was “Arlen Thompson is a bear”.

Hahahah. Woah! What the fuck? What was the site?

I don’t know, I was kind of frightened to click onto it.

Haha, I would be too, man.

For all the blogger fanboy talk over whether Mt. Zoomer was going to be either “Dan or Spencer’s album”, do you think it’s turned out to actually be “Arlen’s album”? It’s recorded and produced and named after your studio, and the drums are a whole lot more present than on Apologies.

Ha! I dunno, I think that’d be a bit much. I think on this album we’re a lot more together, it’s more of a group effort. Being called Mt. Zoomer is funny… It started there with these improvisational sessions, and although we recorded it in different places, it felt like this era was attached to Mt. Zoomer and it was right to call it after it. Mt. Zoomer’s also a play on a good friend’s name. It’s got a lot of inside things like that going on.

What were you going for with the mix of it? It’s not as clean as Apologies, it’s unfussy.

For me when I was recording it I really wanted to capture what we did live and get it on to a recording. We did a lot of the tracking out at Arcade Fire’s studio just outside of Montreal, in this small-town in Quebec. It’s a massive room in this old church, and we just put microphones up all over the room. It’s all of us together at the same time, we’re not fussed over the details too much. Most record production today is all about the minor details, making everything perfect. We really just wanted to throw it up and let it fly, and that’s how the songs turned out. A lot of them are really raw, we’re using first and second takes.

I was talking to the Constantines last week, and they said that for them the live experience and gigging is their ultimate priority, and recorded material definitely second. You don’t really get to tour a whole lot thanks to the amount of other commitments the band members all have, so what’s the Wolf Parade spin on that?

I think live is really important for us, it’s how we work best. When we play together we have a really unique thing, we all know each other’s music ability fairly intimately so we can do things and go places musically that’s always really satisfying. So generally, the live show is the engine of the band. The studio thing when we recorded Apologies was really difficult, when you’re recording like that it really reduces things. It was difficult to find that energy, or that relationship that you have with the music, because you’re not attacking it as a whole.

So do you think Mt. Zoomer’s actually a better approximation of Wolf Parade as a band, is it a more concise statement than Apologies?

It’s definitely a statement of where we’re at now. As a band we’ve evolved so much since Apologies, I think thanks to everybody’s other projects. There’s been multiple records out since Apologies, so when it came to working on Mt. Zoomer it was a situation where we couldn’t write the same record again. There wasn’t much thought put into it, we just relaxed and did our thing and didn’t focus on trying to write singles, which is probably why it functions better as a whole.

That whole “no singles” policy has led to a lot of references to Mt. Zoomer as prog album. Do you think that’s a tag that fits Wolf Parade?

Yeah I think this album is pretty proggy. It all comes out of improvised jams, so we ended up with some deep song structures and long-winded songs. I think we could be accused of being pretty proggy…

Haha, so you’d take it as an accusation rather than a compliment?

Nah, I guess it’s a compliment. I’m not a huge fan. I’ve got maybe one Genesis record. To me prog means there’s a deeper structure there than conventional rock music. There are a lot of weird things going on on this record.

Do you find bizarre as band that does very little self-promotion that you’ve become one of the most hyped bands of the decade?

Yeah. We don’t even have a website or anything like that. We get covered a lot on blogs but we’ve never really attempted to get in that position. It’s weird to be in it, you really wonder if you’re actually going to live up to they hype. When you see bands first that are massively hyped you usually end up disappointed. Where there are that many words written about you, you’ve a lot to live up to.

You talked before about the band being pretty half-assed… Has the new album required more dedication than before?

Hahaha, no, we’re still pretty half-assed. Musically we take it really seriously. Everything outside of playing music together usually doesn’t get nearly as much attention as other bands. I think there’s a great half-assed quality to what we do.

Maybe “slacker” sounds better?

I guess it’s slacker! We’re stuck in the slacker mentality, we’ll say.

So have you all decided what to do as band next, or do you take it more day-by-day than that?

Yeah, it’s more day-to-day. Everyone’s got so much going on and Wolf Parade is just one part of that. Spencer, Dan and Dante are constantly putting stuff out. We’ll probably end up taking a break after this European tour, I don’t know when we’ll get back to making more music together. Hopefully it’ll be sooner than the three years it took us to get Mt. Zoomer out though.

Do you find that because you spend less time in each other’s pockets you get on a whole lot better when you do get together?

Yeah, we all realize there’s something wholly unique in what happens when we come together and play as musicians. It’s a different outlet for creativity with no definitive results for what’s going to happen. If anything having a lot of things going on musically allows us to come back to Wolf Parade in an even more satisfying way than normally.

The Polaris prize being announced this week made me think of something… Over here in Ireland we had this period of singer-songwriters being stupidly popular, suddenly any guy with an acoustic guitar and Nick Drake songs could sell out shows, but now if you say you’re a singer-songwriter you might as well have leprosy. I was wondering if there’s a same sort of situation in Canada where indie-rock bands are really stigmatized at the minute after the massive buzz of the last few years? A lot of the bands who were part of that hype have gotten cold receptions to their new albums.

I don’t think so actually. The thing with Canada, I don’t know if it’s the same in Ireland or not, but the mainstream music industry is really, really small. So a lot of the more indie bands aren’t really that present here, they spend a lot more time in Europe, like Black Mountain, Plants and Animals, or the Arcade Fire. They tend to look at things a whole lot more internationally. There hasn’t really been a backlash as such because there’s a lot of space here. I mean there are a lot of bands, especially in Toronto, Montreal is ridiculous, everybody’s in a band. Everybody’s comfortable doing their own thing. The thing with Polaris I really enjoy is that I know half the people on the shortlist, so I end up pretty happy whoever wins, I know that whoever’s getting $20,000 deserves it. We have our own kind of Grammy’s, the Juno’s, and I don’t know anybody who wants to be involved with that.

How would you feel if Wolf Parade won a Juno?

We’d have the share the stage with Nickelback or something. I think we’d rather not show up. I don’t think I could look at myself in the morning after that.

The Long Blondes Break Up

One of my favourite British bands of the 21st century, the wittily literate, stylishly kitted and Cocker-approved Long Blondes have announced their break-up. Straight from a bulletin on Myspace:

“We have decided to call it a day.

The main reason for this is that I suffered from a stroke in June and unfortunately I do not know when / if I will be well enough to play guitar again.

On behalf of the band I’d like to say a big thank you to anyone who ever came to one of our shows, bought one of our records or danced to one of our songs in a club. Thank you, if it wasn’t for you the whole thing would have been pointless.

Finally on a personal note, thanks for all your well wishing messages.

Dorian xxx”

Dorian, for those not in the know, was the chief songwriter and guitarist of the band. Once me and sometime Analogue photographer Cait bumped into him on Oxford Street mere minutes after buying an LB’s 12 inch and frightened the poor man by jumping on him with our groupie-like love.

Singer and siren Kate Jackson recently played a DJ set in Antics, which I, retrospectively, idiotically sat out. Anybody with a time machine please drop us a comment here in the box and sort me out.

Soupermax

In an attempt to a) poke fun at the record industry and, b) keep you warm through the winter the enigmatically spectacular Max Tundra has announced a bizarre new format for his newest album: the soup can. In a Warholian twist on the scramble for a new vehicle of distributing music in a manner that results in a paycheque for the artist Tundra and the kids over at Domino have designed a can of Kosher Chicken soup with a rewarding twist. Straight from their website:

“So, how does this work? Well, in addition to a hearty, healthy meal for one, each soup can comes with a unique code and a link for you to download all the MP3s on the day of release.”

There are only 250 cans of Max’s bubbling broth available, indicating that maybe the world isn’t quite ready for the revolution yet.

Let’s hope it doesn’t, erm, leek early.

Would Sir like a starter?

Biffy Clyro - Singles 2001-2005

Are Biffy Clyro big? If the press release sandwiched into this singles collection is to believed (and why ever not?) the Scottish three-piece have exploded thanks to the catalyst of their latest album Puzzle, so much so that this compilation has been put out for newcomers / bandwagon-liggers that are too moral to download their older bits and bobs off the Hype Machine or Limewire. Last time I left the band, with 2004’s Infinity Land, they were receiving about the same MTV2 airplay as, say, the Futureheads. Having found them generally incompatible with my tastes of the day (say, the Futureheads), I shelved that album, and never deigned to pay attention to the band again.

It’s all change on the Biffy front these days though: they’ve bagged support with the Stones and terrorized the charts both single and album, and they are no longer solely admired by that disturbingly zealous circle of supporters they based their mammoth toilet-venue tours of old upon. While only the deaf will claim the band haven’t mainstreaminated their sound on Puzzle’s singles, the band have stuck with their quite-loud-quite-loud-veryfuckingloud dynamics (as perfected by Fugazi and Pixies and their most common touchstones, Nirvana) throughout their career. While this allows a sense of continuity to this tacked-together retrospective, the quality of the band’s output is decidedly more patchy.

The included older tracks, from the band’s debut, contain about as many good ideas as a lemming’s day out at the beach. They do a good impression of sounding like Seafood, if Seafood were superfluous and snooze-inducing. The more enjoyably jerky mid-era numbers are all old school Idlewild with their big-as-the-Scottish-Highlands choruses and warped lead riffs (Toys Toys Toys Choke, Toys Toys Toys being the most entertainingly screamy song on the album). Infinity Land big hitters “Glitter and Trauma” and “My Recovery Injection” are accessible, and nigh-on danceable, without sounding compromised. Fun videos too, if my memory of the NME Chart Show hold true.

The real reason this album has been pieced together, it seems, is to save new fans discovering the more tedious and derivative facets of Biffy Clyro’s back catalogue. In this goal at least, it succeeds.

Ibiza’s Dream Course

When it comes to rolling out the promotional wagon to campaign for one of your label’s stalwarts, only Warp could come up with something quite as geeky and simplistically ingenuous as the rollout for trip-hop pioneers Nightmares On Wax’s new album “Thought So…”. Trust me for a second and click here, and observe the irresistable delights of the NoW online game. Not entirely unlike SNES conoisseur’s choice “Kirby’s Dream Course“, the Thought So game is accompanied by streaming, steaming tracks from the Ibiza-based two-piece’s latest offering. Strangely though, the game is decidedly more addictive than the new material.

For more tangible Nightmares action, park yourself in front of your laptop tomorrow night (20th August) about half past 7 for a live stream of the album’s Ibiza launch party, over on ibizasonica.com’s rather slick site. Or, if you’re one of our 6 readers on the Balearic island, get yer shorts on and head down to the Ibizarocks hotel for a free launch party.

Personally, I’ll be trying to beat my high score of 2,600.

Genealogy

That Teenage Feeling - The Genealogy Of Our Tastes In Music

Adolescence, in case you’ve either forgotten yours or haven’t actually reached it yet and have heard only frightening rumours about it, is a tough time. Not only do we have to start worrying about the daunting cosmetics aisle in the supermarket and a traumatic enough spate of Miracle Gro-like bodily happenings to put Des Lynam off his hyacinths, but we have to begin the somewhat extensive job of painting our identity from top to bottom in the hope that we can invite people in and they won’t be too put off by the Pokemon wallpaper we haven’t quite gotten around to stripping off yet. For most of you reading this wonderful issue of Analogue, and for all of those who contributed to making it so wonderful, one of the main factors in our creation of our unique identities is the music we listen to, that we obsess over, scribble the lyrics of on the back of A4 pads, listen to on the bus to our school trips to Bundoran, make CDs of for our friends and bemoan wasting our childhood without.

As I flicked through a dust-covered stack of diamond cases recently I realized what a vast pile of albums I’ve amassed over the past six years that I never so much as consider part of my current taste, let alone listen to. I scoffed at how I was fooled by the NME into buying Razorlight’s first album like a deaf twat. After putting the scratched CD on though I apprehended that no red-top magazine, no matter how hypnotically brainwashing, could force me to memorize every word of it, record tapes of it for my first girlfriend and make me feel as giddily happy as it did. At the time I discovered it I felt I was on to something nobody else was, because nobody in my year knew Johnny Borrell from the next banjax-faced longhair.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdA5IcjWcIs]

And as “Up All Night” spun through it’s hackneyed and half-arsed pop-rock a sadness that I couldn’t attribute to the masochistic audience I was granting the music began to come over me. The more I reminisced about this album, and about the pile of albums in front of me (including oeuvres from Franz Ferdinand, The Thrills, Keane, and that seminal teenage-dreams band Ash) the more and more I felt a niggling echo in my chest: I have connected with so few albums and so few bands the way I connected with those in front of me. It wasn’t a case of sepia-tinted glasses, where I hyperbolized my affection for long-forgotten listening experiences - I truly obsessed about these bands and about their songs, every aspect of their songs in a way I have done with only the most extraordinary of bands since my taste became less singularly devoted to what Conor McNicholas and his evil hack-drones dictates. I’ve swallowed up Kraftwerk, Funkadelic and Jurassic 5, sure, but these are bands with massive catalogues of even-more-massively acclaimed albums. Keane were, on the other hand the sound of wet paint drying. And yet I was as zealously attached to their Hopes and Fears as I am to Trans-Europe Express now.

Why has my attachment to bands faded as my infatuation with music as a whole has grown? Is it a case of casting too strong a critical eye on anything remotely hyped as better-than-decent? Was my early experience of music just a giddy headrush that has worn off over time? Growing cynicism, adaption to the instant gratification culture of the internet, too much music and too little time? I had to find out what other’s experience from their adolescence up in their relationship with their music is. And who better to ask than the most zealous of the zealots, the other Analogue writers themselves.

Q. Do you feel you had more of an honest, or a more direct connection with music when you were younger than you do now?

A. “Yes and no. While there was a youthful playfulness of listening to and enjoying the chart hits of the time, I can’t escape the fact that I was mainly listening to the music I was being force fed by radio playlists. There may be an element of snobbery to my tastes nowadays, but at least I know I’m seeking out and listening to the music I want to hear, rather than blindly accepting what’s shoved in my face (or ears).”

“No it was more of innocence, not knowing the bigger world of music out there at the time “

“Yeah, I remember getting really dizzy and almost nauseously excited the first time i heard Kung Fu by Ash.”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zguGxVes6bI]

“I think I connected way more with lyrics then than I do now. I have actually rooted out my diaries from when I was young, and there’s a ‘meaningful lyrics’ section. Contained are these gems ‘You were there for summer dreaming/ and you are a friend indeed/ and I know you’ll find your peace now/ in eternity’ (Robbie Williams- Eternity).”

“At first, yeah. Every song on an album is important when you only have ten CDs, and you know the words inside out, and it kind of feels like the band belongs to you. That faded a bit, but I’m trying to get back to it.”

“Absolutely. Music, just like romantic attraction, is a million times?more real when you’re 14.”

“No. I think there’s just a sort of nostalgia that goes with the music you listen to when you’re younger. I think maybe I used to pay more attention to lyrics when I was younger.”

“Not when I was a young teen (13-14) but when I was 15-16 I used to get really caught up in albums, so much so that’d I’d listen to them over and over again. I got a real emotional response from them, which I never really get anymore (or at least very rarely).”

I remembered buying every single CD I flicked through; the shop I bought it from, the reason I bought it, the excitement listening to it the first time. I remembered scrounging enough pennies to buy the Killers’ Hot Fuss the day it came out on the back of “Mr. Brightside”, and poring over Anton Corbijn’s artwork, picking up the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds because Interpol’s Antics was delayed and I needed something to review for a Transition Year project, and being venemously irksome when the shop assistant behind a Golden Discs counter had no idea who Editors were, let alone why their album wasn’t in. I have very few CDs or vinyl from the bands I’ve been turned on to over the last year or so, as the internet has become my choice outlet. There’s no sense of hype generated by a magazine or by a pre-release video on MTV2, by Jenny Huston on 2FM or by a massive shop display because I tend to find the songs weeks before their release. Blogs, band’s sites, Myspace, the Hype Machine, and Last.FM recommend something I like the sound of, and I’ll have it within half an hour. Was my earlier appreciation of music more devout because of the channels through which I discovered it?

Q. Who introduced you to the bands and the music you liked then?

“My parents never “forced” much music on me – neither of them were what you’d call enthusiasts – and my brother had his own tastes but kept them to himself, so mainly I found music on the radio. By my mid-teens I was buying dance music magazines, but back in the days before blogs music wasn’t as easily accessible.”

“My cool cousin Robert. Despite being only a year older than me, he had?a ticket to the 1994 Dublin Nirvana show, and listened to Dinosaur? Junior and Stone Temple Pilots. He even had an actual record player,?and only ever bought vinyl.”

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“Dave Fanning, and the band names written on the canvas bags of kids in school who were cooler than me”

“MTV!”

“My mam and My Uncle Tony were huge factors. My Mam comes from the?Talking Heads, David Bowie, Mamas and Papas end of music, and my uncle?was mad into Brit Pop and Punk. And both of them have an unhealthy?obsession with Bruce Springsteen.”

“My mother was a big Dylan fan, and I just always loved music”

“Ray-dee-yo. Seriously. All we used to do was text in. Also, I harboured a secret love for Bob Dylan (thanks Da) and 60’s pop (thanks Ma). “

“Friends were pretty important, but I read Q and occasionally NME and Hot Press from 14 on, so I was building my own immature picture of what was cool and what wasn’t cool to like. That gave me the notion that a finite number of deadly bands exist, and that the way to get to them is through buying music magazines.”

Of course, not every album or band I loved four or five years ago has left me. I have progressed from the bands I loved to the bands they loved. My love for Franz Ferdinand has transferred directly onto Gang of Four, the Fall and Wire, every second I spent on “Is This It” I have replaced with a minute of “Marquee Moon”. The type of song that appealed to me in my early music-listening history has graduated greatly, as it takes more and more to hold my interest. Very few of those bands I listened to survive outside of my iPod’s shuffle mode, but I can recognize that little pieces of what I loved about them, whether witty lyrics or fat-arsed synth sounds, crop up in the songs I love now.”

Q. Can you trace elements in the music you listen to now back to the music you listened to way back when?

A. “When I was growing up, you were either a raver or a grunger. If you?were a “raver” you listened to Cypress Hill, NWA and Body Count - none?of which could under any circumstance be termed rave. Grungers?listened to rock, grunge, sixties and indie. Though my musical taste?has been well crowbarred open since, I guess I still listen to much?more instrumental than electronic music, and my knowledge of hip hop?is limited to early and ‘underground’ acts.”

“Some elements, I’ve come to really enjoy instrumental music which I think I can trace right back to Smashing Pumpkins and their style and approach to writing.”

“Definitely from when I was 16 or older. When I was 16/17, I had Pavement, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Jeff Buckley on heavy rotation. Looking at the bands I’ve been listening to over the last week on iTunes I can see a connection. I still love slightly weird indie rock that occasionally has heavy parts like Wolf Parade, White Denim and Times New Viking but I’ll also listen to folky slow burners like Bon Iver, Le Loup and Beirut.”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu9DnE7gTIU&feature=related]
“Yep. Human error. I still haven’t come to terms with dance music fully. “

“I still listen to a lot of it, so yeah, I guess. I’m a sucker for a melody and a call and answer chorus. Though I probably wouldn’t've listened to half the stuff I listen to now when I was younger. I liked an easy listening experience, no growers thanks.”

“Yeah, I love melody and I always liked the more melodic stuff in the metal spectrum”

“Yes. A good hook, a stupid lyric always gets me”

There are some CDs in the less dusty, beside-the-bed-for-easy-access pile that I bought four or five years ago. Eels, Low, and Modest Mouse remain. These survivors are strangely predominantly those I picked up as the least-favoured of a three-for-one deal, or a half-price sale I couldn’t say no to, but I realized I enjoyed at least as much as, erm, Kaiser Chiefs. Some loves, like Bright Eyes and Grandaddy sprung up from emoticon-heavy MSN conversations, or recommendations from my tastemaking English teacher. The fanboy-like collection of Bruce Springsteen bits and bobs are direct inheritances, both taste and material-wise, from my mother. I loved him as a kid, loved him as a teen, and still love him now (still as a teen, though only for another six months). Why are some acts timeless in my taste while others have worn thin? Personally, I still discover layers of sounds and new levels of meaning, and appreciate different aspects of the artistry of bands more multi-faceted like Low and Grandaddy that I didn’t have the capability of picking up on when I was more used to in-yer-face guff like Hard-Fi. I rarely listen to bands for the memories they evoke, but approximately one night in every three months I’ll throw an older album on for pure nostalgia (can I be nostalgic when I’m only nineteen? Course.)

Q. Which are the acts that you have stuck to liking since you were young? What makes these so durable, do you think?

A. “Dandy Warhols-they’re like musical family. You can fall in and out of love with them but youre stuck to them.”

“I’d still spin the first Ash album because it has the same timeless youthful vigour as stuff like the Undertones”

“Very few. The ones I still actually listen to from that time either? stopped making records long before I was born (sixties stuff), or? started making terrible records after a certain point (Counting?Crows).”

“I still listen to Nirvana every now and then. They are still legitimately good. They are durable in a general sense because kids start liking them for the same reason I did, but for me, I started to hear different things in them when I went back to them a few years ago. Heavy means a couple of different things, and Nirvana are all of them. And poppy too in their way, which helps.”

“Pavement, My Bloody Valentine and Elliot Smith. What makes them so durable? I guess it’s because they each have such an original sound and when you listen to them there’s just something that makes you want to hear the album the whole way through in the right order.”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB8nCE2EoIw]

“Well I never listen to Smashing Pumpkins anymore, apart from the odd rare b-side or two. Or any other bands from that time for that matter.”

Unsurprisngly, everybody’s backstory and how they got to the hetereogenous cocktail of what they drink up today is completely different. It is clear that there are direct links between the DNA of those bands at the top of our music-listening family tree to those alive today. Like all family gene pools, of course, there are some molecules we’d rather delete. As Razorlight finished rotating I could embarrassedly find nothing to appreciate the album, or trace any function it has in my life now other than to allow me to distinguish between an aural pile of excrement and what to me is now “good music”. While in another five years I may well be writing about how nausea-inducing Animal Collective are to me and disparaging my once-upon-a-time love for Built To Spill, I feel while I may have sometimes a less emotional response to the music I listen to know, but a far greater sensoral and intellectual connection to it. And I’m still looking forward to Franz Ferdinand’s third album.

Q. If you could erase the memory of one band you liked when you were?young right now which band would it be?

A. “Stone Temple Pilots” “Simply Red” “Eternal” “Bon Jovi” “Muse” “Limp Bizkit” “Sasha” “Arcade Fire” (!)

What’s The Skinny?

Those ever-admirable champions of art rock in Ireland, Skinny Wolves, have lined up a wonderfully noisy October for Dubliners. Having already showcased acts like No Age, Mika Miko, Magik Markers and Les Georges Leningrad before their popularity burgeoned, be sure some of the upcoming acts appearing on SW posters around town will be gracing blogs and hype-sites a-plenty in the future.

Things kick off on the 3rd of October with the screechings of “based nowhere and residing pretty much everywhere” no-wave outfit Lovvers. Surfing the crest of the current wave of melodic noise-punk, they stir up familiar influences like the Minutemen and old-school Sub Pop with a distinctly British edge. Not to mention their seriously screwed-up EP artwork. Their blank generationisms will be on show in the Boom Boom Room with support from popular-with-earplug-manufacturers Bats and the nicely rhyming Weil Rats.

Probably the biggest name on the SW calendar is Telepathe upstairs in Whelans the next night. A tear through their hypnotic song “Chrome’s On It” is pretty much worth the ticket price alone, and horror-movie “Sinister Militia” would be a nice bonus. We won’t even hold the fact they’re mates with These New Puritans against them. Support comes from Jenny and the Deadites, who have sweetly named songs like “Amongst The Piss” and “Throne Of Blood” (Kurosawa reference?), and work some thumping industrial hip-hop beats. Think dark anticon, like Sole, except Irish, and you’re about there.

The Creeping Nobodies have been slugging out post-punk trips since 2001, so it’s a bit unfair to compare them to Liars. But they sometimes sound quite like Liars, circa 2001, but a lot more layered and erratic. Nevermind cowbells, their track “Your Likeness” utilizes samples of bovine mooing over a break, before fucking your head over with a brass breakdown towards the end. It’s not going to be a laidback ride, in other words. The faint of heart might be more comfortable with supporting violaist Anni Rossi, who has supported the Ting Tings (never heard of ‘em) on their tour amongst other plaudits. Both do a good line in percussion, and both are worth your second trip to check out the new Boom Boom Room on the 11th.

Rounding off the month’s lovely line-up on the 17th are Mahjongg, a band with a clear appreciation of Liquid Liquid, Brian Eno and David Byrne. For once I find myself agreeing with a promo sheet: “Mahjongg have chewed up their influences, spitting back a sinister musical polyglot that will reward the curious and infuriate the impatient”. They mix their sound up with some obscure African elements, but not so tokenistically as most experimental bands tend to, and sound as if they’re pretty much impossible not to dance to in a live setting. Sure we’ll just have to head up to Whelan’s to find out, won’t we?

Have a goo at the Skinny Wolves Myspace for some tracks from the upcoming artists.

Analogue Re-Launches Nationwide

The Irish press stalwarts have been unsurprisingly slow to react to the recent media revolution that has completely altered the manner in which we discover new music, and learn about the bands we love. In this blog-dominated landscape the most ardent music fans have grown used to a new journalistic attitude- talk to the readers, don’t talk down to them. Thus, when Analogue Magazine launched last October as a student-run publication in Dublin city centre it inherited an eager audience. Analogue transplants the energetic zeal of bloggers with none of the associated amateur design or attitude. As a magazine aimed mainly at 18-35 year olds, we’ve worked out that it maybe should be actually written by 18-35 year olds. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Galvanized by our “People’s Choice” award at the recent National Student Media Awards, we started set our sights on the rest of the island.

If you’re from the Alan Hansen school of “You can’t win anything with kids” ideology a quick flick through the newly-revamped pages of the magazine should soon have you converted. Firm believers in the power of positive writing, we treat the bands we cover the way most magazines forget to - as the very creators of art and entertainment that we’re so passionate about. Intensely personal at times, our writers still never let the focus fall from the music and the artists we love. And fortunately we love some very loveable artists. Of the acts that have already graced our glossy pages Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Final Fantasy, The Shins, LCD Soundsystem, Broken Social Scene, Radiohead, Arcade Fire and CSS are just a few. Always keen to promote the bands close to our heart, but perhaps far from an Irish audiences’ ears, we’ve also set aside plenty of space for bands deserving of more attention, whether from our fair island or elsewhere.

When we’re not blagging backstage passes for a quick ten-minute chat with a visiting band we spend our time writing album reviews, retrospectives, and features covering topics as far-flung as negative space in Japanese electroacoustics or the appreciation of Scandanavian pop. Such diversity is no surprise given the mixed bag of music aficionados (read: nerds) that make up our team. Some vow by French electro, while others are noise-rock fetishists. Thankfully this leads not just to inter-writer fights over the merits of our favourite bands, but to an overall vast range of tastes catered for in the magazine.

Forever forward-thinking, Analogue is not happy to remain just a magazine. Our online presence has already received massive plaudits. Rather than simply digitizing our print articles we write even more content just for our .com, and the site’s popularity has already picked up shout-outs from massive sites such as North American taste-makers Pitchfork. The launch of the magazine will coincide with two new projects from under the Analogue umbrella. Firstly a very-specially filmed vidcast of baroque pop multi-instrumentalist outfit Gran Casino in action will be making its way to our aforementioned wonderful website. Our second exciting new means of getting fantastic new music into your ears is the inclusion of 1000 copies of “Maple Drive”, the debut album of the inimitable Irish electronica artists Storkboy Choons and Colours Move, dispersed throughout our 10,000 magazines to be distributed nationwide.

Oh yeah. And it’s all completely, utterly, and uncompromisingly free of charge. And it always will be. Viva Analogue, the future of Irish independent music journalism.

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