At some point last weekend I was crippled with a hangover in the back seat of a car hurtling through a twisty part of county Kildare. It was a humdinger of a hangover, the works. Like having your brain brutally mangled then scraped clean by an electrified spud peeler. I wasn’t really in the mood for audio stimulation, but then Tom, the dude who was driving put on a CD. It was quite pleasant, insistent and sparky in a sort of old C86 indie way, but with added bloopy bits. I asked him who it was. Turns out its a few Irish Lads who’ve started to make blips on the radar. They go by the name New Amusement. They have a fairly confident sound for a band just starting out, but wear it sorta lightly and scruffily. Maybe not all the songs on their Myspace page are as quite as strong as the one I heard in the car, Gone to Sea, but there is enough there to demonstrate some serious promise.

New Amusement

On the subject of new(ish) Irish talent, the Vinny Club is one of our weirdest kept secrets. He’s a dude who messes around a lot with the inside of old commodores and shit (I believe its called chip rock) and seems to live in a bizarre digital haven made out of 8-bit graphics and demented pictures of Hulk Hogan eating pasta among other things. The chip rock musical template always runs the risk of sounding two dimensional and gimmicky, and while one or two tracks veer toward annoying game-boy malfunctions, there are plenty of genuinely odd and properly satisfying sonic presents for your eardrums in Vinny’s CGA wonderland. Check it out.

“Vinny”?

What I first notice about Jens Lekman are his shoes. They are a marvel in shiny white leather engineering, tapering off to ridiculous pointyness like a pair of miniature concorde jets. Backstage in Whelans, as Jens speaks about touring in that melifulously well-spoken manner shared by male Scandinavians, they keep distracting me and I wonder if the tips of them are splitting atoms. You might, by now, be asking yourself why this piece is starting off with a digressive observation of the interviewee’s footwear as opposed to the standard snappy relevant quote to get things going. I could lie and tell you that I am a bisexual shoe fetishist and the sight of a dapper Swedish man in patent leather rendered anything he had to say about music completely irrelevant. Or I could admit the sad truth, and tell you that the battery in my recorder ran out after 2 minutes, meaning that the few shreds of actual quoted material I got from Jens are to be guarded jealously and sprinkled sparingly across this piece like dinky bits of white truffle on a posh omelette. But we won’t worry too much about the details of the interview that (mostly) got away, as there is much to relate about Jens himself and the festive gig he played later that night accompanied in part by Owen Pallett and a woman who looked freakishly like a young Britt Eckland.

Jens Lekman is a Swedish singer-songwriter who writes wry, lyrical and heartfelt pop that is polished and meticulously constructed like, yep, those shoes. A few things set him apart from the dreary masses of guitar-toting workmen that haunt this dreaded genre. One is the way in which so many of his original melodies are woven through samples cribbed from the vinyl he obsessively collects in second hand stores and flea markets. It’s something that could potentially be a clever parlour trick, but in Lekman’s hands the samples imbue the songs with timelessness, like he’s selectively dipping his lyrics into the huge collective vat of love and loss that informs so much great pop music. For me, this is best demonstrated in an earlier song of his called ‘Black Cab.’ Here, a heart-rending lyric of alienation from friends is married to the jaunty sounds of a 60s baroque pop song by The Left Banke, creating a finished product that leaves you grasping for suitable adjectives and wishing the term ‘bittersweet’ hadn’t become such a cliché.

There are two other things that mark Jens out from many contemporaries. They are his light and playful way with words and his rich singing voice, which sounds whiskey mellow and often belies his young age. I ask him about the way he plays around with words on his most recent album ‘Night falls over Kortedala,’ whether it comes naturally to him or whether he has had to work hard at it and sweat everything out? He tells me it comes easily to him, that he’s been fascinated by words and language since a very young age, and likes how the one word or phrase can mean many different things, “for example, the words ‘cigarette lighter.’ I’ve been fascinated by those two words for a long time and I think I used it as an image in maybe about five of my songs.” In Jens-speak, meanings of things do not only change across different songs, they often get turned inside out suprisingly in the space of a lyric, like when he describes how a crab crawls out of a shell he holds up to demonstrate his homelessness in the song ‘The Opposite of Halleluiah.’ Now, I’d say that some readers who have never heard Jens Lekman have gotten this far and are thinking ‘Cripes, pass a sickbag, cos this sounds like some sickeningly twee fluff.’ And there is no denying that, taken alone, or even on record, some of the lyrics might seem a tad affected and suited to only the sweetest palates. But when he takes to the stage in Whelans, twee and grating are transformed to dry and funny as he delivers his lines with the easy and expert timing of an old comedian. It’s something that really strikes me during his gig, this mixture of calm charisma and fluent banter that has the audience hanging off his stories and song lyrics. It is exactly like Johnny Cash playing San Quentin prison, but only if you replace the grizzled and murderous cons with fey kids in cardigans and wonky spectacles.

Talking backstage, Jens’ demeanour is as impenatrably calm as it is live. He chats in such gentle and quiet tones that I’d later wonder if my battery died from the sheer strain of trying to pick up his voice. I ask him about how songs which seem to have such complicated arrangements on record translate live? “Some songs I have to change the arrangements a lot on,” he says, “and some I can’t even play live.” I tell him I heard one of the songs he rarely plays is ‘Maple Leaves, (a swooning ballad from an early EP built around a violin sample) which is a shame because it is such a beautiful song. He smiles, and says it will probably get a rare airing later on. Sure enough, about halfway through the gig, Jens announces a guest musician will be joining him, and a beaming Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) walks into the fray. Together, he and Jens play a wonderfully stirring version of maple leaves. It’s a showstopping turn but more is to come. In a spontaeneous and electric moment, the man who earlier proclaimed “I wish I could have brought [a full band] with me,” leaves me secretly glad that this particular wish did not come true. During ‘Black Cab’ he turns the mic to the crowd and they softly sing the song’s melancholy chorus back to him. He loops it and plays it back to us over the venue’s speakers. The effect is hair-raising and touching. He really didn’t need that band at all.

For three dudes, Menomena pulled off an admirable coup in the Sugar Club on Friday night by playing a thumping good set of material drawn mostly from a complex studio recording process. Not only did they manage this, but they managed to transcend the strange physical barriers presented by the Sugar Club itself. This is not a club for a rock show. With its oppressive red drapes, ascending rows of fixed tables and stools, it is quite obviously built for crooners, comedians and cabaret performers. Its the sort of strange velvety place where Isabella Rosellini might walk out on stage, warble a song and collapse on the floor while her vocal eerily continues. Its not the sort of place you go to see three experimental young lads from Oregon play some twisted energetic indie. In my humble opinion Whelans would have suited Menomena much better as a venue.

Regardless, the show had sold out and in spite of all the jostling, those who wanted, managed to squeeze into places where they could dance and enjoy themselves. There was plenty of dancing. Maybe there was a bit of leap year craziness in the air but from the word go, the audience were lepping around as Menomena ripped into a set heavy with songs from their most recent album ‘Friend and Foe’. This was no mean feat as some serious instrument-swapping dexterity was required to tease out the various tricks and turns of tunes like ‘muscle and flo’ and ‘wet and rusting.’ It would seem that Menomena suffer for their art, judging by the steady streams of sweat lashing off the various band members, brought on no doubt by the instrument juggling. This was most notable in the case of sax player Justin Harris’s beard which looked like a hairy Niagra Falls by the time crowd-favourite ‘evil bee’ hit its crescendo. What struck me during this, is how easy it might be to mess it up, for a stray saxophone solo to fart unceremoniously over the wrong drum roll or something.

Yet, they never did mess it up, and managed to not only deliver the goods like a well oiled machine, but feel the crowd and respond to the enthusiasm in the room with a few spontaneous flourishes. And did I mention Danny Seim’s drumming? It was flippin’ breathtaking, a multi-speed acrobatic masterclass. I was watching with two members of bands who were both pretty much in awe at how Menomena pulled off their set. So Menomena then, I’d call them a musician’s band except that would make them sound technical and dry, and they managed to pull off technical proficiency with a good dollop of hard rocking fun. Shame about the venue though.

Words: Darragh McCausland
Photo: Loreana Rushe

I’d like to clarify one or two things from the interview with Brent Knopf from Menomena, which seem to have come out confuddled from my crackly interview recording.

1: Brent did not say the music at the Grammy Awards sucks. Instead, he was making a self-deprecating joke about Menomena’s own music.

2: When referring to their live show, Brent did not say Justin plays ‘tracks.’ What he said was Justin plays ‘Sax.’ Menomena play live and not along to tracks.

Apologies for the misunderstanding Brent.

Photo by Loreana Rushe 

 If you thought Caribou was the only 60s obsessed Canadian one-man-band recording psych-pop, think again. Graham Van Pelt (aka Miracle Fortress) has been at it too. His full-length LP ‘Five Roses’ was one of the most quietly beguiling records of last year. It was a record with an astonishing amount of attention to detail- the songs seemed to come sealed inside their own hazy and summery micro climate. Graham recently toured the record with a full band. I caught up with him before his band supported Final Fantasy in Vicar Street. He chatted about touring with a full band, the merits of 1960s recording techniques and the Montreal music scene.

Okay, about miracle fortress. Graham, you started this project as a one man thing, now that the guys are with you, it’s sort of a band dynamic. How is that going for you?

Yeah its alright you know. Its really different and something that we are still working on all the time. Its been so quick. Like we have only played together for 8 or 9 months. I’ve gone through 3 different types of line-up.Hah, a bit like Guided by Voices. Well, yeah. But mostly the people have been the same. We’ve been messing around with different ways to pull off the album and sort of departing from the album a lot more and feeling a lot better about it. Every time we go on a trip its gotten better, like I know there are going to be growing pains and all that but its certainly working.

Listening to the album, it’s sort of a summery sound, an optimistic sound. Would you find that an appropriate description?

Yeah, I dunno. I actually made it during blizzards in the dead of winter. So I don’t really know how much I had that in mind but I guess a lot of the imagery a lot of the stuff I was thinking of was indirectly summery. A lot of what I’m into, a lot of sort of 60s psychedelia, well you don’t exactly think of blizzards and snowdrifts. You sort of picture a whole thing of meadows and sunshine.

Another album your record reminds me of is another Canadian record, Andorra by Caribou,listening to the two of these albums, I thought there was an air of 60s revivalism about them, and there is the whole ‘one man band’ thing, but both records have that 60s sound...

Ok, well I don’t really think I was trying to revive anything. But what I do see, is the production and that is just something that I prefer and I don’t see why things have to sound the way they often do now. Like now, things are produced really heavy and really big. And I just recorded the album that way, is because regardless of when they were done I just prefer songs that were recorded that way. Songs that are maybe a little more delicate, a little less drum and bass heavy in the mix. I guess things like that made it sound a little 60s, but otherwise I guess it would sound more like contemporary pop.

Yeah it does. It has a real sort of classic sound. But you did all that yourself right? So just how did you go about that?

It’s funny but a lot of it comes down just to the thinking that you put into engineering a band or engineering a rock song. The way things were done in the 50s or 60s was specifically about the limitations that they had and they had to work with y’know things that were naturally occuring in the rooms that they were recording in and that’s just a principle that I brought to it. I have a kind of distaste for a lot of pro-tooly and clean digital production. Now I know that can work well sometimes and record a lot of cool stuff. But as far as recording a sound well, I mean I suppose my subjective take on that would be to get a sort of natural thing happening. And what that meant was recording things in the room really naturally using room sounds and putting mics away really far from your instruments.So yeah I suppose instead of using some kind of effect to get an echo, you would actually…Yeah, y’know there’s a difference between taking a drum and putting a mike an inch away from it, playing it and sitting there with equalizers and compressors and treating it like a big sound, putting it in a digital reverb space y’know. Or you could just play the drum and hang a mike six feet in the air in a really reverberant room and that’s just basically the difference.

Hah, it reminds me of My Morning Jacket. When I was into them a few years ago I used to always tell my mates that they recorded their album inside a grain silo, you know to get the reverb sound they got into an empty grain silo!

To me its actually a lot easier. People ask how did you manage to get that sound, you know that more 60s sound. But basically it’s a lot easier to record things that way. You could just imagine hanging a mike and playing a drum the way things were done versus hours of trying to craft it. That’s actually just quicker and easier. Its actually almost sort of a lo-fi thing.

 I want to ask you about coming from Montreal. To a lot of Irish music fans there is this notion of Montreal as being some sort of indie-wonderland where everyone knows each other and are all in the same bands. How’s that for you guys, is the scene really that tight over there or what?

It’s definitely a great city to play music in and everyone from this band basically came together because of all our other projects. Like we knew of each other that way before we decided to start this. So yeah, in that way there is a lot of camaraderie and people messing with each other’s stuff. Also, if you look at Toronto its even more the case there. Toronto is definitely another city where you see a lot of huge collectives. It kind of makes sense. If the city has a lot of musicians that you reallly like you sort of end up wanting to play with them.

Right. To get back to the ‘Five Roses’ record. It’s a pretty cohesive record. It’s one to listen to from start to finish. So I’m just wondering about MP3s, how easy it is to rip songs out of their natural context and put them up on blogs. Now you find that songs have to sort of stand on their own. How would you feel about that in terms of your own record?

I mean it probably does hinder these songs a little bit to be taken out of the context of the album. That’s because the whole time I was thinking about making an album. I had in mind how things would blend into each other. I wasn’t thinking about writing a single or having things pulled out of it. That’s something beyond my control, but it is meant to be heard all together.

Do you think that this will ever effect the way you record music?

I dunno. Maybe it already has. Now that we are all playing together as a band the focus is on songs. I don’t think we’re going to all sit down and focus on like a suite of 12 songs all blended in together.

Who or what are you listening to right now?

Everyone is listening to such different stuff. Im kind of obsessed with poppy lo-fi punk bands. I’ve been listening to ‘The Clean’ and these lo-fi bands from New Zealand. I’ve also been listening to the band ‘Japanther’ from New York and ‘Cause Commotion’ from New York. Just really dirty garage music.

New Zealand lo-fi, yeah that was a bit of a scene wasn’t it? 

Yeah a lot of that stuff was from the early 80s. There were a bunch of bands that came out of it. David Kilgour who has a lot of stuff I really like.

Finally, what’s next for Miracle Fortress now that it has become a band?

We’ve just been talking about getting home. Staying at home and writing a bunch of new stuff because we have more or less been playing the same 7 song set for almost a year. Basically quality time at home.

Menomena were not that well known outside of their native Oregon when they bounced into 2007 on the back of their record ‘Friend and Foe’. But as that record gathered countless rave reviews and plaudits, things quickly changed. ‘Friend and Foe’ was a remarkably intricate piece of work, stuffed full of playful looping arrangements and melodic charm. It also came neatly wrapped in what is bound to go down in history as one of the coolest album covers ever, a dizzying, scrawled psychedelic menagerie with rotational settings. Because they used their own specifically designed software to record individual loops of instrumentation, the record felt different when compared to your bog standard indie release. It was fluid, elastic, like it was made out coloured rubber balls and twisting neon. Well, to me it was anyway. Ahead of an extensive European tour that will include a date in Dublin on February 29th, I spoke to one third of Menomena, guitarist Brent Knopf. He’s a really nice guy who says ‘totally’ a lot.

It’s been nearly a year since ‘Friend and Foe’ came out. So what kind of a year has it been for Menomena?

It’s been incredible, so much fun. Friend and Foe came out in the US a year ago but it just got released in Europe last September. And it’s been amazing because we started off, like playing a show a year ago in Denver to, like ten people. And from there we’ve been able to play some sold out shows and even go to Europe for the first time. And it’s been so busy, I got fired from my waiting tables job ‘cos I was away from work so much…

So Menomena better work out for you huh?

[laughter] Eh, yeah. It better.

Okay so I’ve noticed on your Myspace page, there are some nice mock up posters of classic 80s family movies starring Menomena and I was wondering if you could arrange for one to be made starring me? I’d like to be Elliott cycling his bike in front of the moon in the poster for ET.

Totally, no problem. We’ll just delete all our posters and replace them with ones of you. How does that sound?

Ha ha sounds cool thanks. So on the topic of band art, the amazing cover of your album ‘Friend and Foe’ record has given lots of people hours of fun, and I was wondering what the next stage in interactive album art is? Like will you be able to bring it up a level for the next record?

Emm, maybe. But can you tell me what the higher level is because I’m dying to know.

I dunno, how about a three dimensional hologram or something?

Yeah totally. Or how about every new CD will be its own nuclear reactor. We’ve been able to buy a lot of enriched uranium from Sudan and each CD will play Menomena and power your home.

So Menomena aim to tackle the global energy crisis as well?Totally. That’s what we’re all about. Solving global crises.Ha ha, well following on from that, how important is the design element of your music? Like the actual physical design of your records and stuff?

Well we look at the artwork like we look at the music. We try to challenge ourselves to make an experience that’s worth revisiting. Our first album was packaged in a flip book and that took a long time to make. With ‘Friend and Foe’ we had a chance to collaborate with Craig Thompson who is a genius and our goal with him was to make an experience that people are intrigued by and hopefully come back too. Hopefully that’s the thing with our music too. Hopefully people will listen to our songs more than once and on subsequent listens will hear something different each time.

So what album covers by other bands do you rate?Well I think Tool have done a good job. Their most recent one had 3D goggles on it. The one before that had a sort of multi-layered anatomy textbook and the one before that was some sort of animated thing. I respect their work a lot. How about you, what are your favourites?

Emm, I like that Spiritualized cover. You know the one that’s like a medicine packet with its own prescription and you burst the foil to take out the CD? That’s cool.

Yeah it is. That’s awesome.

So your album artwork got nominated for a Grammy award right? Are you bummed that it was your album cover and not the music that got nominated for the award?

[Laughs] No, naturally because the music sucks.

Okay to change track. Nearly every piece that’s written about Menomena mentions the software programme called Deeler that you made and used to record loops for both albums. They pretty much go on about it as if you reinvented the wheel with this thing. So I was wondering, did you ever think of putting a patent on it, making some money?

You know I was always so poor and exhausted. I was working a couple of jobs and trying to do the band on the side. I didn’t have any resources to explore what I could do with it in that regard. I always used to show it to people, and I’d get blank stares. It just ended up being really useful for us. Although I ended up rewriting it and it became incredibly complicated and digital. I basically went insane and wasn’t able to finish it. It got too unwieldy, there were bugs I couldn’t trace. And since then I think there is new software that came on the market that can basically do the same thing.

Sure. So it won’t become an all-consuming scientific obsession that could destroy Menomena?

No I think there will be a different obsession that will do that to me. I tend to go in stages. Since then I got obsessed with doing a music video, and built a kind of home made motion controlled camera device. I built all these sets, and characters, a storyboard and then I had to put it in a box and it lived in boxes for two or three years and then it got resurrected and made into the video for evil bee.

To continue with Deeler- Did the stuff you recorded with it need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the point where you could play it live or was it easier than that?

Our music tends to be very layered and we are only three people so it can be a challenge to choose which layers to perform. So if you come see us live you will see that sometimes Justin is playing the sax and at the same time playing the foot synthesiser, and that Daniel is pretty much playing drums and singing at the same time. So yeah it can be a challenge. But once we get going and hit our groove it feels really good. Some people say they prefer the live show to the album.

Okay because I was going to ask that. Just how different does ‘Friend and Foe’ sound live? Because it seems to me to be more a kind of headphones-suited studio album.

Well, it’s louder. It’s sparser too, but more dynamic, and usually we play the songs a little faster. It works well, but it’s different.

In between your two well known albums, you recorded a lesser known record, which contained instrumental music for an experimental dance company. Was this a pretentious folly or a sign of things to come?

Ehh, both. It was a miscalculation on our part because we thought when ‘I am Fun Blame Monster’ came out there were all these sort of punky bands like the Rapture and the Strokes and we thought, clearly, the next big thing is gonna be instrumental dance music [laughs]. We tried to beat everyone to the punch, but it turns out we were wrong. But it was really a good experience. It’s an album that not many people know about but when we play shows people will often come up to us and tell us it’s their favourite. It’s not for everyone, but we are happy we did it because it gave us the opportunity to collaborate with an amazing dance group.

Okay, another quick change of topic. My friend took one look at your album artwork for ‘Friend and Foe’ and he also heard that your recording software is called ‘Deeler’ and now he’s convinced that you are all on hard drugs. Is this true or will I have to disappoint him?Well I don’t really think crack cocaine is a hard drug. Do you?

Well I suppose in moderation its fine. A nice way to relax on a Sunday afternoon right? Yeah, and as long as Amy Winehouse is with us, we feel comfortable.

So Amy is a spiritual inspiration for Menomena?

Totally.

Okay last question about music. Are you working on a follow-up to ‘Friend and Foe’ yet?Yes [pause]No more information other than that?

Emm. Okay yes. We’re writing lots of baby songs, I call them fragments or baby songs because they are just ideas for songs. You might call them embryos and we are extracting stem cells from them.

Stem cell songs huh? So you won’t be voting Republican because they won’t let you record your own music?

Ha ha that’s right. No, we’re working out ways to record these baby songs, we have over a dozen of them so far and maybe more than half of them will never become viable and reach maturity. But we’re starting that process and taking old Deeler sessions and mixing them. It’s going okay so far.

Finally, a question for our under-12 readers. What’s your favourite colour?

My favourite colour is… polka dot.

A brief history of Lo Fi indie rock

A friend once asked me, “how come so many of your favourite records sound so shite? Its like they were recorded for 50p!” And he was right, they do. In fact, not only do they sound like they were recorded for 50p but at least one of them (‘Vampire on Titus’ by Guided by Voices) is so shoddily recorded it may as well have been screamed into a banjaxed Fisherprice tape recorder on a windy cliff. Well, its ‘cos a large chunk of my CD collection is devoted to the crackly magic and haphazard musical charms cast by lo-fi recording artists.

What exactly is lo-fi then? Well, if you were dreary and took the term at face value, you might say it simply means low fidelity, as in music that was recorded on equipment by bands who for financial or other reasons could not afford to record their music on high fidelity equipment. Lo-fi, you might then argue, has been around for as long as recording itself. You might argue that all the great bockety garage rock from the 60s and the scuzzy DIY stylings of punk were lo-fi because of the cheap way in which such music was recorded. But its not as simple as that. Otherwise lo-fi would be merely a style of music determined by practical necessity, whereas in reality it quickly grew beyond that to become an aesthetic for bands to wilfully aspire towards. It became a genre in and of itself that flourished and peaked in a whoosh of cassette tape hiss in the early to mid-nineties. Indeed, looking back to the genre’s early-nineties peak, practically all the best American indie records, including Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand and Sebadoh’s III, seem like they are barely held together by sellotape and pritt-stick. If these bands were plasterers they wouldn’t bother with polyfila because hey, the cracks in the plasterwork were more interesting. Lo-fi was also a bit political. It was a determined kick against the bloated belly of mainstream alternative rock, which in those days was all post-grunge MTV drivel padded out by millions of dollars worth of big studio turd polishing. As Stephen Malkmus aptly sang about some big grunge bands of the day on Pavement’s lo-fi call to arms, ‘Range Life’ “I don’t understand what they mean/ And I could really give a fuck.”

Unlike other more tightly defined genres like shoegaze, there is no real unifying lo-fi sound. Rather, it’s the way in which things were recorded that holds the genre together. The musical styles vary from the detuned and decidedly wonky guitar fuzz that ultimately makes Pavement such a sublime acquired taste to Calvin Johnson’s baritone singing over Beat Happening’s austere musical structures. However, for my money, if there is one band that could speak for them all and represent the genre in some sort of United Nations style musical Security Council (hah, imagine that!), then that band is Guided By Voices (Sebadoh fans are bound to disagree with this, but if they want to really work this out I am willing to meet them in the car-park of Whelans to sort it out properly). Here was a band of seedy looking thirty-something dudes with beer-guts who recorded most of their best material while they were blind drunk in a laundry room below one of their gafs. Led by The Who and Beatles obsessed primary school teacher Robert Pollard, Guided By Voices used some unbelievably ropey equipment to record music that at its best, climbs to the rarified heights of the best work from those 1960s bands he idolized so much. Although it takes some leap of the imagination to describe much of their polished later material as lo-fi, Guided by Voices’ blinding early run of four wonderful albums from ‘Propeller’ through ‘Alien Lanes’ are shot through with the idiosyncrasies and imperfections that make lo-fi such a love it or hate it genre. You see, one man’s imperfection is another’s accidental wonder. The fact is that Bee Thousand (to take one Guided By Voices release) sounds positively destroyed with tape hiss, badly overdubbed vocals, too much treble, out of tune guitar parts, unfiltered sounds of studio doors slamming, and (half way through one track) a band member snoring drunkenly. Yet these things only add to the record’s legend. Its hard to explain, but all that ramshackle madness eventually worms its way into how you experience the album, finally becoming as important a part of the listening experience as the fine music itself. It gives things textures, depths, and a unique sense of time and place that crackles and sparks. In fact, Bee Thousand is miraculous in that a huge part of its brilliance is wrapped up in how shite it sounds. As a musical statement it is a million miles from the edgeless studio polish and easy to digest radio-friendly mixes that characterize much so-called ‘alternative rock,’ which are little more than mushed up liga for your ear-drums.

Of course, lo-fi does not begin and end with Guided By Voices, Pavement and Sebadoh. The big three are a gateway drug into a scene crammed with dozens of lesser known but fascinating groups such as Silver Jews, The Mountain Goats, The Olivia Tremor Control and the grandaddy of them all, Daniel Johnston. On this side of the Atlantic lots of artists took the baton and ran with it too, most notably The Beta Band, Badly Drawn Boy when he was in his early bedroom phase (in other words when he was worth giving a frick about) and more recently, Graham Coxon and our own Jape. What ties all these groups together might not just be the homespun nature of their recordings but something else too. It’s the honesty that is inherent in recording music this way. Its impossible to cloak poor quality with the smoke and mirrors of studio trickery. Lo-fi brings the listener’s attention back to where it should be. Back to the song itself.

It’s an hour before O’Death tear a blistering live set out of Whelan’s impressive new soundsystem and three of the guys from the band are holding court on everything from murderous cats, beards, blogging, grunge and Yeats. It would seem banter comes as naturally to these lads as one of their dirty jugband banjo riffs. Guitarist and ukele thumper Gabe is doing a comic piece of interpretive physical theatre that casts the influential music website pitchforkmedia as a giant robo-monster (replete with terrifying robotic voice) zapping bands with its judgemental death-rays. “BZZZZZ BRRURRRR. You get an 8.2! You get a 6.5. RARRRRR, YOU GET ZERO. Pitchfork has spoken!” But first, the music.

O’Death are a New York based band that trade in a wild ‘n’ rootsy American style of music that sounds like Tom Waits and a bunch of pissed-up skeletons at an Appalachian barn dance. When asked to describe their music, fiddle player Bob tells me: “Dirt. Our common influence is dirty sounding music, we want to sound dirty. I think you can hear that we are influenced by that kind of stuff, punk rock whether it’s the misfits or something, or old tradtional American music, like old roots, gospel or the blues. Old dirty recordings, old dirty performances of that.” Lead singer Greg agrees, “we like dirt.” They also told me later that they like the Alice in Chains record Dirt. Thankfully, in spite of this dirt-talk they all looked rather clean (if bearded) and there was even a mild smell of deodorant in the room.

Greg tells me “Death is inevitable. Death is gonna happen. We’ve always sort of embraced death in our music. Y’know dark matter as it were.” Gabe adds “right, like the New Orleans funeral march or the Irish wake. Its sort of like, yeah when granpa died we all partied down. That sort of thing.” You can see what they are talking about in the barmy but brill video for their single ‘down to rest’ which is literally crawling with stop motion ghoulies and skeletons. According to Greg, “Oh Death is an old poem by Yeats I think. [Its] also an old folk song, something that’s been around for a long time.” Bob adds “its also a little Biblical, its in the Bible I think. Its everywhere”
Continuing to talk about their sound the guys tell me about how vital the live aspect of their art is to them. “It’s the most raw and immediate thing” says Greg. Bob elaborates “when you record a group you tend to lose certain energy. Listening to the record, you can’t pick up or see what people are doing. Its gets lost. You get so used to recording effects, thinking that stuff is overdubbed.” Greg then explains the live feel of their records “We try to stay as close and true to our live performance on our records for the most part, and there might be just the odd bit, the odd few minutes where it just doesn’t carry over or we want to add a little something else. This is important because our live show is just really where people are affected by it, and we have the most fun there.” Later on at the gig proper, this makes sense. At the end of the set, the band are giving it socks in the midst of the audience and everyone is swept right up in the experience. Greg’s voice is a versatile thing, manufacturing guttural and raspy vocal lowdown tumbles one minute, high and yelpy somersaults the next. It’s a Tom Waits versus David Byrne vibe. Bob tells me about Greg’s singing, “you’ll hear a lot of traditional sort of vocal stylings in Greg’s voice. And he uses his real voice, other than his vocal inflections there are no other effects.”

In keeping with the zeitgeist, and considering that Analogue magazine has a large online component, I ask the band about blogs. “It gives a lot of exposure to new bands. It hypes up new bands”. Gabe explains. Though, Greg sees a bit of a downside to this “they might not be ready for it. Bands get hyped now before they even bring out their first recording. With all that pressure, there is a danger it might not be good for them. They might just peter out under the pressure.” He mentions fledgling US band Black Kids, who are swamped in hype despite having barely played a gig outside of Florida and only releasing a few demos. However, the guys generally agree that blogs have been good to O’Death. “I’ve read blogs where some dude has posted a much more accurate description of what we’re about than one of these internet journalists.” It was this comment that prompted Gabe’s impromptu pitchfork spoof.

Before winding up I ask the band two last things. First off, with me being a proponent of the virtues of facial hair (on men) I couldn’t help noticing that O’Death do a good line in beards. Do they have any beard care tips for Analogue readers with beards of their own? Greg (whose hardcore beard looks like impenetrable curls of black barbed wire) tells me he shampoos his. So does Gabe. I’m flabbergasted. I never thought of a beard as something that might need shampooing, and being told this by a band who are describing themselves as dirty? Yikes. But Greg has a good excuse, his wrought iron follicles need softening. “My beard shaves razors,” he tells me. Finally, I ask what to expect from tonight’s show. Gabe says “Its gonna be about ten minutes long. We’re all gonna be naked and I’m gonna sing lying down.” Greg chips in “Yeah and I bring face paint and paint everybody in the audience’s faces.” Well, there was no face-paint, but three of the band did take their their tops off, and everyone who was there with me agreed that it was a proper hoe-down. Just before I switch off the recorder and wish them luck, Greg sums the O’Death experience up nicely: “actually how about a bunch of hairy sweaty guys who really care about the music they play.”