Bombay Bicycle Club
Plants And Animals
Mon, July 30, 2012
Doors: 8:00 pm / Show: 9:00 pm
Webster Hall
New York, NY
$25
Tickets
This event is 18 and over
http://www.bowerypresents.com/event/114315/
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Bombay Bicycle Club
There are few things in music more exhilarating than the sound of a young band in a hurry. Velocity, hunger, surprise: these are the qualities that keep a band interesting. Bombay Bicycle Club’s third album in as many years reminds you there was a time when new bands put out a record every year or so, each one expanding their territory and making listeners reassess their assumptions. As its title promises, A Different Kind of Fix is not at all what you’d expect. It is the sound of a band throwing the doors wide open and confounding all preconceptions.
The band members have never wasted much time. Frontman Jack Steadman, guitarist Jamie MacColl (grandson of folk legend Ewan, nephew of the late Kirsty), bassist Ed Nash and drummer Suren de Saram formed the band at school in north London in 2006. They won a competition to play at that year’s V festival, released two EPs the next year and wrote their debut album, I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, while still at school. It came out in 2009 and went gold.
This is where most new bands would take a year or so to regroup and plot their next move. Instead, Bombay Bicycle Club took a left-turn with 2010’s folk-influenced Flaws, which included covers of Joanna Newsom and John Martyn. Their label was initially reluctant to release a second album so soon, and an acoustic one at that, but Flaws grazed the top 10 and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award. “I think that’s what bands should do,” says Jack, now 21. “I don’t know how bands can make the same album over and over again. After Flaws it’s all out in the open. We can do whatever we want.”
Signposts to their third record emerged last year in the form of Jack’s low- key solo tracks on Soundcloud and MySpace, bearing the influence of J Dilla’s instrumental hip hop and Flying Lotus’s fidgety electronica. It was a dramatic departure from the stripped-down, organic sound of Flaws but it hadn’t come out of nowhere. Jack has been making electronic music in private since he was 14, when he first discovered Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. “With that type of music, until you become comfortable with producing it, it sounds like a 10-year-old’s made it,” he explains. “You can be bad at playing guitar and a song can still sound great but with electronic music you need to be a bit of a nerd. I’ve been trying for a long time.”
The band reconnected with long-time producer Jim Abbiss (Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian) in London last autumn and again in Hamburg in February. They also traveled to Atlanta in April to record Shuffle, Your Eyes and Favourite Day with Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley, M.I.A.). Tinie Tempah was in the studio next door. “He came in,” says Jack. “’Oh I’m a huge fan, when are we going to collaborate?’ He was charming everyone.” Finally, it was mixed by Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Portishead, the Horrors).
“We’d always talked about making an album in one place with one producer and we ended up with the complete opposite,” says Jamie.
Throughout the album, the production is intrinsic to the songwriting process rather than a final polish. Many songs started out as laptop loops or rearranged samples before blossoming into full-band pop songs. How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep, which appeared in demo form on the soundtrack to Twilight: Eclipse, opens the album with eye-widening mantric dream-pop. The first single Shuffle compresses hip hop breakbeats, highlife guitars, chopped-up piano samples and the campfire psychedelia of Animal Collective into one of the most irresistible pop songs of the summer.
Lights Out, Words Gone makes common cause with chillwave via looped vocal harmonies and dewy-fresh Balearic guitar. Take the Right One’s scintillating, multi-layered sound came about when Abbiss suggested recording four different versions, each one more effects-heavy than the last, and then playing them back all at once. Leave It even lifts its opening motif from a Puccini opera, recasting it as stirring guitar-pop with backing vocals from singer-songwriter Lucy Rose (who also appears on Lights Out, Words Gone).
Other songs had a more traditional evolution. The legacy of Flaws is felt in Beggars, which moves from spartan folk into thrumming rock and celestial sighs, and the sonorous Fracture, a song from the Flaws tour that was filled out, recorded in a church and produced by the whole band. What You Want (“about being a pushover in relationships”) builds a bridge back to the debut and, further still, to the resonant, raincoated indie-rock of the Chameleons and Kitchens of Distinction. The final, self-produced song, Still, is a falsetto piano ballad with hints of Thom Yorke, a gentle touchdown after 50 minutes of sonic adventure.
Pressed about what these songs are about, Jack becomes elusive. The lyrics this time are clues and fragments rather than stories, and he feels more comfortable that way. “We were so young when we started, we weren’t self-conscious at all. We didn’t think anyone would listen to the songs. The reason I started making music was because I couldn’t express with words what I wanted to say.”
Bombay Bicycle Club have always had youth on their side. Through touring and social media, they have built a fiercely loyal, tattooing-lyrics- on-their-arm kind of fanbase. “I’ve always thought it was because of having fans who were the same age as us who could come to talk to us after a gig and relate to us,” says Jack. But A Different Kind of Fix is a giant step into adulthood: an intoxicating, enveloping record, which anchors its diverse inspirations in the warmth and dynamism of Jack’s songwriting. It draws the strands of I Had the Blues, Flaws and Jack’s solo instrumentals into a panoramic picture of what this band is capable of. It is a watershed for the band: not just their best record yet, but a promise of still better to come.
“Bands these days get so pigeonholed by their first album, which 40 years ago was not the case, but we’re constantly trying to find the kind of music we want to make,” says Jamie. “And I’m not sure we’ve discovered that yet.”
Long may they continue searching.
The band members have never wasted much time. Frontman Jack Steadman, guitarist Jamie MacColl (grandson of folk legend Ewan, nephew of the late Kirsty), bassist Ed Nash and drummer Suren de Saram formed the band at school in north London in 2006. They won a competition to play at that year’s V festival, released two EPs the next year and wrote their debut album, I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, while still at school. It came out in 2009 and went gold.
This is where most new bands would take a year or so to regroup and plot their next move. Instead, Bombay Bicycle Club took a left-turn with 2010’s folk-influenced Flaws, which included covers of Joanna Newsom and John Martyn. Their label was initially reluctant to release a second album so soon, and an acoustic one at that, but Flaws grazed the top 10 and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award. “I think that’s what bands should do,” says Jack, now 21. “I don’t know how bands can make the same album over and over again. After Flaws it’s all out in the open. We can do whatever we want.”
Signposts to their third record emerged last year in the form of Jack’s low- key solo tracks on Soundcloud and MySpace, bearing the influence of J Dilla’s instrumental hip hop and Flying Lotus’s fidgety electronica. It was a dramatic departure from the stripped-down, organic sound of Flaws but it hadn’t come out of nowhere. Jack has been making electronic music in private since he was 14, when he first discovered Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. “With that type of music, until you become comfortable with producing it, it sounds like a 10-year-old’s made it,” he explains. “You can be bad at playing guitar and a song can still sound great but with electronic music you need to be a bit of a nerd. I’ve been trying for a long time.”
The band reconnected with long-time producer Jim Abbiss (Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian) in London last autumn and again in Hamburg in February. They also traveled to Atlanta in April to record Shuffle, Your Eyes and Favourite Day with Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley, M.I.A.). Tinie Tempah was in the studio next door. “He came in,” says Jack. “’Oh I’m a huge fan, when are we going to collaborate?’ He was charming everyone.” Finally, it was mixed by Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Portishead, the Horrors).
“We’d always talked about making an album in one place with one producer and we ended up with the complete opposite,” says Jamie.
Throughout the album, the production is intrinsic to the songwriting process rather than a final polish. Many songs started out as laptop loops or rearranged samples before blossoming into full-band pop songs. How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep, which appeared in demo form on the soundtrack to Twilight: Eclipse, opens the album with eye-widening mantric dream-pop. The first single Shuffle compresses hip hop breakbeats, highlife guitars, chopped-up piano samples and the campfire psychedelia of Animal Collective into one of the most irresistible pop songs of the summer.
Lights Out, Words Gone makes common cause with chillwave via looped vocal harmonies and dewy-fresh Balearic guitar. Take the Right One’s scintillating, multi-layered sound came about when Abbiss suggested recording four different versions, each one more effects-heavy than the last, and then playing them back all at once. Leave It even lifts its opening motif from a Puccini opera, recasting it as stirring guitar-pop with backing vocals from singer-songwriter Lucy Rose (who also appears on Lights Out, Words Gone).
Other songs had a more traditional evolution. The legacy of Flaws is felt in Beggars, which moves from spartan folk into thrumming rock and celestial sighs, and the sonorous Fracture, a song from the Flaws tour that was filled out, recorded in a church and produced by the whole band. What You Want (“about being a pushover in relationships”) builds a bridge back to the debut and, further still, to the resonant, raincoated indie-rock of the Chameleons and Kitchens of Distinction. The final, self-produced song, Still, is a falsetto piano ballad with hints of Thom Yorke, a gentle touchdown after 50 minutes of sonic adventure.
Pressed about what these songs are about, Jack becomes elusive. The lyrics this time are clues and fragments rather than stories, and he feels more comfortable that way. “We were so young when we started, we weren’t self-conscious at all. We didn’t think anyone would listen to the songs. The reason I started making music was because I couldn’t express with words what I wanted to say.”
Bombay Bicycle Club have always had youth on their side. Through touring and social media, they have built a fiercely loyal, tattooing-lyrics- on-their-arm kind of fanbase. “I’ve always thought it was because of having fans who were the same age as us who could come to talk to us after a gig and relate to us,” says Jack. But A Different Kind of Fix is a giant step into adulthood: an intoxicating, enveloping record, which anchors its diverse inspirations in the warmth and dynamism of Jack’s songwriting. It draws the strands of I Had the Blues, Flaws and Jack’s solo instrumentals into a panoramic picture of what this band is capable of. It is a watershed for the band: not just their best record yet, but a promise of still better to come.
“Bands these days get so pigeonholed by their first album, which 40 years ago was not the case, but we’re constantly trying to find the kind of music we want to make,” says Jamie. “And I’m not sure we’ve discovered that yet.”
Long may they continue searching.
Plants And Animals
Fall.
"Let's make a new record," they say. "How do we do this? Let's do it differently-let's write a whole pile of songs and develop them big time before we go into the studio to record-let's not do the fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants routine for a change-too crazy, too pressed. Let's create in a cave, off the clock, take some time. Like normal people," they say. "I'll book the Treatment Room for rehearsals and demoing," says Nic Basque.
Winter.
They meet in the afternoons. The Treatment Room is the studio in Montreal where they had recorded Parc Avenue and most of La La Land. The walls are white and brown and it's dark in there. Outside it's dark too. The city is white and brown and frozen solid. They set up some microphones and record into a laptop. Warren Spicer brings in the ideas. He's brimming with them. He's been spending time in a place with a piano, and sometimes that's the tool of choice. Other times he's on the acoustic guitar. It had been given a bit of a break on the last record. It's full of life.
They play. Warren is geometry, flesh and feel. Nic is the colour man. He's the guitar equivalent of taking a handsome blue blazer and turning it inside out to its pink, paisley innards like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He has a big, messy pile of pedals and a little amp called a Kalamazoo that sings like a cicada. Woodman goes thump thump on the drums like an octopus or ting ting like a daddy longlegs. Searching for something slanted, settling on something simple.
Spring.
They take a break from demoing. Nic distributes the pile of raw songs among his bandmates. Warren goes home and fills in lyrical holes. He is bold, straight-up and singular. His voice has grown throatier, chestier, more lived in. He has never sung like this before. The sun has come out and Warren bangs out a couple sunnier numbers that the band will tackle in the studio, just like they said they wouldn't. Who doesn't love the sun?
The Studio is La Frette, outside of Paris. They had had a taste of it before. La Frette is a great big old manor with a great big old vintage board that feels like the helm of a mighty ship. They sleep there, eat there, play there. They enjoy cheese and drink wine. The birds sing outside from sun up until sundown. They set up in the living room, la bibliothque, the wine cellar, the piano room in the basement.
The whole two weeks is spring birds and blossoms. No it isn't. Woodman hasn't done his homework. Warren gets stressed. The studio can be an unforgiving servant. But they have an amazing engineer and outside ear, Lionel Darenne, who has just gotten back from recording Feist on the California coast and is palm tree breezy. Somewhere around day five, something begins to click. Somewhere around day 10, the neighbour complains that it's Sunday and he doesn't want "le rock 'n' roll" while he hosts a family reunion in his backyard. They take a forced day off, extend their flights to ease things up and buy enough time to finish their tracking at a lower pressure pace. Sounds so simple. It was epic. And that was the end of that.
Summer
Mixing. Mixing, mixing, mixing. Is it really important? Much more interesting is this: Bass. "Let's starting playing live with a bass player," the band say together. Plants and Animals have been playing together for 10 years. They began as an instrumental group. They recorded a self-titled record in 2002 with 15-minute songs. They played around Montreal for years, no vocals, heavy on the improvising. Warren started singing with other people, and soon enough he just couldn't contain himself. Silence became oooohs, oooohs became words.
In 2008, a project two years in the making became Parc Avenue and they stepped out onto the circuit for the first time. It had guitars and drums and vocals, and orchestration out the wazoo. It was nominated for one Polaris prize, two Junos and three GAMIQs. They opened for Grizzly Bear in Montreal, and did their first tour with Wolf Parade. Danger Mouse got his paws on it and invited them to open for Gnarls Barkley, and later Broken Bells. The National invited them to open for them in Central Park. They headlined stages across North America and Europe.
In 2010, they released La La Land, a heavier, darker departure from Parc Avenue that has become a veritable cult favourite. They played over 100 shows that year, including a long US tour with Frightened Rabbit. To the Pitchfork Festival appearance the summer before, they added to the list such notables as Primavera in Barcelona, Bumbershoot in Seattle, End of the Road in the English countryside, a marquee spot at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and many more.
If Plants and Animals were a person, Parc Avenue is that person around eight years old-excited, wide-eyed, scatterbrained and innocent. La La Land is that person in adolescence-the body changing in exciting and confusing ways, cocky and insecure, bold and volatile, oily. The End of That marks the 20s-confident in a new, unmasked way, young, excited, going through some shit, will be at the party tonight.
Fall.
"We love the bass," both the band and the crowd chorus. "It gels everything together and makes it so multilayered and dynamic and sexy and huge."
Winter.
The End of That comes February 28, 2012.
"Let's make a new record," they say. "How do we do this? Let's do it differently-let's write a whole pile of songs and develop them big time before we go into the studio to record-let's not do the fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants routine for a change-too crazy, too pressed. Let's create in a cave, off the clock, take some time. Like normal people," they say. "I'll book the Treatment Room for rehearsals and demoing," says Nic Basque.
Winter.
They meet in the afternoons. The Treatment Room is the studio in Montreal where they had recorded Parc Avenue and most of La La Land. The walls are white and brown and it's dark in there. Outside it's dark too. The city is white and brown and frozen solid. They set up some microphones and record into a laptop. Warren Spicer brings in the ideas. He's brimming with them. He's been spending time in a place with a piano, and sometimes that's the tool of choice. Other times he's on the acoustic guitar. It had been given a bit of a break on the last record. It's full of life.
They play. Warren is geometry, flesh and feel. Nic is the colour man. He's the guitar equivalent of taking a handsome blue blazer and turning it inside out to its pink, paisley innards like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He has a big, messy pile of pedals and a little amp called a Kalamazoo that sings like a cicada. Woodman goes thump thump on the drums like an octopus or ting ting like a daddy longlegs. Searching for something slanted, settling on something simple.
Spring.
They take a break from demoing. Nic distributes the pile of raw songs among his bandmates. Warren goes home and fills in lyrical holes. He is bold, straight-up and singular. His voice has grown throatier, chestier, more lived in. He has never sung like this before. The sun has come out and Warren bangs out a couple sunnier numbers that the band will tackle in the studio, just like they said they wouldn't. Who doesn't love the sun?
The Studio is La Frette, outside of Paris. They had had a taste of it before. La Frette is a great big old manor with a great big old vintage board that feels like the helm of a mighty ship. They sleep there, eat there, play there. They enjoy cheese and drink wine. The birds sing outside from sun up until sundown. They set up in the living room, la bibliothque, the wine cellar, the piano room in the basement.
The whole two weeks is spring birds and blossoms. No it isn't. Woodman hasn't done his homework. Warren gets stressed. The studio can be an unforgiving servant. But they have an amazing engineer and outside ear, Lionel Darenne, who has just gotten back from recording Feist on the California coast and is palm tree breezy. Somewhere around day five, something begins to click. Somewhere around day 10, the neighbour complains that it's Sunday and he doesn't want "le rock 'n' roll" while he hosts a family reunion in his backyard. They take a forced day off, extend their flights to ease things up and buy enough time to finish their tracking at a lower pressure pace. Sounds so simple. It was epic. And that was the end of that.
Summer
Mixing. Mixing, mixing, mixing. Is it really important? Much more interesting is this: Bass. "Let's starting playing live with a bass player," the band say together. Plants and Animals have been playing together for 10 years. They began as an instrumental group. They recorded a self-titled record in 2002 with 15-minute songs. They played around Montreal for years, no vocals, heavy on the improvising. Warren started singing with other people, and soon enough he just couldn't contain himself. Silence became oooohs, oooohs became words.
In 2008, a project two years in the making became Parc Avenue and they stepped out onto the circuit for the first time. It had guitars and drums and vocals, and orchestration out the wazoo. It was nominated for one Polaris prize, two Junos and three GAMIQs. They opened for Grizzly Bear in Montreal, and did their first tour with Wolf Parade. Danger Mouse got his paws on it and invited them to open for Gnarls Barkley, and later Broken Bells. The National invited them to open for them in Central Park. They headlined stages across North America and Europe.
In 2010, they released La La Land, a heavier, darker departure from Parc Avenue that has become a veritable cult favourite. They played over 100 shows that year, including a long US tour with Frightened Rabbit. To the Pitchfork Festival appearance the summer before, they added to the list such notables as Primavera in Barcelona, Bumbershoot in Seattle, End of the Road in the English countryside, a marquee spot at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and many more.
If Plants and Animals were a person, Parc Avenue is that person around eight years old-excited, wide-eyed, scatterbrained and innocent. La La Land is that person in adolescence-the body changing in exciting and confusing ways, cocky and insecure, bold and volatile, oily. The End of That marks the 20s-confident in a new, unmasked way, young, excited, going through some shit, will be at the party tonight.
Fall.
"We love the bass," both the band and the crowd chorus. "It gels everything together and makes it so multilayered and dynamic and sexy and huge."
Winter.
The End of That comes February 28, 2012.
