Matt Fitzgerald responded to yourGigs about the making and upcoming breaking of the band's new album, They Blind the Stars, And the Wild Team, on the Splendour in the Grass stage and national tour in August.
yourGigs (yG): It was a conscious decision by the band to cease playing to be able to devote a lot of time creating the album - do you think the end result is better for it?
Matt Fitzgerald (MF): Definitely - we're really happy with the album and there's no way we could have explored what we did if we were rushing to churn out another album. We wanted to get off that treadmill of tour/record/release/tour because it makes your creative instinct habitual and we wanted to make an album that felt fresh and new.
yG: Is the finished product close to the initial ambitions you held for the album and how did you go about creating and sourcing the sounds that appear on the album?
MF: I remember talking to Xav [Fijac] about the album [in 2006] and we already had very distinct ideas about what we wanted to do, particularly with how we want to play with sound, so in some ways the album very much reflects our initial ambitions. At the same time, over the period of writing, our ambitions with what we wanted to do grew, and as a result I think it's both reflective of our original intention but also more than that ... With this album it was about pushing what we have done [previously] and creating something new.
... The main thing was about shaping the sound as a whole rather than focusing on each separate instrument, so everyone's sound is informed by the other sounds going on at the same time. The process was long, painful and one which Ebay profited greatly by - it was basically all of us trying out new things and messing around with stuff to get the sound we wanted ... It was just lots of time discovering how to get instruments to do what we wanted, rather than the instruments setting the parameters of what was possible.
yG: What did the band hope for by using producer Scott Colburn, and what did his methods and studio set-up in a converted church bring out in the recordings?
MF: We're a live band ... It something that's hard to capture on record and this recording we wanted to have the emotion and proximity you get when you see something live, but at the same time have that great fidelity of a good recording.
For us Scott was the man - his work has this amazing balance, almost contradictions, between an almost punk immediacy and a whacked out studio album. Plus we got on like a house on fire from the first time we spoke.
A lot of this has to do with his wizardry and part of that is the recording set up. These days a lot of recordings are very isolated - with each part recorded separately. Usually even when bands are playing together they are still separated by rooms but with Scott we were all together in his church... and he's great at stripping back all the B.S.
yG: Did this album present some new musical challenges for the band? How do you think both the band and album emerged from this particular writing and recording process?
MF: If an album isn't setting new musical challenges for a band then the band should quit. For us it's always been important that we are moving forward rather than rehashing the past. I always find that you emerge from the process somewhat battered and bruised, but that part of the process if you immerse yourself in what you are trying to do.
I don't particularly like the entire process to be honest - there's what you hear in your head and it's so clear and then it's surmounting the obstacles of translating them from imagination to reality, with the constant risk of what you hear in your head not being realised or evaporating. So for me, I feel a great relief we it finally achieved a finalised album. I think the challenge with this one is we never compromised or accepted a watered-down version of what we collectively imagined this album could be. So the challenge was the same as always, this time we just persisted until we overcame it.
yG: Have you found that the different music writing methods that have gone into writing your previous soundtrack works has changed or influenced the way you go about creating your studio albums?
MF: All our experiences affect how we write. The soundtrack stuff is a bit of a chicken and egg - we were originally asked to compose for film because our songs naturally sounded cinematic, but yes, having gone through those experiences, it has affected us, particularly around nuance of emotion, dynamics, the use of space, narrative and the way songs need to interact with each other.
I think the connection is stronger with this album because we really wanted it to be a trip, and so the structure is more aligned to a film's structure than a typical album structure. It's also about the length of a film so for us we really wanted to make it have that quality but without the preconceived story line to inform you when you listen - this way it can become your own.
yG: Is the band looking forward to returning to the stage and in particular getting back to Splendour after the landmark 2006 performance? How do you prepare the songs for the live setting?
MF: Like I said earlier, we are a live band so we can't wait. It's been hard to wait so long but it's a great way to return, playing at Splendour. It has a circularity or completeness that appeals to me. This seems like the best set we've ever had so we're really excited to finally share it.
For us it's about creating the set that builds and flows well together and that takes trial and error - it's different of course to the album because it's a live context, and live it's a more noisy, tripped out and frenetic affair. We're loving it - all we need now is to stop talking about it and start doing it!
They Blind The Stars, And The Wild Team' is out now on Inertia.
Andy Ryan
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