The Trunk 25/03/2018: Mothertongue interview

Old Trunkface strikes back

While Huw, is busy focusing on other things, I (that is, David, the Evil Label Boss) will be posting occasional updates to The Trunk, and generally messing up the beautifully crafted blog so beloved of the Young Elephant. In this edition there's an interview with Louis Smith from Mothertongue, as well as a bumper reviews round up.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Pun Bastard interviews Mothertongue

Our head of PR, James R. Turner, caught up with Louis Smith, frontman from Mothertongue, to talk about their recently released masterpiece, Where The Moonlight Snows.

JT: Louis, thanks for taking the time to talk to me about the Where The Moonlight Snows. How would you describe the album, in your own words?

LS: Where the Moonlight Snows was our attempt to make a natural, honest album.  After previously putting together as intricate and heavily-wrought piece as Unsongs (Mothertongue's first album, released in 2016 - ed.), we were wary of gimmickry, and of disappearing down a rabbit hole of caricature or self-parody.  Moonlight still contains bombast and trickery, of course, with tracks like Mal de Mer and The Isle of Not Quite Right indulging our habit of pushing things to breaking point now and then.  However, we’ve tried to make a record which, overall, has more room to breathe than Unsongs.  It was scary to us to leave unfilled spaces and naked moments in the music, like the unaccompanied vocals in Blue, Wicked Heart, or the hollowed out arrangement of The Creature Tree.  Scarier still to pass that music out to a public who might have been expecting Unsongs II.  There may be moments on the album which barely feel finished, or where the obvious explosion never comes.  But, well, once you’ve shoehorned Japanese disco into the middle of a punk-rock song, you need to find new ways to surprise people!

JT: Exactly how does the new album differ from Unsongs?

LS: Unsongs was definitely an “everything, plus the kitchen sink” affair.  While making it we were definitely looking to come out with guns blazing.  The aim was maximum impact, disorientation and a lasting impression.  This time around we took a more measured approach.  The goal with Moonlight was a record which would reward slower investigation, and which, while probably lighter on initial impact, would have more overall depth and reveal more of itself over time.  Content wise, it’s also a more hopeful album; Unsongs was a portrait of panic, a twitching ball of anxious glee.  The new record is aiming to explore more avenues for hope, feelings of calm and escape, and hopefully, to narrate some moments of actual beauty.

JT: What inspiration did you draw upon when making the new album?

LS: With 6 such disparate personalities involved in the band, a list of “fave bands” or “top 5 albums” would reveal little about what informs our music-making process.  During tracking sessions for Moonlight everything from Latin street jazz, through the Stax/Motown classics, to the lo-fi garage rock of the late 60s was in heavy rotation, so it’s hard to pin down what comes from where.  We were definitely inspired during the creation of this record by the pastoral locations in which we began making it, so it’s definitely more Forever Changes than Reign in Blood.  Lyrically, influence comes from folklore and legends from around the world, the twisting wordplay and meta-structures of John Barth, exploratory science fiction of the 1970s and the elegant forms of machine code.  The usual really!

JT: Any live shows planned?

LS: We’re currently beavering away on the unenviable task of turning a recorded document into a live show.  We’re not the type to jump on stage and have a crack at replicating a record exactly in front of an audience, so there’s a lot of tearing down and rebuilding involved.  We’re expecting to have some gigs booked for the summer soon, and aiming to get around as much of the country as possible to spread the word.

JT: Finally, Louis, sum up Where The Moonlight Snows for us in a short paragraph!

LS: It’s round, it’s blue-ish, and it’s got a hole in the middle!  Joking aside, this is a collection of stories-in-stories, looking to imagine what goes on anywhere we escape ourselves, told over an approximation of what we think those places might sound like.  You can also dance to it.

JT: Thanks again for your time, Louis!

Review Roundup

We're still getting great writeups for Charlie Cawood's masterpiece, The Divine Abstract, including a lovely piece on the Art Rocking web site. 

Fractal Mirror's Close To Vapour gets a glowing write up from prog royalty Jerry Lucky here, and another corker on Progarchives here.

Our very own Tom Slatter - a real Mothertongue fanboy - reviews Where The Moonlight Snows for Progradar.

And last but by no means least, the first reviews for The Euphoric - the forthcoming album from The Fierce And The Dead - are in, at Prog Metal Madness, by Jez Denton at Progradar, and a video review at the acclaimed Classic Album Review YouTube site.

The Trunk 11/3/2018: BEM Marches On

March is a very busy month for BEM. I'm not really sure why, but we've put out at least one thing every March since we got started, including three last year! And, with this year marking BEM's fifth birthday, we thought it proper to go back and take a look at what we've released every March.

As per usual with these archive features, every heading is also a link to the album in question on the webstore!

2014: Motherland

This is what happens when your photographer forgets to clean his lens.

2014 was the first year in which we even existed during March, and we started off our tradition, such as it is, on a strong note. Simon Godfrey, after kicking the label off in explosive fashion with electronic opus Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed, expressed his more songwriterly side with Motherland, a collection of eleven of his own songs that amply showed off his versatility. Personal and passionately performed, our third ever album release helped set the tone for the variety of music we hoped to release in the years to come.

2015: Morning Sun

You're not allowed to look directly at this album cover.

Jon Hunt, previously styled as jh, brought his trademark singer-songwriter verve to Bad Elephant with Morning Sun, a greatest-hits compilation of material from his three previous albums. Displaying an excellent range of both tone and subject matter, this sampling of Jon's decade of work and experience as a solo artist is a delight to listen to. Every single song will have you humming along in very short order, which made Elephant Towers quite a noisy place back in spring 2015.

2016: All Our Yesterdays

Words cannot express how much I want this coat.

Matthew Parmenter, perhaps better known for his role in Detroit prog outfit Discipline, proved his solo chops back in March 2016 with All Our Yesterdays. There's a strong element of the actor to his vocals here - you can feel Parmenter really inhabiting the voices of his characters, beyond simply singing the lines, and this elevates his performance to something really rather special. Often unsettling, sometimes downright uncanny, but always compelling, this is high-concept songwriting and performance at its very best.

2017: Tope's Sphere 2

Tope's Blue and Orange Contrast.

March 2017 was an unusually busy month for us, seeing no fewer than three albums released under our flag. This one was the first, the companion soundtrack to the lost TV show of the same name (which, for clarity, never existed) and a wonderful slice of proggy weirdness and 70s televisual nostalgia. Orange Clocks may be a 7-piece outfit, but they hang together uncannily well to produce something chaotic, irreverent, and, above all else, fun.

2017: Happy People

Objects in heads-up display may be weirder than they appear.

Oh, Mr Slatter, where would we be without you? Somewhere substantially less strange, I reckon, and much, much poorer for it. Happy People is, like most of Tom's work, deeply unusual, but never slips into incoherence. There's a lot going on here, and Tom's lyrics, masterfully written and loaded with layers of meaning and feeling, hold it all together near-effortlessly. This album may have been something of a change in subject matter for him, but the quality remains as high as always.

2017: Gargoyles

The monster's gearing up to tell a really bad joke. The girl remains unimpressed.

Much beloved by Mrs Elephant and by the label as a whole, Big Hogg are purveyors of, in their own words, "electric music for the mind and body". What this means in the case of Gargoyles is a set of thoughtful, Canterbury-ish tunes, led by three fantastic vocalists and buoyed by a distinctive combination of brass and electric piano. Electric though it may be, the music carries a kind of old-world charm that belies the slick production and eclectic style.

2018: Where the Moonlight Snows

Wait, if that's a mountain, how big are those damn birds?

Well, we're not going to break our streak, are we? After the great success of Unsongs back in 2016, Mothertongue are returning with another collection of sharp, diverse, infectiously singable songs, and we at Elephant Towers can scarcely wait to get them out to all of you. If you'd like to make damn sure that you get them as soon as you can, preorders are open now ahead of a March 23rd release (less than two weeks away), so get in there now!

Status Update

As we just mentioned, Where the Moonlight Snows is out in less than two weeks' time, and preorders for the equally exciting The Euphoric (see last week's Trunk for more on that!) are open now, though you'll have to wait another couple of months for that.

Review Roundup

The latest issue of Songlines Magazine rated The Divine Abstract at a respectable four stars - you can have a read of their review below!

The Trunk 4/3/2018: Interview with Matt Stevens

We've a very special feature for you today: an interview with none other than Matt Stevens of The Fierce and the Dead, the band behind Spooky Action, Magnet, Truck, and, very soon indeed, brand new album The Euphoric! We reached out and asked Matt if we could pick his brain about the upcoming project, and he was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day and let us pick...

The Trunk: Tell us a little about the creative process behind this album.

Matt Stevens: We started writing pretty much after we finished the Magnet EP so late 2015 into 2016 then we recorded from early 2017, alongside writing more stuff. We finished in Feb this year, so it’s been a long process. In between that we did loads of gigs and played in America so that made us up our game as players. We were listening to lots of Boards Of Canada and the Melvins but also Sepultura so there are some of those bits in there.  Also My Bloody Valentine, St Vincent and Slowdive. Ozrics, Pink Floyd, Can and Hawkwind.

Spacey psychedelic metal stuff and more shoegazey stuff. We experimented a lot with different guitar tunings and more esoteric guitar sounds and pedals and this is the first album I’ve played quite a bit of synth on and some piano. Kev has done an amazing job on the production, Steve really focused on the detailed guitar parts. We recorded at some awesome studios too, Livingstone in London for example.  We tried a lot of different things like using different drum kits for different parts of a song and lots more variation in guitar sounds.

TT: What would you say are the main differences between The Euphoric and your previous work?

MS: It’s heavier and more psychedelic, bit more spacey, more synths, more downtuned guitars. I think it’s still melodic, it’s still us, especially from what we were doing on Magnet. Some of the riffs are a bit more straightforward and it’s got one tune on it that is the most complex rhythmically that we’ve done. The Euphoric will be a shock to some people, we change with each record, we always have. We’ve done a lot of gigs since Spooky, lots of big festivals and we’ve realised the standard of playing required to play to thousands of people at Ramblin Man or Arctangent is a lot higher. We’re a lot tighter now and a lot more confident. This band means a lot to all of us.

Where does he get those special small guitars? (Photo by Ashley Jones.)

TT: What can you tell us about the long-awaited Parts 7 and 8? Are these the last Parts, or could we someday see a Part 9?

MS: No this is the end of the Parts, Part 8 has a call back to Part 1. It’s done. We didn’t want to string it out just cause people like it. It’s been a fun thing to do. Each of the parts reflects the album it’s on really. 

TT: "Spooky Action" refers to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. What's the story behind "The Euphoric"?

MS: It’s about taking joy in your life, for us  about the joy of playing live shows. Maybe to be happy in these is a state of madness, with all the corruption in the world, all the hatred. I don’t know. You have to find your own joy. 

TT: What can we look forward to in the way of live shows in the months to come?

MS: 15th March, Robin 2, Bilston w/Stick Men (Tony Levin)

30th March to 1st April Hawkeaster w/Hawkwind, System 7, Ginger Wildheart and many more

18th May, London support from Mark Buckingham (Sold Out)

16th June, Sonic Rock Solstice w/ Senser, Evil Blizzard and more

27th-30th July Kozfest with Cosmic Dead, Mugstar, Nodens Ictus. and more

(More information about TFATD's live schedule can be found here.)

We’ll be doing a full UK headlining tour in two legs later in the year and in early 2019 with dates in the US and Europe to follow. We’re really enjoying playing live at the moment.

TT: You call yourselves The Fierce and the Dead - but which one's Fierce?

MS: Sadly none of us are very fierce and we’re all hopeful that we won’t be dead in the near future. Actually Stu is a pretty fierce drummer, one thing about The Euphoric, Stu’s drumming is superb.

TT: Last but definitely not least, when can we all get our hands on The Euphoric?

It’s out on the 18th of May with the preorder on Monday the 5th of March. (That's tomorrow! Hooray! - Ed.) There are a load of limited edition items including art by the legend that is Mark Buckingham and vinyl. We can’t wait to play it to everyone.

Oh and here’s an exclusive for you - here is the track listing:

Truck

1991

The Euphoric 

Dancing Robots

Dug Town

Cadet Opal

Verbose

48K

Part 7

Part 8

***

We'd like to take the opportunity to thank Matt for his time, and for being part of one of BEM's hardest-working bands. Preorders for The Euphoric open tomorrow at this link, which will go live first thing - don't miss it!

Review Roundup

A Map in Fragments got a review this week! This one's a little different to some of the reviews we usually feature here, as Olav Martin Bjørnsen says he's not actually sure whether he likes the album - but finds himself drawn back to it nonetheless by its "melodic and intriguing" feel. We'll take that!