Record Review & Interview: Julian Casablancas – “Phrazes for the Young”

Given that the Strokes haven’t released a record in almost four years, Julian Casablancas’s debut as a solo artist is oddly timed. Band-mates Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti have all struck out on their own during the group’s hiatus (twice, in Hammond’s case) and word is that the Strokes will be back in the studio come January. Fittingly, Phrazes for the Young is the most Strokes-esque of the group’s solo outings, thanks in no small part to Casablancas’s signature half-spoken croon. Thankfully, he puts a twist to song structures and chord patterns that rarely stray outside of the Is This It realm, employing drum machines and keyboards in place of guitars to great effect. Even his vocals get pushed to their limits on “Left & Right in the Dark.” Lyrically, Casablancas makes fun of his image, with lines like, “Yes, I know I’m going to hell in a leather jacket/At least I’ll be in another world while you’re pissing on my casket” on lead track “Out of the Blue.” Although the album does fall off after midpoint highlight “4 Chords of the Apocalypse,” Casablancas has proven himself an adept pop songsmith without the help of his usual friends.

When you started writing and recording, did you have an idea of what you wanted the overall sound to be?
I had some ideas. I think it landed somewhere in between what I was planning and what it ended up being.

What did you originally want?
An album of super-songs [laughs]. It started with drumbeats; I had this idea of polyrhythmic stuff. I was trying to do something different. I had these specific, quirky, modern drumbeats and I wanted to figure out a way to make them interlock so that it sounded rhythmically complex, but in a slightly original way. Without being busy, just feel groovin’. But also enhance the melody because sometimes rhythmic or melodic, to get both is a tough thing. I felt really confident about the melodic side, but I had to work on the rhythmic side.

You seem to be poking fun at your image with some of the lyrics. I’m thinking of the “I’m going to hell in a leather jacket” line.
I don’t know. Different people have different interpretations of things. I don’t know. I didn’t choose it; it chose me.

Do you see the way you approached this record influencing the next Strokes album?
I don’t know. I won’t push it but maybe other people will.

Are you frustrated by people asking you questions about the Strokes while you’re trying to promote your record?
No. No I don’t. I understand why people ask, of course. But, yeah, I just don’t feel that I should talk about it.

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

Interview: Happy Monday’s Gaz Whelan

That The Happy Mondays still exist in any form — let alone as a functioning band — is a minor miracle.

Although they were more of a foreign curiosity here in North America, in their native England the Manchunian sextet were a game-changing act who helped blur the boundaries between rock and dance music. Of course, their off-stage behavior often threatened to eclipse their musical highlights.

Drummer Gary “Gaz” Whelan, who now lives in nearby Burlington, Ont., along with lead singer Shaun Ryder and dancer Bez managed to weather that storm and continue to record and tour.

CHARTattack: So how do you make it from Manchester to Burlington?
Gaz Whelan: In the mid-’90s I left and moved to London. I lived in New York back in ‘99 for a year. I lived in Australia for four years. Then we planned to move here to Toronto, so we came here and went to visit a friend in Hamilton and stopped up in “Borington” Burlington on the way and saw all the kids playing and loved it. It’s great. I love Canada.

The Mondays is kind of a day job now. It’s just me, Shaun and Bez.

Bez does his own reality stuff. He’s like Flavor Flav over in the U.K. He does his own celebrity TV show — that’s what he’s good at and he’s says he doesn’t want to be jumping around all the time at his age. He’s a couple years older than me so he’s about 40, so fair enough.

Shaun does all sorts of this and that. I think old Shaun’s kind of clean and straight. Maybe that’s what’s ignited the old passion.

So it’s a day job, it pays the money. But we enjoy it. We did half a new album and then shelved it while we all did our solo stuff and then next year we’ll go back and revisit it.

This is a new album after the one that you did a couple years ago?
That one kind of came together by accident. I was living in Australia at the time. I’d come back to London to do a couple of one-off shows. We’d taken a break — we only split up once; people think we split up two or three times, but we just took a break — and while I was back I met up with the engineer.

Everyone else hadn’t gotten back and I was stuck in London and we wrote six or seven songs and Shaun came down and put vocals down so then we had an album. We were just a couple short and then we did the rest in Manchester.

Shaun never does the music; Shaun just does lyrics. We all do the music, me and the bass player and the guitarist. We jam and get tunes that Shaun can put lyrics on.

The tour is with The Psychedelic Furs. How did you get hooked up with them?
Similar agent, but we were going to do it initially with Depeche Mode, possibly. I think they’re clean again and I think Shaun’s clean, but I don’t think they’re sure that Shaun’s clean. So we thought it might not be a great idea. So we got in touch with The Psychedelic Furs.

To be honest with you, we only ever did a couple gigs in Canada, we didn’t sell well in Canada. We did O.K. in the States, but when we toured the States we were younger and we were pretty ignorant. We just put on a party. We did Madison Square Garden opening for Jane’s Addiction.

So we were staying in a hotel and me and Shaun are late. We jump in a cab and couldn’t get in [to the venue]. We were supposed to go on stage at 8:00 and by the time we got there it was a quarter past 8. We went to the dressing room to apologize and no one else was there. We ended up doing one fucking song.

So we didn’t do ourselves any favours like a lot of British bands don’t in North America. It wasn’t an attitude thing. We did O.K., especially on the coasts. To be fair we couldn’t fill big venues on our own so to be honest that’s why we’re doing it with Psychedelic Furs.

What is it about North America that’s so daunting to British bands?
In Britain it’s seen as an art form, whereas in North America it’s seen as a job or a profession. So when the first tours of British rock ‘n’ rollers took place in the 1950s, the only places that would put them up were art colleges. So the people who got into rock ‘n’ roll — The Beatles, Clapton or whoever — were artists.

In America, all the art colleges were for architects. American bands kind of work it like a business, they know how it works, they play the game, which is I think the right way to do it. But you play the game. I don’t think it’s resentment, but British bands don’t really play the game as well. Oasis maybe did it the first time. And you’ve got to watch what you say [in America]. You can be as controversial as you want in the U.K.

You helped run an electronic/dance label when you were living in Australia. Were you the one pushing the dancier side of the Monday’s music?
No, it was just the time. We were all into it, we all loved funk, soul, punk and The Beatles and Stones and all that. I was always championing The Beatles, Shaun was always championing the Stones. Me and Paul, the bass player, were no more into it than the rest, but maybe just by the fact we were the drummer and the bass player it shone through.

In the U.K., dance music is so big and mainstream…
It’s not as big here, is it? When I got here, I was really surprised how big rock music is. I’m not a big rock fan. I don’t know any of it. But there’s no cross-pollinating of genres here.

There’s only two types of music, there’s good and there’s bad. In England, there’s mixing a lot. Manchester specifically is good for mixing. The immigrant set in Manchester — there was Polish, Irish, Scottish, African, West African — everyone just mixed. And there was only a few venues that played music so they had, like, Monday night would be Polish night, Tuesday night would be West African night Wednesday night would be Bangladeshi night… eventually they closed the nights down and everything was mixed.

You look at someone’s record collection, it’s got to be mixed. How can you have one type of music? It’s a cornucopia, it’s everything. I have a radio show at McMaster University and people say “Well, what do you play?” Well, music. It could be anything.

This interview originally appeared at Chartattack.ca

A Quick Q&A with The Gaslight Anthem

New Brunswick, N.J.’s The Gaslight Anthem won over both fans and critics last year with the old-school punk and soul fusion the created for The ‘59 Sound, their sophomore album.

A year on, the band are hard at work and still on tour while simultaneously beginning work on their next album.

Guitarist Alex Rosamilia discussed the band’s success and dropped some hints about the new album in an email interview.

Have you started work on the new album? What’s the sound shaping up to be? Similar to The ‘59 Sound?
Alex Rosamilia: We don’t have enough material to really come to any conclusions as of yet. There is a pretty big disco/salsalito vibe on the songs we’ve got so far.

How does the songwriting process work for the band?
Depends on the song. Sometimes Brian’ll [Fallon, singer/guitarist] have lyrics first, and sometimes we work on the music first.

You’re working with Ted Hutt again. What did he bring to the table with the last album that made you want to work with him again?
It was just a good collaboration all around. Everything just worked really well with Ted.

Were all the band members involved in the New Jersey punk scene prior to forming the band?
We were all in touring bands in the hardcore/punk scene. Personally, I wasn’t in anything worth mentioning…

How did the decision to fuse Jersey shore rock with punk happen? Was it a conscious one?
There wasn’t one. I’m not sure I even know what “Jersey Shore Rock” is…

A lot of people were taken by surprise by the old school nature of the band’s sound and lyrical content (referencing Miles Davis, Tom Petty). Was this a chosen aesthetic?
Any references are from songs or artists that we actually do listen to. They aren’t picked for aesthetic purposes. They’re picked for homage.

Do you see any other bands/musicians working in the same vein as your band? Any kindred souls?
There’s a ton of bands busting their asses out there. Too many to name them all. The Loved Ones and Let Me Run come to mind, though.

Were you surprised at the immediate success of The ‘59 Sound?
Extremely. Still am, actually.

Did the success influence the way you approached the new album?
Just made me more nervous to put out something good.

Any album name or song titles you can give us?
Don’t have any yet.

You’ve done a lot of interviews over the past year — what’s the biggest misconception about the band?
I feel we’ve kept pretty true to ourselves.

Brian sang onstage with Bruce Springsteen, which I’m assuming is somewhat of a dream come true for the band. What goals or dreams have the group yet to fulfill?
Next on the list, Eric Clapton and Noel Fielding.

Have you had to set new bars for achievement?
I want to learn pedal steel.

This review originally appeared at Chartattack.com.

Shotgun Jimmie Live on CHRY!

Sackville, New Brunswick’s very own Shotgun Jimmie, in town for a show at the Cameron House, swung by CHRY 105.5 this week to chat and play some tunes. Despite pitching up a tad late, Shotgun Jimmie aka Jim Killpatrick was a hilarious guest and a great performer. The former Shotgun and Jaybird member played a number of tunes from both this spring’s Still Jimmie and his tour only EP Paint it Pink on a banjo that was strung like a guitar that a friend gave him as he was leaving the house. It’s good listening kids…

Listen to Shotgun Jimmie live at CHRY 105.5 here.

Record Review: The Antlers – “Hospice”

Brooklyn’s, NY the Antlers have already achieved a great deal of critical success. Those that were able to get their hands on the self-released version of Hospice in March drooled all over it. Now, French Kiss is giving the album a wide release, allowing the rest of us to see what all the hype was about. It’s an exhausting record, one that takes a few tracks to get going. It details the intimate and harrowing story of watching a loved one die in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York. Opening track “Prologue” begins with the sounds of a breathing apparatus and heart monitor before transitioning into a sweeping soundscape. From there, the record slowly builds on itself, sucking you in deeper with each new track. Hospice certainly shares its aural palette with plenty other bands working today — Sigur Rós’s slow building crashes of sound immediately come to mind. But the intimate emotions conveyed are equalled only by Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which was more a celebration of life. Vocalist/lyricist Peter Silberman, on whose experiences Hospice is based, instead forces us to confront mortality head on as he details the slow and painful slide to the end.

Did you write these songs on your own or were they written with the full band?

Silberman: The process of writing was through recording it, so a lot of it was sort of shapeless for a while and I was just layering a lot of sound. Meanwhile, I was writing a lot of lyrics but not exactly sure where they would be placed in the ocean of sound. As far as the recording and that end of the writing, we were all working on that together but the songwriting itself, the lyrics and cinematic material, I guess, was on my end.

Are these lyrics based on personal experience?

Yes, to a certain degree they are. I tend to not go into a lot of detail where things came from but it’s definitely autobiographical, in a sense.

I read that you purposely shut yourself off in order to write this record but that was contradicted elsewhere. Under what conditions did you write Hospice?

The timeline’s a little weird and a little bit confusing. Basically I moved to Manhattan in 2006 and sort of as a result of the events unfolding in Hospice, and being in a new city, I was just very shut off from people for about a year-and-a-half. After that period of time, when things kind of came to a close, I moved to Brooklyn and kind of started a new life there. I kind of came out of that and started working on this record.

This review originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Exclaim!

A Year in the Life of the Rentals

With their horn-rimmed glasses and synthesizers, the Rentals always leaned in the A/V club direction of high school clique hierarchies. But the one-time “Friends of P” have taken the stereotype to new heights with their online mixed-media project Songs About Time. Combining music, film and photography it’s an ambitious project with a stringent timeline: every day a new photo, every week a new video and every three months a new EP are posted at therentals.com for an entire year. “I just wanted to have it set up so we were constantly releasing things,” says group mastermind Matt Sharp. He says the band was looking for a way to curb their tendency to obsess over minute details. “The balance between how much you’re working and how much you’re releasing has been so out of whack the entire time I’ve been making music,” he says. “[The project] is just a really constant structure that keeps you working and makes sure that you can’t look back.

While taking photos and making movies for a living might not sound very gruelling to cubicle monkeys, the former Weezer bassist says it’s been a real challenge to constantly come up with fresh ideas. Every day Sharp shoots a roll of undeveloped film as well as a new digital image. At year’s end everything will be packaged together as a deluxe physical release, with the first 365 orders receiving one of Sharp’s undeveloped rolls of film. “The amount of work that has to be done doesn’t allow for very much outside of it,” he says, “but I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t love it.”

This story originally appeared in the August, 2009 issue of Exclaim!

Eels Show Growth

After four years away, all it took to get Eels main man Mark Oliver Everett back into the mode of making new music was some facial hair. Well, okay — a lot of facial hair. “You’ve got to get inspiration wherever you can get it,” he says.

Everett, better known simply as E, found his muse in the mirror one day while brushing his teeth. “I saw the beard and I thought about the last time I had grown a substantial beard, which was probably only half as good as the one I have now,” he says. “That was when I did the ‘Dog Faced Boy’ song.”

“Dog Faced Boy” was the lead track on Eels 2001 album Souljacker. It introduced us to a hairy-faced kid living in a town that can’t accept his lupine tendencies — Teen Wolf this ain’t. “I thought, ‘well it’s all these years later, he’s older now. What is he now?’ I figured the best he could hope to be was a werewolf.”

The resulting album, Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire is a sparse guitar, bass and drums record that flips between skuzzy, 21st century blues and sad bastard ballads exploring the many sides of desire from the character’s perspective. “His life is still driven by the same kind of frustrations from when he was young. He’s really driven by his passions and he’s got nowhere to put [them].”

It’s tempting to draw comparisons between the character and E himself. After all E has written entire albums about his personal tragedies. He says there’s no immediate correlation between himself and the character. Yet “there’s gotta be something for you to identify with in order to make it work,” he explains. “If I look back on these things years later… I suddenly realize in hindsight that it had a lot more to do with me personally than I was aware of at the time.”

He says he’s not entirely sure why he decided to ditch the razor, but he feels strongly about staking his hirsute territory. “You’re really disrespecting your rights as a rock star if you don’t grow an enormous beard every once in a while,” he says. “To disrespect that is a sin. If I can’t do it who can? I was born with a lot of testosterone and I gotta use it.”

Despite the gap, E kept himself busy in the four years since Eels last record, the double album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. He penned his autobiography, took part in a BBC documentary about his physicist father and oversaw the release of an Eels greatest hits and rarities compilations. Though the length was unintentional, he says the break was necessary. “I felt like I had kind of painted myself into a bit of a corner with the Blinking Lights album,” he says. “I figured I needed to create some space and give some time so everybody can get over that before I move on and say ‘hey, by the way I’m still alive.’”

Though he’s not ruling out the possibility of a tour, for now he’s content to just lay low. “The fun part’s making the baby,” he says. “Now that we’ve squeezed the baby out, I’ve just got to let my artistic vagina heal.”

This feature originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of Exclaim!

Related Post:

Record Review: Eels – “Hombre Lobo”

Q&A with Dinosaur Jr.’s Murph

Single-named Dinosaur Jr. drummer Murph spoke to CHARTattack from a tour stop in North Carolina about the new record, the band’s famous (lack of) communication and why a good band should never stop pushing forward.

CHARTattack: So where are you guys right now?

Murph: We are in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were just in Chapel Hill. We’ve got, like, four shows left on this tour, so we’re slowly heading back. The last show is in Baltimore and then we head home.

Are you going back on tour this summer?

Oh, yeah. We break in June, the album comes out mid-June and then the end of June we have a few New York shows and then we head to the west coast to L.A. to do some shows. Or vice versa. I’m not really sure. Whenever you put out an album, you have to support it.

So how did the recording process for the new record work?

It was a lot different than Beyond. With Beyond, it took about seven months to make while we were touring on and off. It was a lot more relaxed. Whereas with this record, it was more go into the studio and bang it out. I was literally learning drum parts in the morning and tracking them in the afternoon. It was just, like, boom, boom, boom over a three month period. Just under the gun, under a lot of pressure both from management and self-induced, just to crank it out. It was actually a completely different process from Beyond. Like the exact opposite.

Do you prefer one approach over the other?

I like having everything done all at once, but I don’t like having a deadline. I like someone saying, “Yeah, you got to do the drums and you have a month, but if you need an extra week or whatever, that’s OK, too.” That, I like. But when they’re just like, “No, we’ve paid for 15 days and that’s what we’ve paid for and you’ve got to get it done in 15 days,” I don’t like that at all. To me it’s like cramming for a test or taking the SATs. It’s just a drag. It’s not as much fun. Although this record was fun.

And you have to realize this is just personally me speaking. J and Lou, I think, do a little better under that kind of pressure. They’re people, especially J, that like that kind of pressure. That makes him rise to the occasion a little faster. So everyone’s a little different. I mean, I deal with it. I’ve done both kinds of work. But I’m personally a fan of a little more free flow, relaxed studio atmosphere; whereas these guys, they hammer down.

Was there any particular reason for the pressure from your new label, Jagjaguwar? Was it the cost of studio time?

That, and the label wants cover art, they want demos, they want stuff done. You create a certain momentum and you’re afraid if you give yourself too much time you loose that momentum. It forces you to kind of focus.

You mentioned the cover art, which is pretty out there. Whose idea was that?

I think Brian, our management, had this guy he knew that did art and he did a few sketches and submitted them to J and Brian and they were really into it. They were like, “Yeah, it seems like a good direction. Go with it.” And then when he came up with the cover everybody was like, “Yeah, that looks pretty cool.”

Was the resemblance to the Ents from Lord of The Rings intentional?

Not for us, no. Maybe the artist is really into it. Maybe he’s really into Dungeons And Dragons. I don’t know, I don’t know him. I know we didn’t say anything like, “make it look mystical.” It was just free flow, like, do what you want to do.

Where did the album title come from?

Uh, J. He just pulls stuff out of a hat. I think part of it has to do with growing up in Amherst [Massachusetts]. It’s a farm town. There’s a lot of farms, there’s a lot of cows. That’s why we’ve had a lot of cow themes. It’s where we live. It’s what we see driving around a lot. It just makes an impression. I’m sure, subliminally, that had something to do with it as well.

Why did you want to push forward and make new records? You could have just toured indefinitely if you wanted to.

Well, not really. People kind of get sick of hearing the same songs over and over. You can kind of tell when people are like, “OK, we’ve seen you like three times playing the first three albums. What’s next?”

Also, as a band you get kind of bored. You need to inspire yourself and keep things moving. It’s a natural progression to create a new body of work, especially if everything’s working the way we are. Everything’s fine so there was no reason to stop.

A lot has been made about the communications problems in the band. Have those issues been dealt with?

Well, it’s totally different now. We’ve grown up and we can actually communicate and talk to each other. There’s still little things here and there, but overall… if issues had carried over from our twenties, I don’t think we’d be able to do this. We had to drop a lot of the issues.

I ask because when the Pixies got back together, it was in the studio where things seemed to fall apart for them.

Well, every band’s different; every band has its own dynamic. It’s not really like these bands are reunion bands. It’s really exclusive to, like, some people do it for the money, some people do it because they just really want to, some people do it because of pressure… It’s all different, every band’s different. You can’t really generalize.

After you left the band in 1993, you played with The Lemonheads for a while. What were you doing in the interim years between then and the Dinosaur Jr. reunion?

I did [The Lemonheads' album] Car Button Cloth and two years of touring and then through Evan [Dando] I met Paul Simon’s son, Harper. We had a thing going for about a year or year and a half. I did a lot of session work, and I had another side project called Swish that was on Caroline for a while. We’re actually talking about trying to do another single when I go out to L.A. because they live out in L.A. now. That took me up into 2000 and I kind of just wanted to get away from it all. I got kind of burned out on the rat race of New York City, and I moved up to Maine and I just got really into my drumming and practicing, just kind of living in the country. And it’s interesting because about that time I got the call for the reunion.

Were you surprised with both the critical and commercial success of Beyond? I think it debuted at #69 on the Billboard chart.

I was a bit because it was made over such a long period [that] it was hard to kind of know what it was going to be. We didn’t really have a sense on what the record was going to sum up to be. And then when it was all put together I was kind of pleasantly surprised. I’m not trying to sound conceited, but also with the certain amount of success we’ve had I don’t really get surprised because we put a lot into this band. We’re not lazy. We’re not slackers. We don’t slack on shows. If we’re going to do a record we really try to put everything we’ve got into it. And you would hope that some people would recognize that. That would be kind of sad.

It just kind of makes sense that if you put enough energy into something, you would hope it would make some kind of a statement. I’m not saying it’s great, but we did the best work that we can and we’ve kind of been lucky because we’ve always kind of had a core following of fans. They seem to be really interested in what we do and what’s the progression of the band.

This interview originally appeared at Chartattack.com

Grizzly Bear: Under Pressure

This story appears originally in the June 2009 issue of Exclaim! and at Exclaim.ca

Following up to a successful record is a delicate process, even for the most seasoned bands. The pressure — self-imposed, from labels or fans — can break a band in half. But how do blog-rock darlings keep it together after one of their favourite artists drops them the ultimate compliment?

It’s a dilemma Grizzly Bear faced last summer. On tour with Radiohead in Toronto, guitarist Johnny Greenwood took a moment to thank their openers, and drop a bomb on the band, proclaiming Grizzly Bear his favourite band. “That was pretty insane,” says the Brooklyn-based group’s drummer Chris Bear, just a hint of understatement in his voice. “He doesn’t really talk that much onstage, if ever.”

Their new album, Veckatimest (pronounced vek-a-tim-est), is the group’s attempt to break new musical ground after their 2006 album Yellow House received near unanimous praise. It’s the first time all four members — Bear, singer-guitarists Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor — have worked as a group. “With Yellow House we were trying to figure out what we were doing, trying to explore a bunch of different territories,” he explains. “I think it ended up coming off more atmospheric. This is slightly more influenced by what we became as a live band.”

Grizzly Bear spent much of the two-and-a-half years following Yellow House’s release on the road, from playing for five people at a poetry night above a pub to sold-out amphitheatres with Radiohead and pretty much everything in between. La Blogotheque even convinced the guys to perform an acoustic set in a Parisian washroom for the weblog’s Takeaway show. “That’s probably the weirdest place we’ve played,” says Bear. “We didn’t really have any versions worked out.”

Somewhere in between lavatory gigs and rocking arenas, the band found time to write Veckatimest’s 12 songs. Recording began in upstate New York last July before breaking for the Radiohead tour, where they road-tested some of the new tunes. “They drastically changed from how the original demos were,” says Bear. The quartet reconvened at Droste’s grandmother’s house in Cape Cod before finishing up at a church in New York City. “We tried to not force any ideas to happen if it wasn’t feeling natural,” he says, noting that they gave neither themselves, nor their label any sort of deadline.

The intricate vocal melodies and interplay between instruments that make up the backbone of Grizzly Bear’s sound don’t come quickly or easily. A willingness to smash and rebuild their songs from the ground up was key to the band’s songwriting process. “That’s probably what we spend the most time on.”

A gap-bridging 2007 EP called Friend, featuring alternate arrangements of songs from their first two records, is a prime example of this method. The band has also proved eager to get others in on the act, recently commissioning French house music producer Fred Falke to remix “Two Weeks.” “I think its cool to hear,” says Bear. “Now we have a crazy Euro-’80s aerobicize remix!”

He says the process never really ends; even though Vekatimest in the can, the band is still trying to figure out how they’re going to play the record live. And though he’s anxious for fans to hear the new album, Bear doesn’t posit any opinions as to what Greenwood might think of the album. “I just hope we can continue to live up to his expectations.”

Stephen McBean’s Romance Novel

Stephen McBean does little to buck his stoner rocker image with his long messy hair and beard. He resembles a backwoods hermit who eschews the public to practice his art. When he answers the phone at his Vancouver home, he sounds like he just finished a wake-and-bake.

Outside Love, the third album from McBean’s Pink Mountaintops project, recently came out. Two months of touring will help promote it.

McBean describes the last Pink Mountains record, Axis Of Evol, as “the God record.” I think he’s joking, but it’s difficult to tell. His dry sense of humour could easily be mistaken for brazen arrogance. He speaks with matter-of-factness about his music, with the inflection in his voice rising at the end of each sentence.

“We weren’t planning on making a record,” he says.

The way McBean tells it, Outside Love materialized in the most organic way possible. Its genesis occurred at a wedding in Montreal last summer. He and Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band violinist Sophie Trudeau were both members of the wedding band and decided to collaborate. Shortly afterward, she flew to Vancouver and the two started jamming on bits and pieces of songs McBean had lying around.

“Some of the songs were three or four years old,” he says.

While working out the tracks, McBean says a theme became apparent.

“There was a slightly campy majestic vibe,” he says, “a romantic love notion.”

Pink Mountaintops were effectively a solo outlet for McBean while he wasn’t working with his other band, Black Mountain. But the emerging tracks — heartbreak songs, love songs and songs of friendship — emboldened him to invite a slew of friends into the studio to help shape the new album.

“I wanted it to be more of a story than a one-voice narrative,” he says, “not a personal, miserable cathartic record.”

Comments like this are where McBean’s contradictions start to appear. While there’s a laid-back quality to Outside Love, nothing about it seems tossed off and it’s obvious that a clear vision was carried out with precise execution.

While McBean’s laconic voice unifies his two bands, there’s little else the groups share. Black Mountain are an instrumental assault filled with heavy riffs and spacey keyboard lines. Pink Mountaintops are propelled by the songs’ melodies and lyrics, best displayed on “While You Were Dreaming” and “Holiday.” The music moves as a singular unit and is hardly the product of lackadaisical jam sessions.

The finished product is being jokingly promoted as the musical version of a Danielle Steel book. Black Mountain drummer Jeremy Schmidt wanted McBean to get Fabio to pose for the cover after hearing the album. While that joke quickly fell by the wayside, the idea of presenting the album as a romance novel stuck.

Outside Love’s front cover shows a thick hardcover novel with the band’s name and album title written on the dust cover, sitting on top of blue crushed velvet. Flip the record over to reveal the book’s back cover and you’ll find a black and white photo of McBean sitting in an arm chair, legs crossed with a white collared shirt popping out from underneath a fitted sweater. Despite his seeming ambivalence, it appears McBean has a streak of self-awareness after all.

This story originally appeared at Chartattack.com

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