Electrelane Issue #24

The members of the Brighton, England, quartet are the romantics of climactic cerebral rock

By Amy Schroeder
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 12:28pm

I met up with Electrelane on a Monday morning in mid January at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio Studio in Chicago, where the band had lived in for the previous few weeks to record their third full-length, Axes.

And it’s freaking cold outside. So cold that one of the first things I said to the band was, “thanks for traveling all the way from England to Chicago, during the holidays, at one of the coldest times of the year. Thanks for sticking this out.” They had no complaints. Guitarist Mia Clarke said, “I don’t mind the weather at all. We quite like being in Chicago at this time of year.”

Electrelane’s four members gave myself and the accompanying photographer a tour of the studio, with its acclaimed soundproof brick walls, extended ceilings, and comfortable atmosphere. They talked about how they wanted the album to sound as close as possible to their live sound, so they played from start to finish in one room. After the tour, Electrelane sat down in the adjacent soundboard room, situated on an oversized couch around a coffee table, and lit up cigarettes. The photographer started snapping photos while I warmed up the tape recorder. The photographer said, “I just checked out your music last night, and it’s great. I ripped the songs off the Internet.”

The band didn’t say anything for a good minute, and my stomach sank. He must not have realized that in many cases, the downloading of music is one of the touchiest topics you can possibly bring up with a band. But the sore subject ended up turning into an important one that we discussed at length, mainly off the record. Electrelane explained how the boom of free downloads has made it increasingly difficult for them to make a dependable living as musicians — and how it makes them work even harder. They also talked about how though there are more independent record stores in the U.S. than in the U.K., bands in both countries are dealing with similar issues. “I think downloadable music is affecting us as a band. Labels are trying to find other ways to raise money other than just record sales,” said drummer Emma Gaze. “The technology system is going to have to change, because then there wouldn’t be any bands.”

Though anxiety, in part, fuels them to work harder at the businesses end of being and band, when it comes to the creative process, Electrelane is able to stay focused on the art and craft of making music. Their music is intense and intelligent, to the point where it makes you wonder how much time they spend writing and pre-planning song structure and lyrics before they step into the studio. But when I ask the band about their songwriting process, they make it seem pretty natural. Almost effortless.

“The way we write is that everyone just starts playing,” said bassist Ros Murray, who joined the band about a year ago, after Electrelane’s second album, The Power Out. “I think we're always just trying to convey some sort of emotion, but we never think about it or discuss it first. We just play, and the songs just grow from there.”

Because I met with the band on the final day of the making of Axes — and Clarke said the band is too shy to let me listen in during the recording process — at this point, I had no idea what the album would sound like. Vocalist Verity Susman filled me in — a bit. “The main difference between Axes and The Power Out is that the new album has fewer lyrics,” she said.

This was a crucial statement coming from the band’s chief writer. Her lyrics drove The Power Out’s overall energy just as much as the music did. Whereas their first album, 2001’s Rock it to the Moon, featured fewer lyrics and more music, Power Out blew my mind with its ability to build powerful climaxes of guitar, drums, keys, and bass — aided significantly with its sexy lyrics. For instance, in the song “On Parade,” with her British monotone voice, Susman sang, as a romantic pursuer, “I wanna see her / I wanna see her with her horses / Oh yeah.” The song piques with high-pitched “ooh oohs,” and then essentially orgasms with the hard-to-decipher lyrics “I bet I’d like your underwear.” If you’d just seen the words on paper, an Electrelane virgin would assume similarities to hornball bands like Gravy Train!!!! or Fannypack. But that ain’t the case. Electrelane’s vibe is more like PJ Harvey’s or Stereolab’s. Electrelane’s kind of rock is at once emotional, cerebral, and climactic — it usually starts by introducing the key elements and then builds into large and in charge.

Months after the interview, Electrelane’s label, Too Pure, sent me an advance copy of the album. I was delighted to hear that though it’s true there aren’t as many lyrics on the 13-song album, Axes is just as powerful, perhaps even more so.

Although the band emphasizes that they cannot easily sum up the meaning of Axes and that their music comes from emotion and human experience, Murray said that a couple of the songs have more direct meanings. For instance, Electrelane covers Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan,” the classic freedom song. “Other than that, the song titles and words come after we make the music,” she said. “Those Pockets are People’ was a title that Verity came up with — a phrase she thought of when she was watching the news, and they were talking about pockets of resistance in Iraq.”

“I don't think I could say that Axes is about any one thing, or that we have a message to send along with it,” Clarke said. “The strongest aspect of the record is, to me at least, the interplay between darkness and light within the music. For example, there are some really poppy moments in a song such as ‘Two For Joy,’ but ‘Gone Darker’ has a much more sinister feeling to it. That's something I also feel in the way that the songs build up from a gentle riff and gradually explode over the course of a song, such as in ‘If Not Now, When?’ or ‘Suitcase.’”

Murray, who at the time of this interview was finishing up a degree in language in London, said that she wrote the lyrics for “Suitcase” in Spanish. “It was a poem I wrote for my best friend who passed away before we recorded. The main structure of the song had been written before, and already had the title ‘Suitcase.’ And now it seems to fit really well — the idea of leaving, taking things away with you. Personally, I like to think of it as a piece of lost baggage, abandoned in the place departed from.”