Pitchfork:
How's the new album coming?
Nic Offer: Good. It's about 90% done. We're looking at maybe April. It's always an adventure with us. It's always like you stand at the beginning of it and you know that you're going to have to climb some mountains and swim up a few raging rivers, but you do it. I guess we always go into each record like we're not going to fight like we did on the last one, and then you go and get in the fights. That's how it goes.
Pitchfork:
It's got to be pretty hard not to get in constant fights with so many dudes in the band.
NO: I think that's just the nature of collaboration, and it should be. I don't know how those people have done it for years and years together, whether they're used to fighting. It works for us. I think it surprised our producer because he wasn't used to it. To me, at the end of the fight, you end up with something better.
Pitchfork:
Who's the producer?
NO: Eric
Broucek
. He worked on
the last LCD record
and
the Hercules record
. He was kind of working for
DFA
for a long time, and then he wanted to try his hand being in charge.
Pitchfork:
How would you say this record's different from
Myth Takes
?
NO: It's hard to put my finger on the album as a whole. We started writing the record in Berlin, so there's this big element of these Berlin-type sounding songs, and it was coming out darker. Then we had to go play a show in
Buenos
Aires
, and we came back and we wrote a song that sounded like
Buenos
Aires
. There's these really dark moments in the record, and there's really some of the
poppiest
stuff we've ever done. Each record, we're always trying to get deeper and darker and funkier and catchier, and it feels further along that road. Some of the songs are almost-- I don't want to say wedding disco, there's some stuff I can imagine everyone being able to dance to. But definitely dark and catchy. I mean,
Depeche
Mode is always dark and catchy, and we definitely hit that.
Pitchfork:
This the first !!! without John Pugh. Has it been very different without him?
NO: The nice thing about having John, especially on the last couple records, was any time I hit a wall with vocals, I could just throw it to him. Quite often, the songs that John would sing on were the ones I didn't like, and he would really pull it together. So I just had to work harder, really. I threw an old friend of mine a couple tracks whenever I got stumped, and he actually ended up writing the vocal melody on a verse. I guess I ended up doing most of it myself. As a crutch, John was missed. He was talented, and he would always come back with something, so that was missed. There's a line that John had that we could never cross.
Pitchfork:
How so?
NO: He had a prejudice against anything too candy-ass. He didn't want to do the Magnetic Fields song [
"Take Ecstasy With Me"
]. We had to make it good enough that he liked it. It was a good bar to set. I wonder what he'll think of this record.
Pitchfork:
Are you in contact with him?
NO: No, we're not. We don't speak.
Pitchfork:
Does the album have a title yet?
NO: Uh, no. I just racked my brain to see if I could think of one right then, and I didn't, so no.
Pitchfork:
This is your first record after somebody who was a big part of the band died. Does Jerry Fuchs play on the record?
NO: Yeah, he's on one song.
Pitchfork:
This is a difficult question, but do you address his death on the record? Is there a song about him or anything like that?
NO: [
Laughs uncomfortably for a long time
] It's just funny to see how we're going to have to deal with this. I think we're always looked at as a not-emotional band, but if you go through the lyrics, there's some pretty broad, naked emotions right there on the paper. I know that's not how we're looked at. It's hard because no one looks at lyric sheets anymore because no one gets the
CDs
. It's definitely there. You try to write a song as it occurs to you, as you feel the actual thing. That's how you get original statements, because you feel like you've never felt something like that. Especially with political songs, there's always this idea, "Oh people should write political songs." You shouldn't write a political song. You should write a political song if you feel like you have an opinion that expresses something different than what someone else is expressing.
That said, trying to write a song about how I feel about Jerry would only happen if it occurred to me and I felt like I had something to say that would translate to other people. Half of the way I felt about the whole thing was cliches. You think all the usual things-- he was so young, he was one in a million, he was such a special guy. You think all these things that are cliches you could read on a Hallmark card, and then there's all these raw, naked emotions that no one could even understand, that you can't explain to other people. There's such specific things. You get hit at such specific moments that you never see coming. At the time, I hadn't even figured out how to translate those things. Really, it just happened, and the record was just finished.
Pitchfork:
I appreciate you answering that question. I hated asking it.
NO: It's one of those things where we can't even figure out how we're going to address it. I don't want to talk about it with every interviewer. It's fine with you because you're the first person, literally. But when you go on a press trip and you answer the same questions, I don't want to polish my feelings and memories of Jerry over. So tell other interviewers not to ask me about him.
Posted by Tom Breihan
on December 17, 2009
at 11:30 a.m.
Tags:
!!!
,
Album
,
Interview
,
Nic Offer