Interview with Liverpool band Etches

Paul Tarpey from Nerve interviewed experimental Liverpool band Etches, who have just released their second single, 'Ice Cream Dream Machine'.

If you like your pop curdled but still tempting then you don’t have to shop elsewhere. Etches are making the kind of music that gets into your bloodstream without you knowing the damage has been done. Melody isn’t a dirty word to them but they do like to mess their melodies up.

The five piece from Liverpool have just released their 2nd single ‘Ice Cream Dream Machine’ to a fair wallop of attention and it’s deserved. The city’s more experimental scene has found a band that can reach way beyond.

The exposed vocals on the new single drags a highly inventive but scuffed arrangement behind them and echoes so much layered, classic pop while dodging any obvious reference points. There are traces in there for me, but they are an entirely emotive reflection based on when pop first scratched me a little deeper. In fact I would only mention Smog and Julian Cope as examples of how subtle melody and daring arrangements can be anthemic and enduring.

Will they be enduring? We often take a band to heart when we know they can crack just a little. At the moment you can hear a lot of vulnerability alongside the technique on their excellent cover of I Heard It Through The Grapevine. It may mean they end up loved. But certainly at the very least they will intrigue you as much as any Liverpool band has in a fair while.

Ice Cream Machine is available to download now from all good internets and the band are playing with We Were Evergreen on November 14th 2014 in Manchester’s Soup Kitchen. Nerve interviewed them after their appearance at Liverpool Music Week

Can you explain how the sound of the band evolved?

It has been quite a natural thing to be honest. We didn't set out to achieve a specific sound; it is just what comes out when we play together.

What attitudes do you feel the band share towards making music?

We like things a bit dark and dissonant. If we ever end up jamming out something that is a little too pretty, or too simplistic in terms of rhythm, it will inevitably be dirtied up a bit if it survives to be built into a song.

What attitudes held you together on a personal level?

Trying to put all of our efforts into writing stuff that we think is interesting, to keep things fresh and to push each other to write, play and perform the best we can.

What have been the healthy confrontations in the process?

One of the most frequent, ahem, 'sticking points' is when we are writing together and someone becomes particularly attached to a riff or a specific part that the rest of the band think should be dropped. As we write, arrange and develop songs as a collective, the whole process can be quite torturous at times. Some practices can see us just playing multiple variations of a single tune all night. It is difficult, but we think exploring all of the possibilities helps us to get the most out of each of our songs.

Are there consistent themes that you all want to explore within the songs?

Not really. Lyrically there seems to be some imagery that keeps cropping up, but whoever brings the initial idea to the table, the songs are written and finished with music and melody foremost in our minds.

How important is it to you that an audience understand the themes of a song rather than just a sense of the emotion behind it?

People experience music in very different ways. Once you put a song out there, it is up to the audience to get what they want out of it; in a way, the music is out of our hands then. We're not an overtly political band - we just write music that we love; if people can connect to any part of it, we're happy. Having said that, we'd be lying if we said that politics didn't find its way into our lyrics, but it is up to the audience to engage with the music on their own terms.

What has shaped your vocal style?

Ross and Owen have been singing together for a long time, and their voices are a great fit. We've tried to write more consciously for Ross's range in the last year or so, to focus on the different registers that show him at his best, but again we are still quite organic in our writing. We go with what feels good.

How important are your arrangements to the storytelling process?

Our arrangements are incredibly important to the overall presentation of our music. Not so much in terms of lyrical storytelling, but we are always trying to break away from formulaic song structures. We try to make parts that evolve throughout the song, passing themes or motifs from one instrument to another, so the listening process is a rewarding one. Hopefully this means that the songs take on a level of depth that encourages repeated listens.

How do you have to adapt complex arrangements when playing live?

When in the studio we try as much as possible to keep the live performance aspect in mind, so most of the time what you hear on record is something that we can come very close to reproducing onstage. In the instances when we cannot do this, for instance when we have needed to use more guitar parts than we have guitarists, we tend to write a different arrangement live. When we were rehearsing the latest single for our recent live shows, we weren't happy with how the studio parts were coming across in performance, so we scrapped it and did a very different live arrangement.

How did your approach change when covering and remixing other people’s songs?

In one way, it didn't. We still aim to make the best music we can - the most interesting and most inspiring, something that we can connect with. In another way, there is always the added pressure of being faithful and respectful to the original while doing something with enough worth to actually justify releasing a remix or a cover. We hate carbon-copy covers, and we also hate hearing a great song being pillaged and ruined. It is a very narrow path to walk, the link between innovation and respect for the original tune, which may be why we have been reluctant to do many covers/remixes. At the end of the day it is not our music, and that fact brings a whole lot of extra considerations into the process of creating a track. You need to be confident that you are doing it justice.

Are there instrumentations you want to experiment with in the future or will the themes of the songs always shape this?

In the future we'd love to play around with more synths and drum machines or old school pianos and organs. We're very much open to using anything that makes a noise. At the moment the discipline of sticking to our current instruments is quite healthy for us though so we might try and exhaust these ones a bit before we branch out. Unusual instrumentation is always appealing - Tom Waits for instance seems able to make a tune out of anything. Some of his albums contain mind-blowing rhythms that sound like a bar brawl in a junkyard, very precise and highly structured but really exciting because it is not the sounds, or the instruments, that you expect. He is completely out of our league though, not so much something to try and emulate, but an artistic process to aspire to.

What personal, social and global events will guarantee the band are still making music in twenty years time? And what are your more short term goals?

Short term goals are to get better as a band. That entails growing together, becoming more cohesive as a songwriting team, as well as being more practiced at all the other non-music shit that is a necessary part of being in a band. Social and global events are impossible to predict, but unless we wake up tomorrow and everything is suddenly peachy then we're pretty sure that concerns about the state of the world will continue to be a creative stimulus in one way or another. Whether ETCHES are still together in twenty year's time, again, is anybody's guess, but as far as personal connections to music go, music is what we do. Whether we are reuniting for an Eagles-esque very last ever tour number three, are still happily chugging away in our own studio, pleasing ourselves, or have parted ways due to 'artistic differences', in twenty years time we'll either be dead or making music.

Check out Etches on Facebook and Soundcloud

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