Collecting Your Debt: The Shortwave Set

OMM review

Claire in today's Metro sez: "...sample-happy debut, The Debt Collection is a dissonant fusion of arcane, carnival folk, woozy boy-girl harmonies, crackly waltzing grooves and sticky, hand-made pop melodies. As bonkers as a box of frogs..."

I've only listened to it once, so will reserve judgement for now. Ulrike has a great voice though.

Also, I promised Jerry The Nipper I'd start this today.

that said, they were rubbish when i saw them live, although they did look extremely cool.

So far, the POV reads:

Just Goes To Show
Roadside
Slingshot
Is It Any Wonder
Repeat To Fade

please tell me they don't actually fit this description, because this description is more likely to make me want to puke than actually listen to them.

I think the misused words are "arcane", "carnival" (excepting 'Roadside', which is really music box waltzing in a theatre revue) and indeed, "bonkers". It's the silliest bit of the review anyway; I liked the earlier "St Etienne + Sgt Pepper's best bits + 'Since I Left You' (the song)" encapsulation. Though if they did fit that quoted description, I'd likely still be interested, even if it does slightly resemble the recipe for a trippy little mess.

I'm glad you're keeping your assurance to me to check out the album, MC. See you Thursday?

The lyrics are almost total downers 75% of the time. 'Slingshot' is just pure spite, Rachel S would kill to put down bad boyfriends as well as 'Is It Any Wonder' and I sing 'Just Goes To Show' when I'm feeling blue.

ooooooh.

Flotation Toy Warning have a terrible name and noodle rather too much, but theres some astonishing, carefully rendered pop on their LP, Grandaddy twisted with Flaming Lips, but less goofy.

far too creamy for me. St Etienne really is an important reference but i don't have any strong feelings for St Etienne. Very pretty, very nice, but not nearly "bonkers", cracked or carnival enough for me. "Lite."

Besides, you've only had the album a day ;-).

Plus, incoming XFM, BBC radio and in-store live sessions, which I hope to hear or see before going to Spain.

'Repeat To Fade' still makes me some kind of miserable.

I suppose comparisons could be made with other reassemblers of charity-shop archives such as (early) Bent or the Superimposers, but the Shortwave Set seem to go beyond both, expressing an uncertainty which doesn't quite tip over into out-of-season seaside desolation - they are down but not out.

Clearly anyone who begins their record with a Millican and Nesbitt sample of all things is on the right side with me (so the Peters and Lee/Opportunity Knocks comparison is not at all farfetched). Note how that tinkly cod-Nashville piano motif resurfaces periodically throughout the album, systematically deeper and more sinister in nature, and how it underlines the climax of the quietly devastating "In Your Debt" ("It don't work anymore") in tandem with the gorgeous Tomita samples.

The Shortwave Set are also capable of making their music sound big, even if sample-driven; thus "Repeat To Fade" is what a group called the Modern Folk Quartet produced by Phil Spector should have sounded like, epic and awesome but embracing instead of overpowering. Take it down to the basic fact that songs like "Is It Any Wonder" and "Heap To Fill" are superbly constructed and performed SONGS (no ironic Channel 4 pseudo-revivalism here, thank heavens) with the best lo-fi harmony work I've heard on an "indie" record since the High Llamas' Gideon Gaye.

The record which I find the most apposite comparison point here (never having heard the Joy of Sing Sing, though I will be correcting that oversight imminently) is Spearmint's A Week Away - again the neo-desolate seashore leitmotif, again the careful use of samples on which to build songs, rather than being an excuse not to build songs, and the final leaf of hope left to be picked up by an open-hand and open mind.

While I like it, I have a few reservations. I think they overdo the quirkiness a bit. And while I definitely approve of all the samples and, as Marcello says, the way they are used to build songs - one day, all music will be made this way yadda yadda - some of them still feel a bit... unfinished? (This is the downside of the sampler - unless you're prepared to go to Kevin Shieldsian lengths in the studio, which I'm sure the Shortwaves couldn't afford, ambition will always be frustrated by the limitations of technology.)

So yes, while they are able to make the music "sound big", I felt that punches were being pulled too often. Take for example "Roadside". The moment when the song suddenly explodes on the word "creeping" - the shift from Play School singalong into dreamstate - is magical. After that tho', all they do with the song is repeat the trick a couple of times, with diminishing returns. And it ends as low-key as it began. I wanted it to end in the stratosphere. (NB. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great track, possibly my favourite.)

Sorry to mention The Joy of Sing-Sing again on this thread, and for the second time in two days, but that record solves the same dilemma highlighted above by filling out its sound, principally via its secret weapon, Mark van Hoen. The result is more conventional-sounding indie pop, but also more immediate.

I hope that makes sense. I had trouble putting what I was feeling about The Debt Collection into words. Anyway, to end on a positive note, Marcello OTM about "Is It Any Wonder". Great songwriting, and would have stood out however the Shortwaves had chosen to arrange the song.

I also think they could make a mint if an advertising company ever hears "try it, you might just like it".

The record reminds in a strange way of Nick Nicely's 'Hilly Fields (1892)' - the same fuzzy SE London psuburban psychedelia.

Take for example "Roadside". The moment when the song suddenly explodes on the word "creeping" - the shift from Play School singalong into dreamstate - is magical. After that tho', all they do with the song is repeat the trick a couple of times, with diminishing returns.

I find the repeats tro be very satisfying. The end of the second explosion, wherein Andrew and Ulrika repeat the "found you"s until only Ulrika is left is a great moment of subtle paranoia, playfulness and possession and the electronics and waltz break that succeed this as Sven 'Rokk' (Ulrika's cousin, I think?) tells his joke carry this along as if they're bubbling under a seemingly happy surface and quietly dizzying the listener. The final movement is like being caught in a tornado in a Mario Brothers game. That for me is as stratospheric a height as the album could - or should - reach for, the middle-8's of 'Is It Any Wonder', 'Just Goes To Show' and 'In Your Debt' excepted, and would easily forgive the low-key ending to 'Roadside', if indeed that was necessary. And the lyricism and singing could overcome the faults in lesser songs, for serious.

Also, according to their website, their remix for that famnous bald vegan dude is out now. Anyone heard it? I'm gonna look for it in the shops later.

Yeah, they will be a hot ticket at TDK, not heard about rough trade yet though.

Or "Is it any wonder".

Also, anyone who wrote 'Better Than Bad' would have to be sharp, vituperative and funny.

Fine album, and the 'Victorian funk' ideal carried out as well as possible; it really does sound out-of-time. Most inspired juxtaposition: up-front ukelele sparring with laptop skittishness, on "Better than Bad".

What brought you together?
Drink. And it’s probably the thing that’s going to push us apart! I’ve known Dave for years, and we stumbled into Ulrika in a club in Camden, falling all over the place. We ended up helping her home and finding that we had lots in common. We were drinking mates at first, and a band afterwards.

What did you have in common?
I try not to be too negative about other acts, but it was just the fact that the music we liked and wanted to hear wasn’t being made by anyone. To me it always seemed like there are bands with good tunes who sound really trad, and bands who sound interesting but haven’t got the tunes. So we wanted to do something to square the circle.

What is Low resolution recordings?
It’s an umbrella corporate entity we had ages ago. Our grand scheme was to involve lots of other people from south London, lots of people doing crazy artistic things. People who have no wherewithal to to deal with the corporate beast that is the music business. The idea was that we’d start knocking out a few 7” records with some of our friends. But what happened was, we whacked out our one and got stuck into the belly of the beast straight away. But we don’t have a label deal with Independiente, hence the fact that we’re not rolling around in cash. But we do have the intent to use Low Resolution to bring out other ignored gems from the outskirts of London and beyond. The music business is very conservative, as we’ve found out for ourselves in the last couple of years. There’s so much great, interesting, mad stuff – that’s not necessarily oblique or left-field, sometimes stuff that could be appealing to quite a lot of people. There’s just no outlets for it, so we’d love to provide that.

Was it clear from the start what you wanted to do?
Yeah it was. Like I said, we felt that the good bands sounded boring and the interesting bands didn’t really have good songs. To me that was where we saw the empty space. We want to do 21st century music. Our record couldn’t have been made 10 years ago. If you’d tried to, it would have cost you a quarter of a million quid. It probably cost us about one per cent of that. A lot of people pay lip service to that – “ yeah we made it on a shoestring” – but this album was done with trinkets and second-hand buitars and a couple of beaten-up computers to record onto. We really wanted to do something musically ambitious. So sampling was just a way to access textures that would have cost us a fortune to acquire any other way. We’re not dance-music-heads, we just like textures and sounds that we can’t readily create ourselves. Also the cut-and-paste aesthetic has really been facilitated by computers – and that was something we thought that no one had really tapped into. The idea that you can have quite conflicting textures next to each other, but with a half-decent song gelling the whole thing together.

Do the songs and sampling split across the group?
At a simplistic level it does, because I am primarily a songwriter of the traditional ilk, but Dave comes from more of a laptop and programming background. And Ulrika, all of her favourite artists are from the 60s. But in practice, I’m quite interested in the presentation of the songs, I don’t want it to be bog-standard. I want the sound to be definitively ours and to have an identity.

What’s the fascination with junkshops?
It’s obvious that you find a lot of curiosities in junkshops, and not just music either. Odd ornamentation and pictures and ceramics and old Victorian clothes and instruments. But the records themselves were inspiring because they seemed to be lost in time. They don’t feature in anyone’s top million albums. And that in itself is intriguing – listening to a record you’ve never heard before, that someone has owned previously, and that has ended up in this shop. It started out as curious and quickly became an aesthetic.
I don’t want to give the impression that we’re SAMPLE TERRORISTS. We did love the Avalanches record, that was one of the last contemporary records that floated our boats: the genius in the way the different sound sources were put together. But with us, the song is often there first, and you know the kind of textures you’re looking for… Orchestration is aobviously something that is extremely expensive to record, so you look for it on old records.

It’s like our equivalent of a sweaty blues band having a jam – we plough through a lot of sound sources until some kind of alchemy sparks between the song and the sound source you’re fucking with.

The waikiki Beach Boys track we used on ‘Better than Bad’, we loved that one straight away. We’re always interested in finding something else. We’re not interested in something we might have done ourselves.

There’s a lot more playing on the album than you might imagine. A lot of the loops we rerecorded. But yes, a lot of instruments: melodica, toy keyboards, banjo, all manner of stuff. But once you plug them in, you can start treating them a bit like loops – you can start treating them a bit like loops, you can cut them up and collage them.

Were there problems getting copyright clearance?
There has been a copyright headache, yes. It’s delayed the album a little bit, but everything’s resolved now. We’ve actually reined the record in quite a bit from how it was originally. The legal side is a bit of a nightmare, and it affects the way you work. So now we’re more likely to create our own loops and samples.

Were you fans of the Beta Band?
The Beta Band certainly. They kind of fall into the category of bands who I love… but they just didn’t seem to have the tunes. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cos I love the Three EPs, which has great songs. But it was a bit unsatisfactory, the way it all panned out… their second album wasn’t quite up to standard. I did like what they were doing – the mix of organic sounds with something else. They tried to push the envelope a bit. But they’re definitively one of the groups we identify with. Their ambition was in making something new, that stands on it’s own two feet, rather than the ambition to be in the showbiz pages. I think you can divide bands into two camps: those that have musical ambition, and those that just have personal ambition.

A lot of new music seems quite conservative, and unwilling to deal with new technology…
I think you’re so right. To me, three chords and a heroin addicition does not make you a punk. I think we are Britian’s premier punk band. I really do! If people think that punks are drainpipe trousers and playing three chords then they’re not paying attention. Punk is a state of mind, it’s an aesthetic to break down prevailing musical structures, and to me, that’s what we’re doing. People who are more interested in sounding like a band from 30 years ago don’t get it at all. That’s definitely a huge part of what we wanted to do, and why we formed the band. We thought “this is crazy, we’re in the 21st century – why are we getting 1977?’. That’s not to say that out music doesn’t have echoes of various periods of the past – I’m not saying we should be ultramodernist people dressed like cycle couriers. I’m just saying – be inventive with your influences! Be imaginative in creating your sound rather than taking the attitude from The Clash, the haircuts from The Clash and the drug habit from the Sex Pistols. It shows just such total lack of imagination – it’s just rampant careerism.

What do you like about South London?
We are all from South London, we like living in South London, but it’s not like some kind of territorial tribe. What I would say is that the suburban areas of London generally are far more populated by the peripheral figures, rather than the fame junkies who are attracted to Soho and Shoreditch. On the outside you get the people who drift along taking too much acid making crazy music. And that does go on a lot. And that comes back to what we wanted to do at Low Resolution. There’s a lot of people who don’t give a fuck about sending their demo tapes off to record companies, but they’re just getting out of their heads and making good music. They haven’t got the first inclination to phone up an A&R guy or a lawyer. I find that’s got a lot of intensity to it, and that happens a lot in South East London.

I find the idea of lost classics quite romantic. Like the Left Banke – criminally underrated. But these things survive and stand the test of time and in the course of years people come back to them. People use words like ‘classic’ and ‘classicism’ and it informs the kind of records they make. They believe that somehow it will give them longevity, but that’s so wrong. It won’t be the case. If you make photocopies, they’re going to blow away in the wind. It’s only things that have integrity that will stand the test of time.

Do you prefer things to be lo-fi or slightly wonky to technical perfection?
The thing about ‘Your room’ is that there’s a fully orchestrated version that we have, but that one was so much more pure. The endearing thing about the song is that Ulrika, throughout the whole track you get the sense of the struggle, with the exhales. I mean that’s her singing on the edge of her bed, and me smoking a cigarette watching the telly. I was kind of ignoring the tantrums she was throwing in the background. But when she’d finished and I listened back I was like “wow, that’s gone a bit wrong, but there’s something so charming about that. It was really raw really pure, and just done in one take. I think it’s an importatnt track on the album because it shows that we’re not people. Technical trickery is not the point, it’s not important in any way. It’s to do with the substance of the songs and the substance of the performances, the textures that we use are just to embellish those things. It’s not always necessary for something to be powerful.

Are you now going to take advantage of huge recording studios?
It’s hard to say. It’d be easy for me to say, no way man, we’re going to stick to our laptops and what have you. And to be honest, our instinct would be to do that. I suppose there might be an interest in making a different kind of record. Our nature is to make different songs, but I think the way that we knock things out, it might bankrupt our record company to do one track. I think it might be a little bit idealistic. But we have ambitions to compete on every level that we’re able to, because I think that we deserve to. And I think that we will appeal to quite a wide range of people. But it’s a bit too early to say how we would do the second record. But we have a lot of songs. We’ve got about 40 songs. But how we want to do them is a question of how we feel when we sit down to record them.

Do you enjoy presenting the songs live?
It has been a challenge. We’ve tried a few ways of playing live, some quite radical ways. In the end, we feel in the live environment it’s important to put across your songs and put across your persona and your personality. I think that’s what people tend to buy into. But at the same time we have no interest in doing the old twelve-bar blues and playing the pub rock game. It’s a delicate balancing act. There’s so many wires up there, it’s like a power station. I’m sure one of us is going to suffer a hideous wire-related injury at some point. So it’s a bit precarious and a bit shambolic, but I think the combination of the record deck, we have a big harp on stage, in combination with the organic instruments and some more electronic stuff, I think we’re representing ourselves quite well. But we’re quite embryonic in that form. We’ve only done about 10 gigs, and every time we play we feel we’re getting better at it and more confident. We enjoyed that gig, there was big crowd, I think there was a bout 1000 people there. We all came off thinking that was really good, playing on a large stage to loads of people. But we’ll definitely develop it and get better at it.

We could have done it essentially with a record deck and a guitar. There is a version of our live show, that could be – not electronic, I hate electronic - a cut and paste white stripes. It could be quite simple. In the end we thought the need to put things across, the importance of selling our songs dictates we can get more percussive things going, it just gives us more options really.

it's the way they are unsettlingly odd but strangely familiar, totally new but comfortingly warm, it's like they are filtering the whole history of pop music through some broken old radio. little textures just jump out of the songs before disppearing again to be replaced by some other mad loop.

also the actual songs are masterful pieces of work. they sing and harmonise fantastically well and both andy and ulrika are totally swoonful... as you can gather i can't get enough.

No seriously though auntie, totally OTM. The gig I saw them do at the TDK festival way back in July totally reinstated my belief in the idea that new things are possible within the good old fashioned verse chorus classic tune genre. Their tunes are the equal of anyone but like they say, why does everyone use the same instrumentation these days? Enuff already.

Thursday night is going to be so lushwonderful. Still the year's best album - though serious Sugababes competition has lessened its comfortable lead - but certainly one of the decade's top 5 debuts.

casual use is coming out in the autumn i understand. a friend of a friend knows andy's brother-in-law so got a bit of inside track. by the way. you should check their myspace blog. absolutely hilarious. it seems mostly to be about their manager, who they call roger, who has forced them to start doing the blog. i cant really explain but its totally great. casual use is amazing.

Optimo remix of new single 'No Social'
http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:Snp4BfHeRDYJ:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/SMirC-thumbsup.svg/320px-SMirC-thumbsup.svg.png
mainly for the twisted synth bass

http://www.myspace.com/theshortwaveset

^^YES

was also listening to the old demos tracks today = <3 <3 <3

saw that they have a concert coming up + time out was giving away free tix - so are they good live?

anyone heard the new album? hopes aren't v.high due to dangermouse involvement, blech.

yep. a splendid album by a criminally under appreciated group. the songs are so great it basically doesnt really matter who is at the dials. but for me dm does a pretty top job actually...

Where's the love for Replica Sun Machine? Loads of posts for the first album but hardly a peep for RSM. Seems like critical consensus is that it's a case of "too many cooks" (no only DM but John Cale on one track and Van Dyke Parks arranging strings on a few others) but I love the album. Beautiful psych pop - it's like Broadcast meets The Free Design.

Production / mastering on the first one tired me out so much and so fast that I never bothered to investigate RSM, especially when I heard DM was involved.

Hey, if that's the case you might want to give RSM a shot. Their sound is more streamlined on it.

Production / mastering on the first one tired me out so much and so fast

I'm intrigued by this...can you elaborate?

Revive, just because I have become passingly obsessed with the Aeroplane remix of Now Til '69, owing to its wonderful presence on their RA mix.

I second your obsession.

Getting an American release soon, RSM, and...it's quite good! The most immediate point of comparison was the Beta Band, early on the early EPs or during the Hot Shots II period, but that's far from the only one, admittedly.

Ten years since their debut. Whatever happened to them after RSM?