Email to a Friend

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

In the musical lexicon, under the entry over-used, buzz-worded genre designations, post-punk ranks pretty highly. It has become a catch-all, enveloping any music with sharp, angular guitar riffs in its all-knowing folds.

These New Puritans (TNPS-who are playing DC9 this Thursday) have a sound that defiantly takes the whole concept of post-punk music and infuses elements from their own musical tastes and styles to create a more versatile, textured and unclassifiable beast. It’s not that they are delivering anything that hasn’t been done before. That’s increasingly hard to do these days.

Rather, the magic in music like theirs is found more and more through a spectacular showcase of artistic alchemy, reliant upon the amalgamation of disparate aspects of existing genres to form an artist’s own musical philosopher’s stone. In the case of Jack Barnett and the rest of TNPS (his twin brother George, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson and Thomas Hein), this consists of: dropping a killer angular guitar riff that could fit in perfectly with Bloc Party or Arctic Monkeys’ canon. Flashing a bit of urban-atmospheric dub a la Burial. Laying down heavy, driving dancehall drum beats. Weaving in some inventive sampling.

The list of elements deployed in the span of their mere-35-minute debut, Beat Pyramid, is impressive. But more profound than the sheer number of these elements, is the way they are so tastefully well-mixed as to create something with such spectacular flow, a true hybrid sound, that it feels as natural as breathing. Something instantly familiar yet irrepressibly fresh and invigorating.

On Beat Pyramid, TNPS deliver what I recall Bloc Party was shooting for with their sophomore album, A Weekend in the City. An album rooted in post-punk that bears many evolutionary marks of urban life and music. That they accomplished this in their first full-length is a testament to their talent.

I got the chance to pick lead singer/mastermind Jack Barnett’s brain from across the pond, delving into his slightly unexpected influences (Wu-Tang and Missy), the ever-present theme of numerology, their debut album and the coming tour…

Could you say a little about how you started playing together? Jack Barnett: We started technically about a year and a half ago. But me and my brother had been making music together as children even before that. The rest of us, we knew each other from around pubs and life in general. It started off really with my music. I posted some music online, like thesenewpuritans.com, I’d made some music and put it up on the internet. From there people just came and I got them to play it. Eventually these guys became more of like a band. Was this your first band? JB: I’d written music since I was very small, I’d recorded since I was very small. But this is the first band…well, first real band.

You mentioned you’d written and recorded since you were young. Could you say a little about when and how the material for your debut, Beat Pyramid, was written/recorded?

JB: Probably half of it was written in the lifetime of the band, the other half was written when we were recording it which was last year. It was all written in some form before we went in but I knew all the changes we’d have to make.

It’s all kind of processed music so it mostly starts with a beat or ideas in a notebook or something. Then gradually we just cut stuff up on the computer. A lot of it is written on the computer first and then we translated it to the band. By the end it’s all cut up and edited completely different ways. We recorded with Gareth Jones who’s also recorded with like Einstürzende Neubauten and Liars. So it turned out quite good.

I will write it, and then within the kind of framework that they can put it in, we change it. It’s not really music you can improvise, really. I don’t think.

Your music unquestionably falls under the banner of post-punk, but it feels much more textured than most other post-punk bands. You bring in myriad sounds including dub, hip-hop, electronic. Could you tell us about some of the different artists that influence or inspire you in some of these areas?

JB: I grew up with electronic, Aphex Twin, stuff like that. I felt like that’s where our foundation is, the way we think about music. None of us really listen to much rock music. A lot of English electronic, like Warrior Queen, Dancehall MC, she’s good. A lot of the sub-bassy electronic music.

I saw that you’ve also cited Wu-Tang. Which songs do you feel bear the most influence from them?

JB: I suppose the most obvious song musically is “Infinity ytinifnI.” It’s kind of hip-hoppy, but more I like how complicated their ideas are in their music. But at the same time it’s not too pretentious. That’s something I always think is good in music. Maybe our music is a bit like that.

That’s actually one of my favorite tracks on the album. I hear a bit of Missy Elliot influence, and the beat feels a bit like that song with Snoop Dogg and Pharrell.

JB: I like Missy Elliot a lot actually. And we rip off quite a lot. Like there’s a really good song with M.I.A. and Vybez Cartel that’s got a ton of good South American drumming and stuff. I think the song “Numbers” as well has quite a bit of a Missy Elliot type beat.

One of the major themes in Beat Pyramid deals with numbers and numerology. This is reflected in many things, like the title, the album art, beats, and a number of tracks focus on conjuring new age, number-related images. Could you say a little about your fascination with this?

JB: A lot of it came to me as we were making it, during the first sessions, that sort of thing. But I used to be, well I suppose I still am, into numerology. I had the idea of how things like the number of syllables in a verse or line in a song, are dictacted by Kabbalah numerology. Those kind of ideas, making the songs into spells. It really grew out of that interest.

You also do subtle manipulations with numbers. For example, in the lengths of the first and last tracks, or say in the use of loops and repetition.

JB: Yeah, actually the first idea I had was to try and make the entire album a loop. And then the idea of the song “Infinity” and the line “Infinity is not as fast as me.” And for others like “4″ I left some of the track names til the last minute and just had to make them all up, and they ended up neatly into our music.

Was there a particular reasoning behind the short, almost-silent track “4″? JB: I always forget which one is which, but “4″ is the shortest one isn’t it? By like a second I think. JB: Originally the album was gonna have field recordings from around London. And when you plot the field recordings on a map they made these sorts of symbols. Is there any connection to the track “4 pound” which precedes it? JB: Not really, but that’s funny now that you mention that connection. I keep finding these things that I never realized. “4 pound” is actually off our EP, we used to play it as a sort of sales pitch for the EP. Could you say a little more about “Infinity” and “Numerology”? JB: Well it’s kind of a confrontational track, an ego song you know. Like I suppose you get in hip-hop. But mixed in talking about infinity and bringing the numerology theme. It contains sounds like gunshots and glass-smashing. We went and recorded the gun shots at a firing range. The sound of those old muskets firing used as snares in the chorus. “Numerology,” it’s got dubby, a cyclical shuffling beat. I list the numbers 1-10 saying what they mean. We invented our own numerology just mucking around. It’s supposed to be a kind of pop song in a way.

Do you listen to a lot of dub?

JB: I’ve always listened to the classics. I really like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s 80’s and 90’s stuff. I keep meaning to download his album “On the Wire” which was recorded with Adrian Sherwood. It’s really quite an amazing album. And new dub, dub-step, British dub.

I can’t stop listening to Burial’s latest album.

JB: Yeah, yeah! Is he popular in America then?

I don’t know if I would call him popular, but he has been very well received critically and is pretty big material in certain circles.

JB: Yeah he’s quite good. It’s kind of nocturnal sounding, which is what our stuff is becoming more and more.

So do you have a fair bit of new material going? The album was recorded what, over the course of late last year?

JB: Sort of, slightly earlier than that. It was sort of spread out over ages. Bits here and there. I’ve got loads and loads of ideas. But we’ve got quite a bit of time before we start to record again. I’ve got like 5 or 6 songs that are definitely going to be on the next album. But we can’t play them yet. I don’t know how we’re going to play them live. They’ve got loads of instruments and no one else to play them.

Interesting. I gather you don’t premiere many songs live? Rather you tend to put them down in the studio properly first?

JB: Yeah. It’s kind of fun to play new songs and we used to play new songs all the time, that’s how we wrote. But more and more we are leaving them more to the studio first. Like “Swords of Truth” we played a really strange version of that about a year ago. It was just lots of drumming and me playing the bass guitar and sounded nothing like it turned out. But I kind of feel that we should do our experiments in private and show people the real thing live.

So you won’t be playing any new material, not found on the EP or LP, on this coming US tour?

JB: Yeah actually I’m still telling you a lie. We’re playing 2 or 3 new songs in our set. If we finish it in time, we’ll be playing another one as well.

You mentioned that a lot of your music is very cut up, doing a lot of stuff in the studio. How does all that end up translated into the live show? Do you end up dropping a lot of stuff?

JB: Yeah, some of the arrangements are virtually impossible to play musically in a live setting, so we have to alter them. We use samplers which helps, so we can use some drums straight off the album. And we have a laptop. So it’s not really a problem if you have a lot of electronic stuff, so it’s easier to play and you can concentrate on the performance.

What do you really focus on for your live performances?

JB: I personally like doing the songs where I don’t have to play guitar so I can just walk around, direct the music and stuff like that. There’s a lot of rhythmic things going on, beat-heavy stuff like George playing drums to mix it up with the electronic drums. There’s some songs where we’ll have drum stuff on the sampler and a bunch of other stuff playing live, you have something like 3 elements at the same time, entwined.

Where have most of your shows been?

JB: We play quite a lot in Europe, more than we play in some parts of England actually. We’re more popular in like France, Germany and Italy than in lots of England.

What have you found attracts people most to your music there? A lot of the electronic influence?

JB: I find that lots of people get different parts of it. Some people get the more pop songs, others get the more electronic and experimental side of it. Others just like the idea of it.

This is going to be your first full US tour, correct?

JB: Yeah, sort of all the way around either coast. We played SXSW and LA before this. That’s it.

Excited? What are your plans leading up to and during the tour?

JB: Yeah, I’ve only been to America once and it was mostly to the South, which was really interesting and I liked. But I suppose it’s not too representative. Hopefully we’ll get some exploring done. I know there’s like 10 hour drives which we’re not used to in England. We’ve got a couple days off, hopefully we’ll get one in New York, LA or Chicago.

Before the tour, in a couple of days time, we’re gonna spend a few days working on new songs and if we can finish them off we’ll be playing them. We don’t really need to practice any of the songs we know since we’ve been playing around Europe. Other than that, just packing.

want more:
myspace TNPS here: http://www.myspace.com/thesenewpuritans
and
don’t miss the show @ DC9 tomorrow (Thursday) – you can thank us later.

Email to a Friend

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•