Track by Track: Post Louis - 'Descender'
Art-rock indie five-piece Post Louis have just released their debut album ‘Descender’, they took a moment to talk to us about about the release - track by track.
Fishwife
The album starts in the middle of a step change – the uncertain moment in the midst of a fight (or a ‘bad patch’, or a bad year) where the balance tips and things seem to start sliding inexorably south.
I’d wanted to call a song Fishwife for a while (this might give some sense of why) and this seemed a good time to do it.
I had fun with the lyrics in this song:
“The angler man is sinking and the walls are rusting through and through and my love is green as the sea is blue because all I had I gave to you”
Stress Fracture
This track is about the parallels between physical and emotional damage, and how they can reinforce each other.
Our friend Alex Hitchcock recorded tenor saxophone for us on this. He is amazing and quite rightly getting a lots of praise for his playing: www.alexhitchcock.co.uk. We wanted Andy’s backing vocal and Alex’s saxophone parts to tumble in out of nowhere, like a car falling off a highway.
This song tracks the moment when panic sets in, temperature rises and emergency begins; when something fundamental gives way entirely, whether a bone or a belief.
Little Jack
Little Jack is a character study of someone who lives mainly in their own head. It’s about the pains of loneliness and low confidence, and what happens when these mix with naïve sexual desire. I wanted to hint at the potential for harm or even domination.
Little Jack isn’t a monster, but the song is in part about how monsters – or wolves – are made. We need to rethink how we make, force and mould some children into being ‘men’.
Janaskie Pt I
Sometimes when we play this in rehearsals I wait for the big instrumental section then just sit on the floor and listen. The hold-up in the drums and bass before everything comes crashing in is one of my favourite moments on the album; I love Mattis and Adam’s playing on this track.
Janaskie Pt II
This was the outro on the original 8-track demo for Janaskie. When we started playing it with the live band, it got replaced by the loud final chorus at the end of Pt. I. But we didn't want to lose this music and these lyrics, so now it serves as a companion piece.
Labyrinthitis
We used to play this instrumental with a full string section in the early days of developing the band at university. I love the detuned section at the start; it’s one of my favourite things Robbie has written.
Un-fun fact: I have had labyrithitis.
Descender
Descender is about the churn and confusion of working through the day and the night and then back into the daylight, and what this does to one’s mind, body and relationships. I don’t think people talk about labour enough in pop music.
Too bright to see
Shows me all the veins in my eyes
Too dark to sleep
Hideaway under synthetic light
While I take what give and I spell it out
And I take what you give and I spell it out
I’m working now from evening till dawn
Sun rises up and then you are gone
This is the only song of ours to start with a chorus. It comes back twice, each time in a different form. This happens again in ‘December’, the closing track – which is also about love and labour, and acts as the pair to this one.
Despite the personal lyrics, this was one of the most collaborative tracks. We worked with my brother Michael again on on synths and programming in the early stages. We then hosted Robbie’s regular string quartet rehearsal in our flat, where we doubled up with a session for Lokki (Drew from Glass Animals), taking turns engineering for one another. The final layers involved more cello, recorded at the Norwegian church, and harp played by our friend Katya in her childhood home.
Like Bad Dreams
Usually I write to music – we’ll develop loops or skeleton structures and I’ll sing over them. This is the only song which was completely different: I woke up (from bad dreams) in the early hours of the morning and dashed out the words in their present form in one complete outpouring.
I used to perform poetry at university and when I was feeling brave enough I sometimes tried this poem out.
A few years later, Robbie recorded an incredibly dense, messy, distorted guitar song on our old 8 track. Emboldened by the chain of pedals stretching from my mic to the recorder, I did a few takes experimenting with these lyrics while we both played with the sounds. We mixed the tracks on the 8 track and the song emerged.
‘Fun’ fact: For a while this song was called “Your Breath Smells Like Bad Dreams” until our bassist Adam vetoed the name on the basis that it was too gross.
Ghostwriter
This track was originally a secretive late night phone recording by Robbie, and is a bit of a one-off. It’s the only Post Louis song for which he wrote most of the lyrics. It’s also the only song on the record on which guitarist Andy, Robbie’s brother, sings lead vocals. We sometimes think of Ghostwriter as the tracing or impression left behind by the rest of the tracks on the album.
Winter Pollen
The phrase ‘Winter Pollen’ caught my eye on a book spine a couple of years ago at Christmas. The snow falling that December made the notion of winter pollen seem quite oppressive – white powder falling, with the power to choke or bury.
I was feeling overwhelmed at the time by all the turmoil produced by the courageous disclosures in the Me Too movement. The Brock Turner witness statement had been published in the summer of 2016. That act of bravery occupied my mind, alongside a relentless looping mental image that I couldn’t shake, of Emily Doe (Chanel Miller) lying in the road.
I wanted to link that image to the idea of heat, rage and being burnt out - whether by work or aspiration or fury. Fiery anger is often apt (here’s an amazing statement of that by someone I really admire) but it can be exhausting as well as empowering.
The guitars had to be really loud for this song, so Robbie recorded in Ed Nash’s (from Bombay Bicycle Club) garden studio (rather than at the Norwegian church, as usual). They didn’t have very long, and you can hear the urgency in the recording. Most of the parts are single takes and decisions on sounds and equipment were made impulsively.
I only realised recently, when I went back to check, that ‘Winter Pollen’ is a collection by Ted Hughes. Unsurprisingly I feel conflicted about that. It’s probably a good indication of how one often ends up complicit without realising. After some reflection, I decided to keep the title.
Angler Man
Unusually for us, this song started with the piano part.
It’s about feeling crept on, and seemed like a good way to follow Winter Pollen.
December
We used some contrasting instrumentation to create the world we wanted in this song: clarinet, French horn and Andy weilding an e-bow.
The last line of the album is “In my darkest hour I fear I’m not strong”. Approaching this song, I was challenging myself to write extremely concretely.
The lyrics are a mixture of truth and fiction. One element that’s true is that my grandmother really did wear black nail polish while undergoing chemotherapy to protect her nails from sun damage.
She was called Zita, she died quite in December a few years ago, and I loved her dearly – so now this song is also about grief, and for her.