Band Of The Week #146 - LICE
Kicking off 2021 with our first Band Of The Week - Bristol’s LICE, who have just released their much-anticipated debut album - ‘Wasteland: What Ails Our People Is Clear’. Written as a piece of experimental short fiction, the ambitious concept album distances LICE from being just another ‘post-punk-band’, they took a moment to talk to us about the release.
Hey Lice, so the debut album is finally out there! It feels like it’s been years in the making - what took you so long?
Making ‘WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear’ was a big undertaking. It’s a concept album, the lyrics are also presented as a standalone piece of experimental science fiction (taking stacks of drafts in itself), and it features a noise instrument we built ourselves based on the 100-year-old designs of The Italian Futurists. It took two years, since the release of our double EP ‘It All Worked Out Great Vol.1+2’ to complete. However, we think anyone who listens - especially if they’ve been with us for a while – will be as excited by this leap forward as we are. It’s music we never thought we’d be able to make.
It is titled ‘WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear’ - that is quite the mouthful. Does it have a certain meaning behind it?
The album’s argument is that by unsettling the prevailing forms of the lyric, satirical music can deal with implicit forms of bias and social iniquity in more nuanced, constructive ways. “What ails our people” is revealed to not be the real-world crises alluded to in the vignettes, but the insufficiency of the prevailing artistic language for understanding them. For political music to do anything truly valuable in these militant years, people need to experiment with its forms – the two-dimensional, sonically conservative, platitude-laden concoctions spewed out by this country’s punk bands serve only to coddle the left and entrench the right. By unsettling those settled laws, WASTELAND suggests politicised music can better present the complex moral universe we live in, and help us live in it more easily.
Since your early singles we have seen quite the shift towards a more experimental sound with you as a band. Can we expect more of this on the album? And what caused that shift?
The main idea behind the music in ‘WASTELAND’ was to reconcile our growing interests in minimalism and industrial. Simple motifs repeat and evolve in ways inspired by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but are expressed through cold, alien sounds influenced by Bristol’s currently-vital avant-garde scene (HARGGA, Giant Swan etc.). The non-singles (as you’d expect), show these ideas at their most liberated – we experiment with looping and reversing vocals, mixing live and synthetic drums, and all the sounds we could get from the Intonarumori. The album covers a sonic and emotional spectrum we’re very proud of – it’ll take you to some very dark, euphoric, cold and warm places. The shift was driven principally by knowing we wanted to do something drastically more ambitious than the wiry Birthday Party-meets-The Country Teasers post-punk of our early EPs, having become too familiar with sounds from the live circuit.
There is certainly a concept album vibe coming from this, was that intentional?
From the outset we conceived this as a concept album, making the arguments I’ve mentioned. This decision wasn’t inspired by other concept albums as much as it was by the desire to create a coherent piece of art, with a manifesto and a solid point. In retrospect, I think knowing the album would have that thread running through it gave us the confidence to musically explore the range of styles, structures and textures we did.
What are the key influences and themes on the album?
The main themes of ‘WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear’ are disillusionment, violence, the mentality of crowds, commodification, and (above all) transformation. Not only do characters transform morally, temporally and physically (‘Arbiter’ sees one turn into a horse, and another a ball of ectoplasm), but the text itself transforms typographically. As the Wasteland begins to unravel through the interferences of Dr Coehn and The Conveyor, the prose lyrics warp into cut-ups, soliloquies, and even plays.
In terms of lyrical influences, the main idea was to reconcile the vivid, grotesque and blackly-comical storytelling of my favourite sci-fi writers (William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Brian Catling etc.) with the violent, revolutionary language of early 20th century art movements – the Italian Futurists’ manifestos, the Vorticist magazine ‘BLAST’ etc. To make the arguments I wanted to make, this is the strange, brutal world the story needed to take place in.
Where was the album recorded? Any behind the scenes stories from the process?
The album was recorded in The Nave: a studio built in an old church in Leeds where we also lived together for two weeks. Our producer Alex Greaves had worked with some good friends on some staggering music there, including Spectres’ latest album ‘It’s Never Going To Happen And This Is Why’ and Yowl’s EP ‘Atrophy’. We had a couple of things left to do when the session ended, and planned on going back to the studio around our March 2020 UK tour, before the country went into lockdown and put our plans on hold.
In the meantime, Gareth went home to live with his parents. Finding himself with an abundance of time and access to woodworking tools, he made our idea of building an Intonarumori a reality. This is a noise instrument conceived in the early 20th century by Luigi Russolo, a member of the Italian Futurist movement. He theorised a new kind of music for a public familiarised with the harsh, mechanical sounds of a rapidly-industrialising world – an early example of ‘noise music’. Russolo’s instrument is a wooden box, housing a wheel turned on a crank which rubs against a nylon string; its pitch is modified with a lever moving the wheel, and the sound – while reminiscent of an old motorcar – is truly alien. Gareth’s version is enormous, complete with springs and pickups, and the inventive addition of a snare drum as its ‘horn’. When it was finally safe to return to Leeds and finish the album, we brought this instrument with us – its caustic, terrible sounds tying the whole record together.
There is a number of guest spots on this release, can you tell us who it involves and how those partnerships came about?
The album’s closing track ‘Clear’ features our good friends Katy J Pearson and Goat Girl’s Clottie Cream and Holly Hole. A sort of epilogue to the story, influenced by David Lynch’s ‘Ghost Of Love’ and Philip Glass’ ‘Floe’, it features this chorus we knew we wanted female guest vocals on. We know Katy from Bristol, and Goat Girl from our circles in London; we’d actually met Holly ages before she joined the band, through our friends Strong Island Records in Portsmouth. We’re all massive fans of these artists, and it feels very special to have them involved in this album. Home-recording their features, they approached the chorus in intriguingly different ways: combining their performances gave the choruses this wonderfully unsettling edge that took the track to a new level.
Do you have a favourite lyric on the album and why?
“Tears for the slug-crawl of culture and art in this wavering, insipid age? No! It’s the punching fist which springs from my pure, inexhaustible genius”.
These lines open ‘Arbiter’, which deals with the commodification of music. The Artist despairs at the landscape of music, but suddenly feels this turn to furious anger – propelling him to action. The form of the lyric in the pamphlet here shifts from prose to the soliloquy form, opening a series of other references to Shakespeare in Part II: The Dissolution (Side B). This was inspired by my encounters with Harold J Bloom’s ‘Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human’. Bloom suggests that Shakespeare’s revolution in the emotional and psychological complexity of popular literature – as it became globally ubiquitous – actually influenced the self-awareness of successive generations of human beings. These lines call for the same revolution in the song lyric, whilst being a really flamboyant, colourful, Futurist-tinged piece of braggadocio. It’s my best work.
Now the debut album is finally out there, what’s next for LICE?
We’ve been energised by the discovery of new ideas and the development of new skills – we’re just working out what to do next with them, but it’ll be different. Whatever the next LICE record is, there will be a good point to it – for us, and the growing raft of allies we’ve gathered in this noble voyage.