These New Puritans are a bit of a quasi-enigma. They have no particular form or shape, and often find themselves lost within different spheres of space and time. Creating a storm with an angular, trancey and mathematical pop formula, they’re proving to be one of the most exciting and promising bands in a short while. I caught up with singer Jack for a more insightful approach to the music, especially when it comes from someone who ‘really likes My Bloody Valentine, The Walker Brothers, Danny Weed, and Vybz Kartel’ and is currently listening to the likes of ‘Balinese chant. I'm also listening to Rolf Harris, he's very underrated’ admits Jack. Hmmmm........
There’s a fair few towns in this country with a youth scene; a small, close knit group of musical appreciators who stay focused on their love, while not much else around them happens. How does Jack feel about the music spawned in his hometown, Southend? ‘The Southend Scene almost existed. It definitely doesn't exist anymore’ he says. ‘I suppose we really should have exploited it as a media tag type-thing, but I think that would have been destructive and all destruction is evil. So we didn't and will not. Southend is just a vacuum. That is what is good about it; Southend is nothing really.’
And to have gone from playing the local haunts of Southend’s relaxed musical scene, to writing a soundtrack piece for a ‘Dior Homme’ fashion show must have been a surreal experience. ‘It was a great furious piece of creative energy.’ reminisces Jack, ‘lots of amazing studios, staying in a top-floor flat in a Paris side-street, trying to communicate with French engineers, nineteen hour days.’
It must have seemed a world apart from the usual milieu that bands find themselves wading through in search of a leading edge. Not least because it was an international fashion show, but because the whopping 17 minute soundtrack was a far cry from 3 minute simplicity and hasty art punk.
‘That was the whole point - to lose our sound!’ assures Jack authoritatively. ‘We'd never done a song longer than 3 minutes, now we had to do a 17 minute one. It's good to sound different to yourself - the music I'm writing at the moment is for mallet instruments and a choir and will be recorded live in the countryside. So that's different to the album and the album is different to the EP. All we want to do is be something else, and then something else, and then something else. All we want to do is forget ourselves.’ The Puritans are purely more than just style over substance.
Bands with such an immense intensity are bound to change and progress, especially when you take into account the punishing and prolific work schedule ahead. ‘We're touring in Europe and the uk in February and March, to support our album which is out in January’ states Jack. We’re also re-releasing 'Elvis' in January as well.
TNP are leaders in their field. Far from being content with three minute shoe gaze perfection, Jack explains how the band are striving forward to meet new goals, un-chartered and undiscovered; they’re achieving this in anything but a linear fashion and, as Jack explains, the album reflects countless new adventures in their sound.
‘Our EP was recorded by candle-light in 24 hours and was fuzzy and our album was recorded in harsh light over more than 24 hours and is pristine and electric’ muses Jack, ‘It's still harsh and compressed though. The whole time we were making it I had two phrases in my mind: "HYPER-FAVELA" and "WAVE".’The album has, I've been told, a bit of an electronica / dancehall / shoegaze / pop feel. I've managed to get over my obsession with distortion - distortion is easy.’
The new single, ‘Numbers and Colours’ has just been released; a hyperkinetic, enigmatic fusion of electronica, jerky, piercing riffs and hollow space like bass, show that the band crave something that most haven’t even thought of. They take the mundane and average observations of life, and forge an existential, parallel meaning from it.
‘Numerology is meaningless but it's good to take something meaningless and make it meaningful rather than take something meaningful like love or life and make it meaningless.’ quips Jack, who’s obviously spent many an hour pondering the worth of aesthetic gains. ‘Most bands try to make their music seem meaningful by referencing stuff but we've invented our own form of numerology that you can hear about in the song numbers.’
And this remains to be the spirit of the band; an entity of their own, lead by the often dictatorial and commanding Jack, who shouts and leads his band on stage, they shift between form and structure, normality and abstraction, linear and arbretary motion. Described as cryptic by some, I wonder if this symbolizes a longing to be whisked away to another world, without rules and constraints. Has the bands own experiences influenced their decision to not follow the beaten path?
Well, we had to re-map Southend into something meaningful, rather than something empty. These New Puritans is a mystery and I'm looking for the answer myself. I feel that we have something in common with dubstep but not in an obvious way.
We don't want to just re-create this world; we just want to make our own. In the words of Freddie Mercury: "are you ready for a brand new beat?’
http://www.myspace.com/thesenewpuritans
Thanks to Beth at Toast fo the solid effort
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