Bio: WHOA, the noughties are coming to a predictably bland end, aren’t they? Predictable bands playing predictable songs from predictable albums going predictably nowhere. Somewhere in summer 2009, under a ... (more)
Bio: WHOA, the noughties are coming to a predictably bland end, aren’t they? Predictable bands playing predictable songs from predictable albums going predictably nowhere. Somewhere in summer 2009, under a barrage of average records from over-hyped pale-pop imitators, pop music lost its bite, with any number of pretenders to the throne blurring into one all-encompassing one-dimensional musical mass of beige. Just about the time that bandwagon was grinding to a skidmarked halt, though, it just so happened CHEW LiPS were putting the finishing touches to their remarkable debut long-player; pop music with fangs, songs packed with indelible melodies and incessant, hip-swivelling rhythms. Made up of ten tracks of impeccably-executed future-pop that veers from grinding electro-pop grooves to fevered howls of beat-heavy R’n’B, ‘Unicorn’ is a record fit to herald a new decade.
Formed in London in late winter 2008, CHEW LiPS – Tigs (vocals), James Watkins (bass, synths) and Will Sanderson (guitar, synths) – wasted no time in garnering an arsenal of electro-epics, hitting upon a rich songwriting vein – famously, they wrote over 20 songs during the course of their first two rehearsals – from the off. They had no choice - Tigs had booked their first show before they’d actually written anything. “I knew James and James knew Will and we talked about being in a band for a while – it was all quite theoretical,†explains Tigs, “and then James made some music, I booked a show and we wrote some lyrics. Well, I say booked a show but we arranged for this guy to have a house party so we could play. It was two weeks away.†“And we ended up like this, not because we were deciding to be an electro band or use drum machines, but because we didn’t have a drummer. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we just pressed GO on all these machines and wrote ten songs in our first rehearsal.â€
Those songs becoming the band’s blueprint, the next year was spent honing and perfecting on the road and in the studio, with singles, the self-produced ‘Solo’ and its follow-up, ‘Salt Air’, both released on cool-label-du-jour Kitsune, bookended by tours with Howling Bells and The Virgins. CHEW LiPS fast established themselves as a band with brilliantly contrary characteristics – synth-poppers with guitar and bass bulletholes all over their songs, eschewing the usual bedroom-based boffindom of electronic bands and slinging themselves around the UK’s toilet tour haunts, Tigs’ barbed tongue growing ever sharper with each show. In journalistic parlance, she gives good copy.
When it came to recording ‘Unicorn’, the trio stripped everything back to zero, determined that their debut wouldn’t be restricted by how the songs sounded live or on early demos and keen to work with someone who’d be able to expand the CHEW LiPS universe and enable the formative to become fully-formed and the sketches to become sonic masterpieces. Enter David Kosten, fresh from producing Bat For Lashes’ Mercury-nominated ‘Two Suns’, and a man with the ability to lend their music the skyscraping, otherworldly shimmer it deserved. “David encouraged experimentation,†offers Tigs. “He very quickly allowed me to just go ‘no-one’s heard the demos, it doesn’t matter what they sound like’,†says James. “With him, we ended up with something we’d never have done. We treated it completely separately to what we do live, and that was part of the freedom that David gave us, not to worry about what our songs sounded like before and just go, ‘this is a record and it’s different…’†“We weren’t precious about anything and that’s down to James,†Tigs confides, “cos James wasn’t scared at any point when David said ‘let’s try this’ – he’d always tell us if it didn’t sound good, so why be scared?â€
Let off the leash, CHEW LiPS have gone on to create an astonishing, visceral debut that thrills from start to finish, each song different from the last but with the hallmarks of the trio stamped over everything, the tracks intrinsically connected and detached at the same time, grand and intimate at once. Opener ‘Eight’ creeps into life slowly, its glacial soundscapes giving way to a robotic surge of glitches and bleeps, ‘Play Together’ sees shrill synths pirouetting round Tigs’ deviant vocals, whilst ‘Slick’ is space-age soul, building to its climactic outro in a haze of cascading, kaleidoscopic harmonies as Tigs showcases her vocal allure – the CHEW LiPS frontwoman is mesmerising of voice, her prurient laments imbued with a playful menace that could break hearts and the law at the same time. “’Play Together’ sums us up as a band,†says James. “It’s got an amazing bassline and some really cool keyboard sounds, whilst ‘Slick’ could signal a change into a new direction for us – the thing I really like about it is that the music could be Beyonce or something. It was one that me and Tigs were always excited about. It came on the most out of all the songs we recorded in the studio.†“I love ‘Karen’,†adds Tigs. “I love that little break in it.†Indeed, anyone whose accustomed to its original live version should grip themselves for the moment it morphs from straight-arrowed art-rock into its swirling, mesmeric breakdown, whilst the likes of ‘Too Much Talking’ and ‘Piano Song’ reveal tenets of raw emotion within CHEW LiPS that underline the heart pumping within their mechanical beats’n’synths. “I like that about our record,†opines Tigs, “the suggestion that we could go in any direction afterwards and it wouldn’t be completely surprising. Like ‘Piano Song’ – where the fuck does that come from?†As it transpires, the plaintive lullaby that closes ‘Unicorn’ comes from when James sat down at a piano left in David Kosten’s studio that Stevie Wonder used to play. “It’s not a song, there’s no structure to it, it’s just… nice,†smiles Tigs.
At ten tracks – “ten is the classic debut album length,†according to Tigs – ‘Unicorn’ flows effortlessly. It’s pop music alright, but with a more colourful and complex DNA than 2009’s limp-wristed attempts. This is pop music 2010. “We wanted to avoid an album of all the same stuff – there’s no good our album tracks just being less good versions of our singles. Over the course of an album, that’s boring.†“Music recently just hasn’t been very clever,†adds Tigs. “It has no soul in it all. It’s superficial.†To that end, you’ll notice that their two 2009 singles aren’t included (“We couldn’t put out a record that has a single on it that’s been out for a year. We’ve moved on,†says Tigs) and they’re not missed either; ‘Unicorn’ doesn’t rely on past glories – it’s an album for the here and now, a record, says Tigs, that’s about “becoming an adult, about growing up, the notion of being one small person alone in the world.†There’s no growing pains here – ‘Unicorn’ is the first great record of the new decade. (less)
