The Brute Chorus aren't your average indie act.
Each member of the band contributes vocals, a four piece where each musician benefits from their company. Recording their debut album at a live show, the London based group decided to head to the country and work on a follow up.
The result is 'How The Caged Bird Sings'. A wonderful return from the four piece, The Brute Chorus have added something indefinably ethereal to their potent brand of harmonious indie rock.
ClashMusic are streaming the album ahead of release - click HERE to sample 'How The Caged Bird Sings'!
Meanwhile, singer James Steel wrote a 'Track By Track' guide.
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Lazarus
The chorus to Lazarus came to me one night as I was falling asleep. I was too tired sit up and do anything with it then and there so I sang it into my Dictaphone and left it til morning. The following day Nick and I were working on mixes for our first album and this tune kept running round in my head so I said I was just going to nip to the shop. I’d finished the lyrics by the time I returned twenty minutes later. It’s rare that I can get a song down in one go like this. It’s so exhilarating when it happens though. A bolt from the blue! Lazarus is about the brother of Mary and Martha relating the time Jesus came to revive his brother Lazarus. He’s telling the story to his wife and using it as a parable to revive their failing marriage. I wanted the chorus to have a heavy skank feel similar to Bob Marley’s Mr Brown. Reggae is a style that’s dangerous to dabble in but effect we got is subtle and pretty ghostly. We added a very Morricone style vocal part to the middle eight and the whole song just takes off. The Huntsmen’s version of Fever was a big influence on the sound too. I call it spaghetti dub. We often start our shows with this song now. It can really create an atmosphere.
Could this Be Love?
I’ve often been interested in the links between religious/spiritual experiences and love. I got the idea for this song after our drummer Matt had been assaulted at a party. He was in pretty bad shape. All the Brutes were there at Lewisham hospital while he was being cared for. I was totally spangled as a result of the party and so I went out into the car park for a breath of air just as dawn was rising over the ambulances. It was a pretty psychedelic experience as I recall with the sun reflecting off the green and gold machines. I combined the imagery of a man in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital as his soul is called to the light and all the time he still thinks he’s on his way to see his girlfriend. The riff’s pretty much out and out rockabilly but the structure isn’t. I refute anyone who says we’re a rockabilly band. We take stuff from many genres to use in the music we make.
Banged & Blown
A lot of the songs I write are long and wordy and so to counteract this I’ve taken to writing mini songs. I can jot these down quickly at any time, on the bus, at the bar, in the supermarket etc. They’re generally pretty hymn-like and simple. Usually when I sit down to write I’m completely straight, with no chemical assistance apart from may be a couple of double espressos, so writing these songs in this way achieves quite a different effect. They’re not as polished and can feel a lot more open ended. Writing while pissed is different to getting pissed to write and the two shouldn’t be confused. As we were recording the album I decided a few of these would come in useful to break up some of the longer songs. So this is one of the ‘drunk hymns’ I wrote. I waited until we’d had a few ales in the pub and said I’d like to teach the band some new songs in the studio that night. We recorded a handful of them live that night with just a distant stereo pair in the village hall we were using as a live room. They’re meant to sound ramshackle and unrehearsed and I think the effect is great.
Starlings
Near where I grew up on the Somerset Levels there is a fen where vast flocks of starlings come to roost at certain times of the year. I went to see them on Boxing Day and wrote this song as a poem as soon as I got home. The song’s structure is meant to mirror this spectacle where a couple of the birds drift in, seemingly, out of nowhere and are gradually joined by others until all of a sudden the sky practically turns black with a heaving mass of starlings. Then it’s over almost as quickly as it started. We used lots of drone notes and guitar feedback with a roiling drum beat to create this song and Nick even borrows from Mendelsshon’s Fingal’s Cave for his keyboard part. Listen out for that; it get’s a bit buried in the tumult of everything else.
Wife
This song began life as one of the drunk hymns but I ended up drunkenly scrawling verse after verse after verse of it. I edited it down and shaped a song from what I had many weeks later. It was recorded live one night with just me singing and playing guitar, again with the mics placed at a distance to capture the sound of the room. I was half cut that night and as a result the performance is suitably maudlin and boozy in a kind of Neil Young Tonight’s the Night way. Off key in all the right places fortunately. The next day all the boys wanted to add was Dave’s double bass part and a synth line. We could’ve worked it up into a full band thing but the decision was an important step for us a group. Learning that less is sometimes more is something you hear old musicians bang on about all the time but sometimes you have to work these things out for yourself. It’s become one of my favourites out of all the songs I’ve ever written, not least because it proved to be so prophetic so soon after. Our friends Kirsty McGee & Mat Martin who organise the Hobopop Collective in Manchester have been playing it at their shows and are planning to release it as a single. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone perform a Brute cover version. It’s a real honour. We’ll return the favour by recording one of theirs soon.
Silver Lining
The day after the live recording of our first album we were in a studio in Kentish Town listening back to the tape and preparing a mix of All The Pilgrims which was to be the first single. In an effort to have a change of scene from the songs we’d been drilling and rehearsing for a month previously I went into a side room and wrote this. It’s about finding someone who can completely understand you and love you for your faults. In my case, I can be a moody bastard at the best of times and will wander round under a black cloud for days and this is what that song is about. “... from the bottom of my heart, she puls out diamonds by the cart, she knows a diamond needs it’s mining, and every black cloud needs a silver lining...”. Mat’s drum part on this is great; really restrained, the backing is reduced mainly to stabbed chords with a brushed snare lightly keeping time. It’s similar in feel to Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand. Again, loads of the natural reverb of the hall we were recording in.
Red Blood
This one was a bitch to write and sing. The band love it but I was breaking up with my fiancée at the time and as a result the writing and recording of this song and that experience are so wrapped up in each other that I can’t separate the two. A lot of the lyrics had to be improvised in the vocal booth and much of the song is said rather than sung because I was finding the simple act of singing almost impossible. I do love the outro though where the chorus chants in and the synth and melodica twist together around the melody. There were big arguments between the four of us as to whether it should be included in the album with me arguing against. Eventually I capitulated but listening to it now is still a bit like watching a car crash happen in slow motion.
Birdman
This has been a live favourite of ours for a while now. It’s a real psychobilly stomp about a guy bragging about how goddamn amazing he is and casting voodoo love spells on a woman who lives in his tower block. It was partly inspired by a visit to an exhibition at the British Museum about south sea islanders and their rituals as well as Bo Diddly and The Cramps. I thought the idea of an urban witch doctor dancing around in his flat covered in feathers etc was pretty cool.
Lyre Bird, Humming Bird
Another drunk hymn. There is a recurring theme of birds in this album. I can’t really explain why that happened other than to say that when I was a boy my dad always used keep an aviary. We’d have quail, cockatiels, budgies, canaries, love birds and, my favourites for their name alone... cut throat finches. I was never much of an ornithologist but I think the names of birds are an endless resource for lyrics and so the Lyre bird and the Humming bird seemed to be the most musical sounding species for this song. So I guess their inclusion wasn’t entirely arbitrary.
Whipping Boy
My mum came to see the band play at the 100 Club. I think it was the first time she’d seen me play since I was sixteen and so she wrote to me the following week, full of maternal pride, to congratulate me on the success we were having and to praise me for persevering for so long. At the time I thought this was highly ironic and so this song came about. It’s a letter to a mother from her eldest son telling her all the worldly wisdom he’s learned which is basically no matter how hard you try and for how long some guys are just destined to get chewed up and spat back out again “...I searched all my life but I found no joy, ‘cause all the world wants is a whipping boy...”. A lot of the imagery comes from the story of John Williams who was accused of the Ratcliff Highway Murders in 1811. He hanged himself in prison and his captors paraded his body on a cart through the east end before driving a steak through his heart and burying him head down in a hole at a cross roads not far from where the band live in Whitechapel. Musically it’s inspired by TV On The Radio’s cover of Mister Grieves and The Doors’ When The Music’s Over and Dick Dale. I call it Doorsian Doo Wop. To use R&B parlance, it’s a slow jam and I’m very proud of it.
Heaven
Heaven continues a similar theme. I became a fatalist for a while back there. I started believing that all our lives are preordained and no matter what you did you couldn’t tamper with the cosmic plan. The chorus melody is quite uplifting in itself and so I like the juxtaposition of all that negativity sung in such an upbeat way. The song’s ending is so final and it’s statement so concise it was a natural choice to end the album. “... this ain’t no place to party, and you know that very well, if you want somewhere to party you can go to hell...”. It’s also the first Brute song not to have guitars on.