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 lectrelane's music is powerful with longing: even during its most intense, layered crescendos, it has a restraint that's like running on tiptoes, and you want to give chase. On the British quartet's third album, Shouts No Calls, the tempos force hope into lyricist Verity Susman's nostalgic images of trains and missed connections. "Say it now — you're not in love anymore," drones Susman over a bouncy guitar and drowsy drums on "Cut and Run." "I'll try my best to catch up with you." Not for nothing have they been compared to Stereolab and the Breeders. Susman (also the band's organist and sometimes-guitarist),
bassist Roz Murray, guitarist Mia Clarke and high-school pal Emma Gaze recently completed a US tour. We talked with Susman about their ecstastic live shows, the band's female fanbase and gender in rock. — Catrinel Bartolemeu
Your show at Irving Plaza in NY was very high-energy. During the show I noticed a disproportionate number of cute lesbian couples. The lights came up, and I realized I was in a room full of the best-looking gay girls in NYC. Then I read that your label, Too Pure, is a lesbian label.
I don't know what that means. I've never heard that before. [Laughing] I guess there's quite a few people on the label who are lesbians, but to describe it as a lesbian label is kind of a weird description. Too Pure as a label is primarily about the music. I mean, there are people on the label who are straight and gay — there's men and women.
How does writing or practicing compare to the intensity of your live show?
When we're writing together, it's just the four of us in a room and we don't feel any pressure from outside, it feels like a natural thing to be doing. We wrote this album in a studio in Berlin, it was a beautiful summer and we could take breaks from the studio outside by the river and so it felt really relaxed. Recording is something else. There's pressure to try to get good takes. Live, that's probably what we enjoy most. You can put a lot into that, because there's an audience there, and you really want to get to them. When people are into it, we really feed off that energy.
There's a lot of build-up and anticipation in your music. During one song, the guitar slowed, she started plucking, you guys were looking at each other, and everyone was just waiting for it to explode. How do you all know when it's going to break?
We never really talk about what we're doing, and I think that's the best way to write for us. Me and Emma, we've been playing together for twelve or thirteen years now, so we're really in tune. That sort of buildup often starts with the drums, and I think we're all sensitive to it. That bit you described got a lot better when we played the song live, because we realized how it worked with the audience and that anticipation, so we started responding to that. Drawing people together is what we always wanted to do but it did take quite a long time to be able to do it.
Do you think of your music as sexy?
[Laughs] I don't. Those things are kind of separate in my head. I can see how people can interpret music in a sexual way, with the anticipation and build-up, and people have said that about our music. But if we did, we'd just laugh when we were trying to play or write. Can you imagine you're trying to play this piece, and there's a certain amount of controlling top crescendo, and everybody is kind of concentrating, and you thought, "This is sexual" — we'd just lose it.
Did you want an all-girl band?
When me and Emma started the band, we did. It ended up like that, because there were all girls in our group of friends, then we wanted to keep it like that. We had a guy in the band for while. We've gone through phases of thinking that's important and thinking it's not. In some ways, I'm into it, because it's empowering to be four women on stage, and just on a practical level, the lineup works and there's no point changing it. So we don't really think about it. But we get asked about it, and described as an all-female band, and the fact that we're women gets played up. First, we're musicians. Our sexuality and our gender are something outside of it. At the same time, we might be feminists or into queer politics, but the band is where we make music.
Until I saw you live, I wasn't even sure if you all female. I didn't know some of you were gay, until I saw all the couples. The crowd blushes and screams when you sing "Girl, you'll be a dandy and a deserter . . . I bet I'd like your underwear."
It's upsetting sometimes when our music is seen in a gendered way. I don't think all-male bands get that, because they're seen as the norm. It's talked about a lot with us. In an logical way, I can see it's an issue because there's not as many all female bands as there are all male bands. But that's something distinct from the actual music that we're making.
But if you're into queer politics and in an all-girl band, isn't that part of the music?
I know what you mean. Over the band's lifetime, I've written lyrics thinking about women and other times about men. A lot of the times it's kind of open, so people can read something into it and relate to it. What's important to me is the emotion, more than whether it's for a man or a woman. I totally see what you're saying, but so many people talk about us being women, more than they talk about the music. That's kind of where this comes from. It's like, "Jesus we're not here to talk about being women. We're in a band — let's talk about music." n°
To order No Shouts No Calls,
click here.
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© 2007 Catrinel Bartolemeu & hooksexup.com
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