RISING TIDE: Wave Machines Take America
photos by Alexandra Marvar
Four gents start a band in Liverpool, record a batch of utterly fresh songs, take their show on tour in America, and liftoff in starry musical ascent. Old news? Thinking, “Jeez, GUTFIRE!, 1964 was a long time ago?” Well, dear reader, excepting the fallout shelter at GUTFIRE! headquarters where we store the Nehru jackets for the interns, you’d be spot on. But we’re not talking about some old Quarrymen here. And Wave Machines are most certainly not your father’s puerile, mop-topped Liverpudlians.
Formed in 2007, Wave Machines (Carl Brown on guitar, keyboard, percussion, vocals; Tim Bruzon on vocals, guitar, keyboard; Vidar Norheim on drums, vocals; James Walsh on bass, percussion, clarinet, and vocals) make self-proclaimed “eclectopop” that, as The Sunday Times put it, “you can imagine James Murphy envying.” While their music can be pop indeed, it is without the syrupy sweetness that leaves a listener desperate for something more substantial. That’s because that very something is right there in their work – the label “pop” touches only the crest of the wave, as it were.
The band’s singles – from the silken thump of “Keep the Lights On” to the dancefloor mandate of “The Greatest Escape We Ever Made” to the rollicking ride of “I Go, I Go, I Go” to the subtly anthemic “Punk Spirit” – are eye and ear-openers enough. But keep listening to their debut album, “Wave if You’re Really There,” and Wave Machines will lead you through a soundscape of tart grooves, guitar-driven indie rock, and meaningful electronica, all complemented by artfully cryptic lyrics, rewarding the listener with that delightfully rare combination: music that at once provokes the mind to thought, and the feet to the floor.
GUTFIRE! caught up with the band near the end of their recent U.S. tour, during a stop at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
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GUTFIRE!: So tell us, how’s the U.S. tour been?
TIM: It’s been quite a lot of fun. We’ve managed to meet quite a lot of people, experience quite a lot of hospitality and generosity, and um… we’ve experienced the American-sized portions. I’ve gotten a lot hungrier since I’ve been over here. Stomachs have been growing accordingly.
GUTFIRE!: Any particular highlights?
CARL: We had a chance to see Niagara Falls. People had said, “Oh, you’ll be underwhelmed by it.” Whether they were setting us up, which I hope they were, it was an amazing experience. We’ve just met many different kinds of characters. We’ve absorbed so much American culture through our TV screens, and there’s always been a great exchange of ideas between the U.K. and the U.S., so you kind of feel a familiarity with people you’ve never met before. What’s been wonderful for us on this tour are the genuine human beings you meet – they’re warm, and loving, and caring, and full of life, and full of beans. It’s been amazing being here.
GUTFIRE!: How does the music scene in Liverpool compare to what you’ve seen in the States? Coming from Liverpool and going through similarly industrial cities on your U.S. tour, what’s your take on why those places can be so conducive to producing great music?
TIM: We spoke to an interesting character at the Magic Stick in Detroit, the security guy at the car park. He was keen to talk to us, but a lot of shaking the head going on… you know, “This place is on its knees.” And I knew there had been a lot of trouble there – but the way he was talking about things was really quite shocking, really brought it home.
CARL: This guy was maintaining and repairing bowling alley machinery. The place has been there since 1955 or 1954 – it’s the original stuff. This guy is behind the scenes, the life and soul of the place. He took us into the theatre space next door, which is the second to last place Houdini ever performed, the Majestic. And this is an example of what was said before: I mean the guy is full of passion, full of life. Just a great endorsement for Detroit and for that place, and he extended himself to us, showed us the theatre, the backstage areas. And there was something about how the streets felt that was reminiscent of Liverpool – but not Liverpool at the moment. Liverpool has basically had a rebirth in the last decade. But there are similarities in the fact that these cities share huge periods of wealth and then huge periods of desolation. And that breeds a characteristic within the people. They’ve got very rounded experiences of living high off the hog and then having nothing. So it was wonderful to meet such grounded human beings and be welcomed into their place.
But also you asked about the creativity – where does it come from? Liverpool has always been – and still is for different reasons – a great mixing pot of cultures and languages and ideas. Obviously New York is similar. Ports around the world have that. Culturally Liverpool is a very rich place, so that comes through in the creativity, the songs, the comedy, the language, the food. So when you go to other ports, you just sort of feel at home in a weird way.
TIM: Liverpool gets a lot from having a big university there, and a lot of people coming from the outside. Things have kind of spread out a lot more, a lot of different influences, different musical styles. There’s a very definite Liverpool sound that local bands – still, to this day – have generated. I find that kind of curious how this thing remains. I don’t know what you’d say the London sound is, or if there is such a thing. I don’t know, how would you describe the Liverpool sound, this kind of acoustic-driven…
CARL: It’s chord-driven songs. But I think that goes back to folk music as well. Because the people – there’s still a singy-songy accent. It’s just a natural thing. I mean Elvis Costello is a practitioner of it today. Obviously you can go back to the generations before. Bands that were… very songy, traditional, two guitars, a bass, some harmonies, you know, and nailing it. And I think there’s no shame at all in nailing the three-minute pop song, just using those basics. It’s not easy to do. But we want to be as inventive outside of the guitars. We want to try and find a blend, which is engaging for people, and just don’t leave it at that place of two guitars and a bass.
TIM: When you come to a place like Austin – we ended up at the Broken Spoke. And that’s a similar kind of thing, I suppose. That’s the sound we might sort of associate with a place like this, not really knowing too much about it. It seems to fit our image of this place perfectly. Lots of cowboy hats and dancing, and it was really wonderfully music. I mean the band was so good. So I suppose all over the world, these kinds of really rootsy sounds, they just pervade, and they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.
GUTFIRE!: Could you speak to some of the activities you have going on in Liverpool with St. Bride’s Church, the Mercy Arts Collective, and the collaborations with Nathan Jones? Any work on a new album, or new collaborations coming up?
JAMES: Mercy has put on nights in Liverpool that were sort of underground, spoken word, and nights that turned into raves, basically. The funnest nights you could go to in Liverpool for years. We enjoyed going to them, and eventually they asked us to play a couple of them, so we did. And we got on so well with their ethos of putting interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking stuff out there in a different kind of package from most of the nights that you go and see. So we started rehearsing in St. Bride’s Church, which is a wonderful space. Still a practicing church, just about. We rent the room at the top, which is a beautiful big room that used to house the organ for the church – it’s been a few different incarnations since then, I think it was cubs and scouts hut for a while – and now it’s sort of our rehearsal and recording room. We decided to get together and put a night on in the church with Mercy, and also we have a lot of music we’d been making that wasn’t suitable for the record we were wanting to make – some of it was very filmic. And so we thought, well, let’s ask Nathan (Jones) to get some poetry together, and we’ll combine his poetry with our music and see what we can make out of that.
CARL: One of the reasons was that I had a cassette in the car of a Taxi Driver soundtrack. I didn’t really know much about it – I copied it years ago – and on there were monologues over the score. I watched the film many years ago but I haven’t seen it recently. And I got the impression from that cassette that there were tons of monologues in the film. Turns out when I watched it again there wasn’t as much as I thought. What happened, they overlaid vocals – bits of Robert DeNiro – over Bernard Herrmann’s score, which was his last film soundtrack. So I just made a mistake, basically. I said to Nathan, we’ve got some music that’s fairly soundtrack-ish. Why don’t you try to write some monologues like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, like Rutger Hauer in that famous scene in Bladerunner where he releases the dove. And I said, this could be the most embarrassing thing any of us had ever undertaken, but if it is we’ll just pretend it never happened. So we go to the church, and a few Guinnesses later we were all going, “This is actually good! What are we gonna do now – are we gonna perform it in front of people?” So we arranged a show. The first one was the Halloween night.
JAMES: That’s right. We’d written a piece that was very grandiose – it had a big chorally bit that we managed to sing with just the four of us. And Nathan wrote some amazing words, a great monologue, and it went down really, really well. It felt like a very special, unusual thing.
CARL: There were open mouths.
JAMES: There were.
CARL: I literally saw people (drops jaw, awestruck).
TIM: They’d been drinking.
JAMES: But we were very aware that there was the potential to make something very cheesy and corny, and we managed to avoid that and come out with something that felt like a lot of fun, and something quite special. We’ve done about six or seven different pieces with Nathan now that span the whole range from a quirky amusing little three or four minute ditty to a 15-minute epic rant that left people… we’ve actually had people in tears.
CARL: We’ve since started to record these, and we’re currently on the lookout for some young filmmakers in the U.K. to put some visuals with this content we’ve created, see if we can get maybe four or five of them together and have a DVD available. It’s just been really healthy to have another angle, another place to output, really. People create all the time, they just get into thinking that they only create one thing and they don’t – they just think they do. So we try to make sure we can find a home for the different things that we do.
GUTFIRE!: Are you also working on music for a new album?
TIM: We’re about to start writing for our second album as soon as we get home. Very excited about it. We’ve got lots of ideas, and it’s sort of heads down and try to make something as exciting and fresh-feeling as possible. There’s a lot I really like about what we did on this first album, but as with any piece of work you do, there’s a lot you wanted to achieve in certain areas, so just trying to improve on what we’ve just done, that’s the goal. I’m excited about the prospect.
GUTFIRE!: Any timeframe for completion?
TIM: We’ll be putting some kind of point on the calendar. It would be great to have something out before Christmas, or autumn of this year, so we’ll be aiming for around then. We’ll see how we do.
GUTFIRE!: In the creative process, do you all do some songwriting, throw in different ideas?
CARL: It’s a bit of both, really. Tim and I have worked together for many years, doing everything from writing together, to writing material for each other’s work, to arranging each other’s work, so it’s whatever a piece of work needs at that point. And then poetry stuff is different – it’s a more jammed, improvised process in the room.
GUTFIRE!: Do you write poetry or fiction in addition to the music?
CARL: No, Nathan produces the dialogue. I’ve just started writing again after a long time of not writing, because I didn’t really have anything to say. The main thing is just allowing stuff to come through and then seeing if it fits together in a good way and feels like a body of work. We have to excite each other. Something has to have the four of us say, “You know, that’s really good.” And that’s it, really. You don’t have a fixed role anymore – your role is just dependent on how to react to the material that’s coming through.
GUTFIRE!: You’ve talked before about how the cover art for your releases – scenes of nature cut with geometric designs – reflects your music, which features classic instrumentation integrated with electronic sounds. Just wondering, do the various animals in the artwork (buck, lion, dolphin, rabbit) correspond to each of you guys?
TIM: If they do, we haven’t been told about it. Scott, who does all our artwork, is a great friend of ours. He’s the kind of person who would be divisive.
VIDAR: Have you seen the new one?
GUTFIRE!: The centaur – on the Facebook page. Like that a lot.
VIDAR: There might be a theme going there. We don’t know where he comes up with it.
CARL: Scott’s someone we’ve worked with for many years, and he’s basically like the fifth member of the band. We really recognize and respect the visual aspect of music today. I mean it was always important – the Beatles wore suits for a reason and Elvis moved his hips for a reason – it’s always been there. But in our cover art and posters, Scott’s been the guy who’s always been able to make all of us go, “Whoa, hold on a minute!” and be a bit shocked and a bit proud that it had something to do with our band.
TIM: We work well together. He’s slightly twisted, that guy… it’s good.
CARL: I guess you’ve just put your thumb on it there. I think we always look for that – everything needs to be slightly twisted, really. A good song is one thing, but it will entertain us if it’s got some ingredient where it doesn’t feel it was so predictable the way through. And if a song does that, then we know the voices we use, or the keyboards we use, or the drum machines, or the loops – then we can add that twist in.
GUTFIRE!: Do you like listening to your own songs? Do you rock out to them in the van?
TIM: No.
CARL: My girlfriend does. My girlfriend sings Tim’s songs a lot. And then I write one and it doesn’t stick for some reason. It kills me.
TIM: We’d taken the time getting everything recorded, gone slightly mad listening to it again and again and again. And we had a guy called Lexxx mix our album. That was a really great experience, letting somebody take it and do their thing with it. And he made a few decisions on a few of the songs, which weren’t what we were expecting, but which really helped the music. And I can enjoy listening to our music when there’s a couple of tracks where he’s changed it a bit and there’s that element of surprise for us.
CARL: There is a responsibility that you have – or I certainly feel – to police the amount of music in your head, because with so many competing melodies and lyrics, sometimes you’ve just got to keep a clear head to let your ideas come through. You can’t hear yourself think musically sometimes, and you need to create space. As far as listening to the album, I’ll listen to it occasionally, but only for a specific reason, which is how are we doing with our songwriting artistically, what ideas have hit the table in the last month… So I will check it, more than listen to it.
GUTFIRE!: Are there other bands or other types of artists that have served as inspiration over the years?
VIDAR: Last year at SXSW there was this Swedish band called Wildbirds & Peacedrums I just happened to catch on this really cool radio show back in the U.K. called Rob da Bank. I just heard one tune, and I thought I’ll probably like these guys live, and they blew me away – I think everyone, really. I listened to them a lot.
CARL: The best band in England is Post War Years. We first met them at a festival a few years back called Lounge on the Farm. As we arrived, they were playing their set, and for the first time in about ten, twelve years, my jaw dropped. I just thought they were incredible. They had absolutely everything – songs that give you everything you want, and songs that push you a little bit as a listener – you find yourself very invested in their music. There’s another guy called Gary Daly who I think is an exceptional songwriter and a really strong visual artist.
GUTFIRE!: Do you all ever do “You’ll Never Walk Alone?”
CARL: No, I can’t sing it. I go to the game, I watch Liverpool play, but I really struggle with that song since the Hillsborough disaster. I can barely get through it without crying. It’s a beautiful piece of work. But for me, now – and I go with my dad who’s eighty years old, and we both sing it – it just comes with a little history. I can’t quite shift it – do you know what I mean? Hopefully one day justice will be done, and I’ll be able to shift it.
GUTFIRE!: Would you mind giving us your best “GUTFIRE!?”
TIM: Ok. We’re gonna try and say it all together. On three. One, two, three…
WM: GUTFIRE!
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