Literature is a Philadelphia-based jangle-pop outfit consisting of Kevin Attics, Nathaniel Cardaci, Seth Whaland and Chris Schackerman. In 2012, they released their first album “Arab Spring”, and endearingly lo-fi mix of jittery anxiety and sugary pop songcraft.
This year the band returned with their sophomore album “Chorus”, for which they experimented in the studio with softer sounds and textures with the same immediacy and thrills of their previous work. Brimming with charm and shimmering melodies, “Chorus” is a heart-racing yet comfortably familiar set of power pop tunes.
Maintaining a frantic, breakneck pace in their music, yet somehow never losing their laid-back cool and winking sense of humor, Literature are one of today’s most promising up-and-coming rock acts.
Earlier this week we spoke to Kevin Attics about the deliberately archaic recording methods used on the new album, their place in the musical community and the many trials of being a lesser-known band on a nationwide tour.
Dailyer: Alright. Could you tell us a little bit about the band? You guys are from Philadelphia, right?
Kevin: The band’s headquarters is currently in Philly but we began as a band in Austin, Texas. Austin is a bit of a cultural oasis in the midst of a vast desert, so we kind of wanted to go to an area that was closer to major cities so that we could tour up and down and immerse ourselves in more of the East Coast culture.
Dailyer: Let’s talk about the new album. Your first album has more of a lo-fi recording sound, whereas “Chorus” is a much more carefully polished record.
Kevin: Yeah, that was a conscious decision. We toured the songs on the first record for years and years so we knew them in a live context a lot more, and that record was trying to capture lightning in a bottle. With the new record, we knew early on that we wanted a more careful and more orchestrated kind of album, to focus on songwriting and use the studio to its fullest effect and immerse ourselves in it.
Dailyer: What were some of the challenges of this new approach compared to recording “Arab Spring”?
Kevin: Well, the challenges on this one were mostly ones we set up for ourselves. [laughs]
There are kind of forgotten analog effects from the sixties and early seventies that we wanted to experiment with. Only problem is, they’re forgotten for a reason. They’re very difficult to achieve and there are some lovely digital approximations of almost all of them. An example is automatic double tracking, which is really easy to do on a computer or with a delay pedal, but we decided to do the old-fashioned version where you actually synchronize two tape players and delay one slightly. So instead of taking a few seconds to set up something like that we would end up taking an hour or two.
Dailyer: But you feel like that approach fit the vibe of the album more?
Kevin: Definitely. We’re all big record-heads and we grew up with these records where we hear these effects and we wanted to learn where they came from and how they’re actually achieved, like what is actually happening with these effects. For instance, when you just turn on a flanger pedal, you can’t see what’s really going on. There’s a thing that happens where the two reels are going together and when you touch one, the sound ends, essentially. When you’re actually touching the tape you can feel what’s happening and you can control it better. What I’m trying to say is that you understand what flanging is after you do that, whereas if you just turn on a flanger pedal it’s like “Oh, I know what that sound is,” but you don’t know what exactly is happening to make that, or what it’s trying to approximate. So we wanted to know where these sounds were coming from going forward into future recordings. That was one of our big goals for the album.
Dailyer: The song “Tie Die (Your Life)” was released as a single prior to the album coming out, but the single version was a different version of lower recording quality. Did you have any particular goals for that track in recording the new version for the album?
Kevin: I think that actually there wasn’t a preconceived goal with re-recording “Tie Dye”. We were so deep into the recording of the record that there was a point where we were all listening to the mixes and we couldn’t even tell the difference between the two of them. People would remark on the difference between them, that one was so much more lo-fidelity and so much more hi-fidelity, but there was really a point where our heads were so deep into recording the record that we honestly felt like they sounded the same.
Dailyer: They sound pretty different to me.
Kevin: Well, yeah, they sound different now that we’re out of the recording process. [laughs]
Dailyer: Tell us a little about your songwriting process. Is it collaborative with the whole band or is there one person who brings most of the ideas and lyrics?
Kevin: Nathaniel and I typically will come up with the chords and Nathaniel often writes the lyrics as well. It’s usually about a 50/50 collaboration on that, then we take it to the full band and it gets filtered through everybody and everyone contributes. I think it’s a pretty democratic thing, it’s not just one guy’s ego project. It’s refreshing but also frustrating at the same time because it would be easier if someone was like “Do this, this and this” all the time, but I don’t think the songs would be as good.
Dailyer: So you guys are a little over halfway through a country-wide tour now, right?
Kevin: Yeah.
Dailyer: Have you ever toured for this long? Has it been at all difficult?
Kevin: This has been the longest tour we’ve ever been on. It’s been difficult, but strangely, I feel like since we all know the length of the tour, things that on previous tours that would have caused us to blow up at each other just make us say “Okay, we have to keep the band together for 30 more days, let’s be rational about this.” We’ve come through a lot of hardship on this tour, we had our van broken into, a few of us had our credit cards stolen. Those things are seemingly very difficult but I feel like we’ve been so in lockstep with one another that we’ve all been a safety net for one another. It’s been pretty good.
Dailyer: You still on tour with White Fang?
Kevin: No, we only did two shows with White Fang. Those guys are great. We partied with them each time we played with them, as I recall.
Dailyer: How did you end up playing shows with them?
Kevin: I don’t know how that happened, exactly. I think one show was purposefully booked with them in Boise and then they just kind of jumped on for another show. Now we’re all thick as thieves, as it were.
Dailyer: Any other crazy tour stories besides White Fang and van robbery?
Kevin: The fact that we’re on tour is pretty crazy to us. [laughs]
Dailyer: I feel like the kind of upbeat guitar pop that you guys make is something that’s not really done as much lately. Most bands seem to go for kind of a chilled-out reverby sound or a harsh post-punk kind of thing. Is your music kind of a reaction against these trends?
Kevin: We all like current music, but as far as the zeitgeist goes, we’re not really reacting against it. We have a big net for music we like, and there are things we do and don’t like, but it’s never like “This shitty modern music is too chill, we need to write the fastest, most upbeat song in the world!” [laughs] We like a lot of old bands a lot of new bands, but we’re not really angry at these new bands or trying to thrash them with our upbeat power pop or anything. We just do what we do.
Dailyer: You guys named your band Literature. I assume you guys must like reading. Do you have a favorite author?
Kevin: I like magical realist novelists like Julio Cortázar. We all have different tastes. Everyone’s always reading their books in the van and stuff. So yeah, we like reading.
Dailyer: What kind of music have you guys been listening to recently?
Kevin: There’s this band called Future Punx we’ve been listening to. They only have two songs out, and one of them is called “999”. It’s like this modern Zolo masterpiece, it’s so good and so catchy. We just got a tape player in the car, and when we were in Portland we grabbed a couple Mississippi Records compilations we’ve been listening to a lot. Seth foolishly picked up a Neil Diamond tape just to make us mad and that made it to the bottom of the van floor pretty quickly. A lot of us have tried to stomp on it.
