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Maxïmo Park
HQ: Newcastle, EnglandNOW PLAYING: Our Earthly Pleasures (WARP) WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW 'EM: Nervy keyboard-pop that raises your IQ and makes you move your feet at the same time. YOU LIKE? YOU'LL LIKE: Futureheads / Devo / Blur Maxïmo Park vocalist Paul Smith is in a jovial mood when AP reaches him as he's wandering through the same Paris cemetery where the authors Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde are buried. Strange? Hardly. Fresh off watching an English football game in a pub, Smith is bubbling over with excitement for his quintet's new album, Our Earthly Pleasures. Light years beyond the band's scrappy, spiky 2005 debut, A Certain Trigger, Pleasures booms with herky-jerky synthpop ("Our Velocity"), throttling power-pop ("By The Monument") and manic prog-punk ("The Unshockable"). And while its lyrics deserve good, old-fashioned English 101 analysis, Pleasures reflects Maxïmo Park's desire to, well, rock out as much as possible. Some credit goes to producer Gil Norton (Foo Fighters, Pixies) for helping the band evolve. In particular, Norton impressed Maxïmo Park with infectious enthusiasm-he even visited the band in their north England hometown for pre-production-and mad arrangement skills. "[Pleasures] is slightly more sophisticated, in a non-crappy sense," Smith says. "We've developed our ideas. They're still pop songs with choruses, but it's kind of rocking without it being too rock-spelled r-a-w-k. We're trying to find a new spelling [for rock]; I don't know what it could be." If anyone could dream up a new word, it's Smith: He's a former art teacher with a degree in linguistics and art history who earned a master's degree in American History by writing a dissertation on the Def Jux record label (El-P, Aesop Rock). In fact, he was convinced he couldn't sing until drummer Tom English's then-girlfriend heard Smith singing Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" in a bar in 2003. "I attribute some of the reasons why people like our band to the fact that I wasn't in a band for ages," Smith explains. "I just decided to start singing when somebody asked me to, rather than having some burning desire to be a star, or some fragile part of me inside needed somebody to look at me onstage. I thought, 'If I express myself honestly, then people will believe it, and it'll be like the music I listen to.'" Indeed, the members of Maxïmo Park don't sit around all day only listening to, say, the Futureheads-whom the band are often compared, largely thanks to the Trigger hit "Apply Some Pressure." (Actually, Smith is more of a Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Smog fan.) Thankfully, Pleasures should help Maxïmo Park shed its one-dimensional "post-" and "art-punk" reputation. "A lot of people didn't really get the beauty in our records and the romance that was always there, or the thoughtful aspect of it," Smith says. "They're not little exercises that are very clever and whatever. "There's something very genuine about our music. I just want to express myself and know that what we've done is something I can live with for the rest of my life. I couldn't live with the spirit being taken out of our songs. That would totally kill me." -Annie Zaleski UNDER THE INFLUENCE What album's had the greatest influence on you? "It's ANY OTHER CITY, an obscure album by LIFE WITHOUT BUILDINGS," says Maxïmo Park frontman Paul Smith. "The music is otherworldly. I put it on and play it until I feel better. Sue Tompkins' voice is doing something entirely odd; the guitars are really melodic but still driving." ALT Click HERE for the offical AP review of Our Earthly Pleasures. Label Website: http://www.warprecords.com |
