What was the driving force behind such a lateral shift?
With this album we just had a lot more time and money and resources to execute the album we envisioned. We never really ascribed to any definite lo-fi aesthetic; we always wanted to make an album where you could hear these individual sounds that had taken a long time to craft, it just took a lot more effort to make them come out. This album’s just as layered as the last one but you can hear everything more clearly because of the use of compression. And a good mixing board and good mixing engineer. It was our intention to have an album that was a lot dryer than the last album, that had fewer vocals and a more direct lead vocal. More direct, simple songs – more pop oriented. We never set out to make All Hour Cymbals Pt 2; we’d been touring those songs for a year so we had no interest in doing stuff that was really that similar. If you play them back-to-back then I’m sure you’ll still trace some similarities, but the definite intention was to do something as different as possible without
