Subba chats with Fang Island’s guitarist Jason Bartell about hipsters, hype, and how kids say the darndest things.
“Hey Jason, is now a good time to talk?”
“Hang on a second…”
The phone goes silent.
“Jason?”.
Oh dear I think, pondering the fragility of the transatlantic phone connection.
“Hey, sorry. I was just trying to get comfortable. I’m in the back of our tour van” comes a cheery voice down the other end of the line.
My relief is palpable; I’m on the phone with Jason Bartell, one of three guitarists in New York via Providence band Fang Island. Not only are the band creating all sorts of waves over the pond garnering all sorts of praise from US indie tastemaker websites like Pitchfork Media and Stereogum, they were also the ones everyone was talking about at this year‘s SXSW festival. Getting an interview with Fang Island is somewhat of an exclusive given the fact that this is one of their first ever UK interviews, they haven’t even played a gig in the UK and that they’re eponymous debut album doesn’t come out here until next month.
The band formed at the Rhode Island School of Design whose previous musical alumni includes the likes of the Talking Heads, Les Savy Fav and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, so they‘re in good company. Fang Island started as an art project between friends who had a shared love for the Smashing Pumpkins and classic rock. “We’d always freak over anything with a harmonized guitar in it, we listened to a lot of Boston, things like that. It was just this ear candy we’d freak out over, anything that was really positive and harmony driven.” explains Jason.
Positive and harmony driven are also terms that could be applied to Fang Island’s music; their fun, frenzied and often very noisy sound is pitched somewhere between the indie pop of Cap’n Jazz and the anthemic indie rock of Weezer. “I’ve told many interviewers about how Weezer was pretty much one of our primary influences and they’re like ‘Eh? I don’t get it. I don’t hear that’” explains Jason. Fans of Pinkerton and the Blue album will rejoice at the glorious riffage on Fang Island self-titled new album particularly on tracks like ‘Careful Crossers’ and ‘Treeton’.
I start by asking Jason about the hype which now surrounds the band and whether it translates much into real life?
“It’s been really interesting trying to figure out what it means because I still don’t really know. It would be foolish to say it probably had no impact; it probably had a large impact on the beginning of this momentum that we’re trying to build and maintain but I think it’s good to take it with a grain of salt in terms of like giving credit to its importance and kind of relying on that. The internet thing is weird because it’s intangible but in a way I guess it’s kind of crucial.” he explains.
Given the amount of coverage the band have received on the internet the temptation must be there to read the reviews and he freely admits that he used to frequently check Fang Island’s twitter page.
“I used to swear that I’d never go on twitter but then three months later I was checking it every day. You get a funny little personal insight into people’s reviews. On twitter anyone can write a review even if it’s just what he or she is thinking at that moment about your record. You’d see things like some dude saying ‘Hey listen to their song ‘Daisy’ it sucks’ or something like that. I get a kick out of that sort of stuff because I treat good reviews identically to bad reviews, it’s just kind of fun to think that they’re listening at all and that they sort of care even the slightest bit to say anything.” says Jason.
Talk then turns to a discussion about the meaning and implications of the term ‘hipster’ (tongue in cheek it must be said), a term frequently applied to Fang Island by internet armchair critics.
“The word itself is ridiculous. I live in New York and it’s a very omnipotent force there. The funniest argument you can have is that a person who doesn’t think they’re a hipster is a hipster. It’s just like boring, the best way I can describe it is boring. It doesn’t mean anything and people overuse it. I don’t get offended by it all because it doesn’t mean anything at all, it’s just funny.” Another band that often gets tagged as hipsters are Yeasayer whose singer Chris Keating, oddly enough lives in the same apartment block as Jason. “We’re buds, he lives upstairs from me in New York and we hang out all the time…he’s got crazy stories, there’s something about him and airplanes, I’ve only ridden on a couple of planes in my life, but every time that guy rides on planes something insane happens, like he sat next to Al Gore on airplane, it’s always crazy shit like that.”
A quick search of the name Fang Island on youtube will bring up an intriguing video of the band playing to a classroom full of smiley, bouncy and slightly confused kids, I ask how the classroom gig came about?
“Our good friend Alex started working at a kindergarten in Providence as a teaching assistant during the day, he just brought it up and it happened literally in the space of a couple of hours. He has a really good rapport with the kids and thought that our music would go down really well with them and that it would be a fun thing to do. It was great we stayed at the school for an hour and played a half hour set and had this adorable question and answer session. They’d asked the cutest, weirdest questions. You couldn’t even make it up, one of the kids asked me if I was friends with the drummer. I was like: ‘That guy? The one who is sitting over there? Yeah, we’re friends’. I think they thought we’d like flew in from different planets on that day and hadn‘t met each other before, it was just weird.” explains Jason.
One of the defining features of their new album is the complex and slightly skittish structure of the music; I ask Jason whether it was difficult to write?
“A lot of the song writing is very stream of consciousness which makes it easier in that it comes out easier but it’s not always easy to access the stream of consciousness state of mind. In terms of the technical side, we consciously tried to avoid certain things like the verse/chorus song structure and repetition. The whole linear thing was a big element early on in the band, writing riff after riff that like kept changing and never went back to anyone thing. It was like a big deal when we wrote a song with a riff that referenced something earlier in the song, that was a big breakthrough for us.”
Whilst we talked the band were on route to a gig in Baltimore that night as part of their first ever headline tour, I asked Jason how the tour had been going?
“We’re still effectively starting out even though we’ve been a band for five years. We’re doing a lot of firsts; this is our first full American tour and the second half of it is our first headlining tour, so that’s new for us. I was actually pretty concerned about how that was going to go, the shows are small but I’ve been like pretty pleasantly surprised about the response we’re getting. If we just played to three people, which we still do, and those three people are still into them I’m still totally psyched. I’m more worried about percentages of people who like it.”
When talk turns to the future, Jason enthuses about the band’s forthcoming tour with the Flaming Lips and I ask about whether their rider requirements will change much which leads to a story about Van Halen and their dislike for yellow M & M’s but that’s a tale for another day.
Having run out of questions and being slightly mindful of the cost of calling a mobile phone in Baltimore from London I try to round things off by asking Jason if he’d heard any good jokes recently. He ponders for a bit before replying “I’m pretty bad at jokes actually. There’s this guy in Portland who came to our show, he looked like one of those twenty-something guys who could be homeless or a drunk or a genius. He was like walking around with all these rubber ducks attached to his belt. He talked to our guitarist Nick for a while and he told how he had over 70 joke books published so we’ve had some of his totally mad joke books littering our tour bus lately, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. There’s lots about Reagan for some reason, he’s obsessed with Reagan, I don’t know, none of these are jokes. I guess I kind of failed the question. I’m not like a joke kind of guy.”
And it’s at this point that our interview ended, with a slightly unfair and an entirely unrepresentative quote. Jason had a million amusing anecdotes to tell and perhaps when Fang Island become as big as they deserve to be we’ll have the time and space to feature the rest of the interview on the site. Fang Island many not be a UK household name yet but give it a couple of months and they be bigger than the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fang Island’s eponymous new album is out on July 5th on Sargent House. myspace.com/fangisland Cheers to Nina Finnerud for sorting out the interview.
Baffled And Beat Dear God... It's like someone gave Bjork a disco Biscuit and set her free at Altamont... Someone get me me raving trousers... Sh*t is going down... ...read album review
