It Either Gets Better Or It Doesn't: FIDLAR Ride Again With 'Too'
Friday, 04 September 2015
Written by Huw Baines
Illustration: Tom Norton
The wheels might fall off at any moment. Things shake and roll before crashing to an unexpected halt. There’s almost a pause for breath, but then it starts again. FIDLAR’s first record was nothing if not honest about its intentions. Fuck it, dog. Life’s a risk.
The second time around, the risks are different. ‘Too’, which is out this week on Wichita, finds the quartet sinking into different elements of the punk landscape, with a helping hand from Jay Joyce. Not only does this represent the first time the quartet have worked with a producer, the record was also laid down in Nashville, lending a new air to what remains a very LA sound.
Zac Carper, too, is in a different place. FIDLAR’s party first, ask questions later aesthetic is the first thing many people associate with them, but his songs on ‘Too’ untangle problems without getting fucked up in the process. They are deadly serious, frank discussions of a bleak time in his life that just happen to be laden with hooks.
Carper’s long-time heroin addiction and alcoholism almost killed him, pushed him into rehab on multiple occasions and came close to snapping the band in two. “Drown all the voices that are stuck in my head,” he murmurs on Overdose. “I tried to do the therapy but that didn’t work for me. Really gonna try not to overdose again.”
“It’s trying to deal with all the things that we were trying to deal with before,” he said during a brief London stopover. “The songs that I wrote on the record were about trying to deal with them without drugs and alcohol, you know? It’s a different thing.
“When something like the party lifestyle, or whatever, becomes the norm that’s when shit gets boring. It’s important to challenge yourself, especially when it comes to music and stuff like that. It’s so easy to keep doing the same thing over and over again.”
‘Too’ doesn’t dispense with the velocity of their debut as much as reshape it. FIDLAR’s roots as a grimy, garage-rooted punk band are still to the fore, but there is an almost playful edge to some of the decisions made, whether that’s the toy piano that drops in for the chorus of 40oz. On Repeat or the drawled coda to the swampy blues of Punks, which slides into the breezy West Coast with a “relationships are fucking wack”.
Sober, meanwhile, possesses an almost Devo air of manic energy. As top halfs go, this is not a stall out, sit back sort of thing and, as a whole, this is an album that will provoke those who wanted the band to continue their punishing first album excess. It reflects a change in process, with a few of their DIY roles falling by the wayside as Joyce enabled them to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of writing and playing, rather than the literal nuts and bolts of putting together an album.
“The first record was done in my fucking bedroom,” Carper said. “We had the shittiest, lowest quality gear. I would say about 90% of the guitar tones and 100% of the vocals were recorded on a $20 fucking pre-amp. There was a lot of fixing in the mixing process. It was rad to go in and be a musician instead of being a producer and engineer.
“We met with three different producers and Jay just really stood out. He really liked the old stuff, but he’s just a weirdo. The other people were weird in their own ways, but there was something that caught our attention with him. The guy’s a total eccentric. Jay was the one that we knew the least. The most outside person.”
Tracked live over the course of two weeks, with maybe a couple of days off here and there, the momentum on ‘Too’ is all over the place. It’s less of a straight ahead record, more one that shoots off on tangents. In certain instances, at least, Joyce had the band’s on-it-from-minute-one live show etched onto the back of his eyelids, even if Carper didn’t.
“There was this one song that we’d been playing for a while,” he said. “We had a demo of it from earlier and I wanted it to sound similar, just better. But that’s not how we played it live. It was this moment where we kept playing it and it kept being: ‘No, I want it to sound like this.’ Jay was like: ‘But it’s losing its power.’ The energy of it live was so rad that he wanted to capture it.
“I kept fighting about that, but after the second day of talking about it, I was like: ‘You know what? You just gotta let go.’ That was one of the big things I learned through the process. This guy is a producer. He produces bands. We shouldn’t listen to everything he says but, like, let him produce. It’s what he’s getting paid for.”
Change is natural. People don’t always like it, but it happens. On their second album FIDLAR wear elements of surf and radio pop like a good LA band should, like they once wore the burn-out-don’t-fade away badge of the city’s hardcore scene.
“It’s just in us. We just don’t even realise it. That’s like our classic rock,” Carper said. “That’s in our blood. The older generation, their thing was like the Beatles or the Stones. But, we’re all either born in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. That’s just in us. There’s definitely been a shift. What it is is learning how to do this again. It feels like a natural progression of the band. It either gets better or it doesn’t.”
Fidlar Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Tue November 10 2015 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol
Wed November 11 2015 - MANCHESTER Ritz
Thu November 12 2015 - GLASGOW Glasgow Garage
Sat November 14 2015 - LONDON THE FORUM
Sun November 15 2015 - BIRMINGHAM Institute
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