Find A Doorway: William DuVall On The Weird World Of Giraffe Tongue Orchestra

Photo: Johnny Buzzerio

“Can’t we at least put ‘Orchestra’ at the end? Y’know, class it up a bit? If it’s got ‘Orchestra’ in it, it must have some sort of substance. Not just all this silliness.”

William DuVall speaks of silliness while clad in a leather jacket, staunchly refusing to break a single bead of sweat in 30°C sunshine. Bring on the heat, motherfucker.

But what does this achingly cool man, who sings for Alice in Chains as a day job, know of silliness? Well, seeing as his latest band stumbled across their name after guitarist Brent Hinds fed some bananas to a giraffe, he actually knows a fair bit. But Giraffe Tongue Orchestra are silly in title only. Musically, this is serious business.

Comprising DuVall on vocals and Hinds on guitar, the band is fleshed out by another six stringer in Ben Weinman, Pete Griffin on bass and drummer Thomas Pridgen. We’ll get into what they sound like a bit later on – it’s a job and a half to explain – but it’s safe to say that Giraffe Tongue Orchestra have been damned with the ‘supergroup’ label.

Suddenly Angels & Airwaves, Prophets of Rage and Hollywood Vampires flicker before your eyes, burning everything you love. But it’s OK. DuVall’s comrades – Weinman’s from Dillinger Escape Plan, Hinds is 1/4 of Mastodon, Griffin plays bass for imaginary metallers Dethklok and Pridgen drummed for the Mars Volta – aren’t the ego-driven types. They just want to make great rock music. No clashes, no chest-beating. Just music. 

“I talked to Ben and we very quickly arrived at what we didn’t want this thing to be,” DuVall says of the band’s embryonic stages. “We didn’t want it to be this free-for-all, all-star thing where it’s all like: ‘Let’s get this guy singing on this song, then this guy singing on that song.’ We wanted it to be a band. A gang. Something people can really latch onto and believe in; something we can believe in. We wanted to make that statement musically, too.”

And that statement really is one from a real band. Giraffe Tongue Orchestra has been on the backburner for six or seven years, with what DuVall describes as rudimentary demos from Weinman and Hinds eventually getting swept up as the band’s core members were pulled back into their whirlwinds, schedule-wise. Mastodon, Dillinger Escape Plan and Alice In Chains are all massive in their respective fields and, in DuVall’s case, the task at hand included carrying on the legacy of the late Layne Staley by bringing a seminal group into the 21st century with tours supporting ‘Black Gives Way To Blue’ and ‘The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here’.

Therefore, Giraffe Tongue Orchestra spending some time on the bench made sense. During that lay off we also got Dillinger Escape Plan’s ‘One Of Us Is The Killer’ and Mastodon’s double-headed, pop-laden assault of ‘The Hunter’ and ‘Once More Round The Sun’. But a chance encounter in the supermarket – of course it was in the supermarket – led to Hinds reconnecting with DuVall. A phone call to Weinman later and the trio were seeing where this Giraffe Tongue Orchestra business was at.

“I asked Ben to send some examples of the music,” DuVall clarifies. “By then, he’d already gone into the studio with Brent, Tom and Pete to record the finished, complete instrumental tracks you hear on the album today. So when I got that load of music, I was just like: ‘Woah, OK…there’s definitely been some development, where can I get a word in edgeways? Where can I build my little house in this sonic landscape?’ I tackled them one by one and, lo and behold, we have this 10 song album.”

Giraffe Tongue Orchestra’s debut LP, ‘Broken Lines’, is something of an oddity. Flavours of each members’ bands are thrown in here and there, one never overpowering the other. It’s got too many bells, whistles and razorblades to simply be dubbed the work of a rock band. They’re a metal band but not quite. Funky territory is traversed on Blood Moon, too, while Everyone Gets Everything They Really Want is what disco would sound like in 2016 if disco were actually good. There’s a ballad, All We Have Is Now, and it’s not shit. The conduit for all of this is DuVall, who holds your hand and promises not to let go as you’re dragged through a genre-smashing freakshow.

“I wasn’t worried about this sounding like anything I’ve done before, because the music itself is its own thing,” DuVall points out. “It was just about deciding what I wanted to say over this music and finding the doorway in – that’s always my thing, finding the doorway. So on a gnarly song like Crucifixion, you might have to explore a little more to find the doorway, y’know? But with some of the more straightforward songs, it might not be as hard to find a way in in terms of spatial awareness. But you’ve still got to find a doorway in terms of what you want to say.”

The doorways, it seems, were largely kept under lock and key. Confessing that he had to “throw out the rock songwriting handbook” for ‘Broken Lines’, DuVall approached the record as if he were penning a Broadway musical. Well, not exactly. He’s not Andrew Lloyd Webber, but DuVall’s appreciation of musical theatre’s chaotic composition makes for an interesting comparative hop-scotch.

“Broadway is almost like cartoon music,” he says. “And cartoon music and carnival music is some of the most bitchin’ music ever. It’s so extreme even though it’s applied to this super commercial, mass consumption thing. With stage plays, it’s often the melody, lyrics and narrative that smooth it off. It gives audiences a story to hold on to, so I wanted to be like that. In the gnarlier songs, I wanted to be the life raft that people can cling to and navigate through the choppy water.”

The biggest challenge to that balance arrives with the album’s hulking title track. It’s a progressive, obtuse beast – even on a record this varied, it stands out – that sums up Giraffe Tongue Orchestra’s uncompromising ability to flit through genres over its near-six minute run-time. It almost ran DuVall’s creativity into the ground.

“I put off writing for the title track for as long as I could,” the singer admits, claiming it would’ve been “just fine” as a closing instrumental track for the record. “I love the way it’s kind of a 3/4 thing – the actual working title was 3/4 – but there’s so much going on in that waltz-time beat and the way it jerks you around all the time. Finding that particular doorway was tougher.

“I just said to myself: ‘I’m gonna get in the car, play this song, drive and not come back until I’ve found the doorway.’ That’s how stark it got. We were coming up on production deadlines and we wanted to turn this thing in on time and give it the shot and promotional due it deserved, so I just had to get really hard on myself until I found that chant: 'Blown out, blissed out, blacked out, ran until I fell out.’ And I was like, that’s the doorway! I drove round for a solid hour and a half or so, just trying to figure out what to do rhythmically.”

Satisfied with his doorway-busting activity of late, DuVall signs off before a Giraffe Tongue Orchestra press conference, and a night watching the Dillinger Escape Plan play to a pub filled with 150 people (yes, really), by summing up ‘Broken Lines’ in the most succinct of ways: “It’s an eclectic record. It’s about as progressive as progressive gets, but also with these really wonderful, more straightforward moments. We’re so proud of it.”

Put that on the sleeve sticker, because Giraffe Tongue Orchestra deserve to be heard. Not because it’s the work of three high-profile musicians, nor because it’s gonna be ‘the next big thing’ etc etc etc. It deserves to be heard because it fucking rips. Their live debut at Reading Festival was an absolute treat and found all members in their element, not restrained by the stoic power of Mastodon or the batshit madness of Dillinger. Who knows when their paths will cross again? Given their insane schedules, nobody can be sure. Be a part of this while you have the chance.

'Broken Lines' is out on September 23.

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