They thrive on big cities – and a little bit of adversity. After parting company with their record label, Director have bounced back with apparent ease, writes KEVIN COURTNEY.
THERE ARE different ways of handling a downturn in fortunes. You can be Mr Pitiful, wailing and gnashing your teeth and railing against cruel fate, or you can carry on with poker-faced determination, seemingly indifferent to your straitened circumstances.
For a band that recently lost their major label record deal, Director seem to radiate a Zen-like calm and a complete absence of panic. Any other band facing into an uncertain future with no guarantee of continued success might appear a bit fidgety. But singer Michael Moloney and guitarist Eoin Aherne look relaxed to the point of indifference. Record company, shmecord company – what’s the big deal?
The Malahide quartet, though, are past masters at cold, clinical detachment. their debut album, We Thrive on Big Cities, has that clipped, emotional blankness previously perfected by the likes of Wire. Released in 2006 on Atlantic, We Thriveestablished Director as favourites on the Irish music scene, and helped gain them prestige support slots in the UK for Hard-Fi and The Fratellis.
With music school graduate Moloney writing the songs, Director went for a “clean, precise, disinfected” pop sound, low on emotion but high on catchy hooks and niggling melodies. The album wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it was enough to earn it a half-year residency in the Irish charts, a Choice Music Prize nomination, and a Best New Band award at the Meteors.
But then, just as they were getting ready to work on the follow-up, Director departed Atlantic as part of a cost-cutting purge. Was it a case of goodbye champagne and limos, hello cider and CIE? Er, not exactly. Apart from forgoing a video for their last single, Aherne says little has changed in Director-land.
“We had the deal,” he says, “but we were still playing small gigs and trying to build a fanbase, and I think we were still very much in touch with reality. Being signed to a big label, unless you’re Lady GaGa or some other stratospheric thing, it’s not exactly a whirlwind. You can’t just toss off a couple of chords, send it to the label and they’ll send you back an amazing album. You still have to rehearse all the time, you still have to write the songs and record them and mix them. All they can do is pay for it. That’s all they can do.”
Still, when Atlantic offered them the best producers that money could buy, Director demurred and opted to produce their debut album themselves. In hindsight, they’d have preferred the resulting album to have been a bit “bigger and rockier” while keeping its arty aloofness.
“We were at a couple of cross-directions where we wanted a dry, 1970s, crisp drum sound,” says Moloney, “but also we wanted it to sound big, so I guess we weren’t exactly sure what we wanted. And we were feeling our way around a bit, and I guess learning a lot.”
Getting signed to Atlantic didn’t open the doors to a glitzy, glamorous life, says Aherne, but it did give them a massive boost of confidence and bolstered their faith in their supremely detached art-rock vision.
Ironically, for their second album, I'll Wait for Sound(recorded on their own Crapshoot Economics label), the band opted to secure the services of a top producer, decamping to Los Angeles to record with Brad Wood. With a CV that includes Smashing Pumpkins and Placebo, Wood can't have come too cheap, but Director's success so far has given them the means to take control of the next step in their career. No surprise to find that these geeky-looking guys are also savvy and businesslike in their approach to the industry.
They also felt the time was right to change the android-like emotional tone and go for a bigger, warmer musical feel. On We Thrive in Big Cities, the band went for mathematical precision – every note had to fit right and be played correctly. On I'll Wait for Sound, however, they've gone for something a little less rigid.
“I think we just changed, ourselves, as musicians and people, and I think it’s just a natural reflection of that,” says Moloney. “There wasn’t a lot of messiness going on in the first album, and that was always the way we wanted to do it. I don’t know whether it worked or not. I guess it’s more a way of thinking about it. We’ve never been much for wigging out or jamming.
“We’ve always been, if you’re going to do something, you have to have a reason why you’re doing it, otherwise don’t do it. We were trying to keep it pretty lean.”
Perhaps that all sounds arty-farty to your average guitar-grinding rocker. But to Moloney, a former student of classical composition, and his college-educated bandmates, it’s just the usual lateral way of thinking about rock’n’roll. He talks about taking a “structural, ground-up” approach to songwriting, and dismisses much rock writing as little more than a “collage of musical influences”.
There did come a point during the writing and rehearsals for the new album, however, where the lads had to put their foot down and say the hell with art, let’s just finish the damn song.
“We had a lot of songs,” Moloney says, “and we were spread a bit thin – there were good ideas there, but a lot of filler in between, so we decided we’d stick with just one song until we were totally happy with it.”
Where the first album thrived on big cities, I'll Wait for Soundblossomed when the band moved to a farmhouse in Co Leitrim. Armed with 10 songs they were more than happy with, the lads then spent seven weeks at producer Wood's home studio.
“I feel an eerie, ominous satisfaction, where I’m really happy with the album, but I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” says Moloney. Whatever comes next, you can be sure Director will meet it with suitably inscrutable cool.
I'll Wait for Soundis out today on Crapshoot Economics
