With their debut album ‘Trees Dream in Algebra’, a perfect and assured amalgam of radio-friendly pop and skewed post-rock, Dublin band Codes are preparing to take on the world – and their critics
IN RECESSIONARY TIMES, with record labels taking a very long and a very hard look at any new band’s record sales potential before signing them up, new Dublin band Codes took the upside-down approach. They self-financed their debut album and then presented the finished copy to a record company.
“We worked out that if we gave a label the finished product, they wouldn’t have as many costs as they would have with putting a band in the studio and paying for the recording costs,” says the lead singer, Darragh Anderson. “There was also the fact that we didn’t really fancy a label telling us to change this or change that. We made the album we wanted to make without any outside interference.”
The album, Trees Dream In Algebra, is one of the most assured and accomplished Irish debut albums of the past decade. Shot through with glossy synth pop which is leavened by some deft cinematic touches and the odd classical motif, Trees Dream is that rarest of beasts: an Irish album that will get radio play at both ends of the schedule and the very real possibility that this will chart in a number of bigger territories. A top 10 UK single by this time next year? You'd be a fool to bet against it.
Just take a cursory listen to one of the many stand-out tracks, You Are Here, and what you're hearing is (although they will chase me down the street with sharpened knives for saying it) the sound of Kevin Shields guesting on an A-Ha single. And it's that perfect amalgam of radio-friendly pop and skewed post-rock (Keane meet Sigur Rós for peace talks) that informs almost everything here.
MAINLY FROMBallyfermot in Dublin and all in their early 20s, the four-piece band have all been in an assortment of local bands before but it's only with Codes that they really found a common purpose.
“Nothing really felt right before,” says Anderson. “But with this band and the way we went about recording the album ourselves, we have something we are proud to stand over. We do know that as a new band we will get described in terms of other more established bands, but we’re prepared for that”.
Influence-wise, Anderson and the band’s bass and synth player, Eoin Stephens, easily reel off a top-notch list of acts: “At one end it would be Radiohead, then the pop sensibility of The Beach Boys and The Beatles and then on to cinematic stuff such as Sigur Rós.”
What moves Codes away from just being a sum of their influences, though, is Anderson’s deft songwriting and his insistence on embracing a melody rather than ploughing straight through it – as many of his “cred” contemporaries still do, bewilderingly.
Sounding like a soundtrack, it's no surprise to hear Codes talk about how that particular genre of composition impacts on their own work. "I love the work of soundtrack artists such as Ennio Morricone and Murray Gold [the musical director of the Dr WhoTV series] and we wanted to this to have that sort of feel. There's no silence anywhere on the album – to give it that soundtrack feel. We wanted big songs with big arrangements and also to combine all the different elements and textures together so that the album sounds like a complete work," says Anderson.
For Stephens there was a surprise when they listened to the first playback of the completed work: “It sounded a lot poppier than we had imagined it,” he says. “But you also have the dissonance and the differing time signatures in there too – but never to the extent that it makes it an alienating listening experience.”
WHEN THEY RECORDEDthe album last year in the UK with the Manic Street Preachers producer, Greg Haver, they were aware that the complex arrangements they were putting down would have to be played live, so they pulled back a bit on the studio trickery.
“Now, when we play them live, we have a standard drums, bass and guitar line-up,” says Stephens, “but we all also have synths on stage so what you hear is really live, nothing is sequenced.”
Late last year, Codes had their biggest live audience when they were asked to support the Keane show at the O2 in Dublin. “Going from playing to a few hundred people to 11,000-odd people was daunting but it was interesting to see how a band operates on that scale,” says Anderson.
Given that the album is just so good and that they self-financed the whole thing, the band are already prepared for the inevitable bitching and sniping from the claustrophobic Dublin music scene. “We just sort of know that some people won’t like us because they will think we’re too commercial,” says Anderson.
“We also know we will be accused of imitating other bands or jumping on a bandwagon – but if you’re the sort of band who do that, what usually happens is you catch only the tail-end of that scene and you find that there are already 20 bands there already doing it better than you.”
“What I’m proudest of about all this is that we put our money where our mouth was when it came to making the album,” says Anderson. “And then we had this take-it-or-leave-it approach when it came to shopping it around the labels. We found the right label in EMI – they get the music, and they get us. It’s all up to us from now on”.
Trees Dream In Algebra is on release.
