Austin and London – Indie folk has always been a slippery label for me. I understand the desire to connect with an older musical tradition; it’s the execution that’s been throwing me off. Good songwriting, passionate performance, crooning backup vocals, banjo shredding, etc., seems to sacrifice the hardship it wants to reproduce. Which is fine, except that pop music is deeply tied up in the stories told about it. Would Justin Vernon be a Grammy-validated artist absent the legend of an album produced in the seclusion of deep woods, log cabin, and profound heartbreak? Or the endurance of the blues motivated in part by the slummy innovation of beer-bottle slide guitar. These stories attract you with their visceral impressiveness. When the story is absent or faked, it’s kind of a letdown.
So, I brought that skepticism when I first listened to Narrow Plains, a new band tagged as indie folk but with a sound that draws at least as much from 90’s era alt rock—Gin Blossoms and the acoustic/electric sound of Counting Crows, maybe a little farther to the acoustic side. “Keep You Anyway,” “Seventeen” and “So Rewind” stood out as songs where the indie folk classification was fishy. Notwithstanding “Somewhere in Between” which, if the band were a 90’s alt rock group, would be the signature prom-song—lovely, picked guitar, bass subdued, timekeeping limited mostly to tambourine. The group loves fingerpicking, soft starts prior to alt rock boogies, and more recently, the addition of harmonica. So I can’t fully dismiss the indie folk label. But I really, really wanted to.
“The idea is that all of our songs we’d like to be able to play at any point. So when we write songs we try to keep it very stripped back. We’ve got, you know, a simple drum kit, bass, acoustic guitar, so that we can play live without fiddling around, which I think is what attracted us to folk style instruments,“ the band’s guitarist and vocalist, Charlie Ferriday, told Best New Bands via Skype from London.
Roger Connick, the bass player, added “It’s somewhere in between…a rock ‘n’ roll kind of folky. It’s definitely inspired by 90’s rock bands, but some of the more recent acoustic bands in the UK are definitely an inspiration for the more stripped back stuff. There’ll be some more of that on the new album.”
This is what’s great about getting to talk with a band—grilling them about your weird, petty qualms. Narrow Plains doesn’t have a Robert Johnson-esque story to share. But their approach to making music hitches up with folk on an important level—making music with whatever is on hand. For example, tapping Roger (whose brother Stuart plays drums) to play bass on their first EP.
“I had never actually played bass up until then. I was a guitar player,” said Roger. The band was sitting in the living room of what turned out to be the Connick brothers’ childhood home/band’s occasional practice space.
Charlie and Stuart have been playing together in larger bands since secondary school before leaving for college. They reunited, this time on their own, to work on songs Ferriday had written in college. After some time as a “drums and acoustic duo,” the group added Roger to fill out their sound. But the group found inspiration in the quieter dynamics of a folk three-piece, and capped the group at three. They also found a solution to a problem that had been dogging them since their early days.
“Stuart and I, I think we were about 15, we were in a lot of ‘punk’ bands, and we had electric guitars and everything, and piano, and there really wasn’t a limit to what we could throw in there,” Charlie noted. “There was often a wall of sound we could hide behind. And because it’s an acoustic guitar and a bass, you can hear mistakes easily and hear different sounds, and it really focuses on the dynamic between those two instruments along with the rhythm.”
“I remember there were times when we were playing in rock bands, and sometimes there was so much noise you would have no idea what was going on. And it would get to the point where we would say ‘okay, shut up’, and unplug the instruments and play as quietly as we could, to try and figure out what wasn’t quite working,” said Stuart. The group was all laughing at this point; clearly this was a common frustration.
That ethos would eventually land them on a simple sound, with minimalism as an absolute rule. Even when they decided the guitar/bass/drum setup needed fleshing out, they turned to the simplest instrument they could think of.
Stuart continued: “We were aware that some of these songs needed something different, and we realized that we could just mount harmonicas on our microphone stands.” Ferriday added: “You don’t have to be skilled to play a harmonica.”
Besides the harmonica, there are the drums. Stuart had to explain it to me, because I had no idea what a cajon is. “I think we would describe ourselves as a DIY band. For example, the reason I use (a cajon) instead of a bass drum, is because we didn’t want to pay for a drum kit,” said Stuart. He tipped the laptop so I could see.
At first, it looks like a roadie has misplaced a bunch of small amplifiers. That’s what I had thought when I saw a picture of the band with their instruments. But the cajon is a traditional Peruvian drum, as it turns out; a six-sided wooden box with two sides made from thinner wood, one of them usually having a resonator hole to improve the sound. It’s a surprisingly good, cheap drop-in replacement for a drum kit. Stuart said he made up the difference by modifying a kick-pedal so that he could play in the way he had learned. “That’s the kind of thing that we mean, we’ve always kind of had to make do as a band. And we rather enjoy that.”
Does it really count as the rough-and-tumble innovation implied by DIY if you’re using Pro Tools, though? Well, Pro Tools isn’t that pricey. Anyway, it’s less than the cost of recording on tape, now that reel-to-reel tape is a luxury good. And counter intuitively, digital recording gives the band exactly what they want—the cleanest, most natural sound possible.
Plus, they had experience.
“Luckily, when we (Stuart and Roger) were younger, our mum worked in a local performing arts center, and they had a full studio in there. And from time to time we got to go in there and do some recording, so we learned Pro Tools there.”
Since the band is unsigned, they’ve worked without the backing of a record label. That’s gotten them through their first round on the small festival circuit, and to legendary venues like 100 Club in London. It’s a good opportunity for new bands, especially in the crowded English festival season. And for a band planning to release a new album sometime early next year, it’s a good proving ground for record material.
“There’s a song called ‘Let it Die’, that no one has heard on the internet, which we play almost every set, and that’s gone down really well,” said Ferriday, noting that not every song is so well received. “It’s really weird, sometimes you’ll play a song for one audience, and they’ll go nuts for it, and you’ll play the same song for an audience next week, and they just won’t go for it. ”
Thinking of all the promising bands that lagged after a debut failed to gain attention outside of their hometown, how do you deal with that pressure? London is a crowded scene, with lots of other groups to pay attention to.
“There’s a lot of competition in London, so when you play there, you’ve got to be good. There’s a gig we played with a Liverpool band in London, and they got on stage and said they were from Liverpool and there was this massive cheer, everyone was like ‘Yeah!’ and we went to Liverpool and said ‘We’re from London,’ and there was nothing. If we had said South London it might have been different.”
With respect to the album though, they seemed pretty upbeat. “We’re nowhere near the stage where we’re running dry on ideas. It’s at a stage where we’re having to choose between songs we all quite like,“ said Stuart. Ferriday agreed: “It puts a lot of pressure on us choosing the right songs. It’s always scary to go out on stage with a new song, but we always have a thing where we play it three or four times before we gauge the reaction. That’s what’s good about the way we’re going to record it, where we can change it any time.”
They do a good job updating their SoundCloud, which even fairly well established bands are annoyingly relaxed about. And even though it’s a fairly small sample, it’s a consistent stream of activity for a young band, with a new single out just two months ago, featuring “Keep You Anyway” and “So Rewind.”
A strong release stands a good chance of getting the band out of the London scene and to a national audience. The band has fans around the world already, courtesy of the Internet, but firm plans for international shows pend on future success. “I lived in the States for about six years, and I would love to go back,” said Ferriday. “We talk to a lot of people on Twitter about going there or Italy, or wherever. Right now it’s about getting the album out, and when the album is done we’re looking at where we can realistically get to. We’d love to play there. Some of our most active fans are on Twitter, and to hear that they listened to our song and it made their day better—that’s an amazing honor, and it’s definitely in our ambition to be as good as possible and get more chances to interact with them, because that’s what we loved from bands growing up.”
I’m optimistic that Narrow Plains will make it here, my (ongoing) conflict with indie folk aside.
Will Jukes
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