Matt Sharp gets in the right state of mind for new album
Rentals albums don’t come along often — the new “Lost in Alphaville” is only the third in 20 years. True to their name, the Rentals are less a band than a configuration of borrowed musicians who work with bassist and singer Matt Sharp.
He hatched the project while playing with Weezer in the ’90s, building the Rentals sound on him/her vocals and buzzy power-pop tunes dressed up with a Moog keyboard. Sharp released “Return of the Rentals” in 1995 prior to his ouster from Weezer and then “Seven More Minutes” four years later. At that point, Sharp put the Rentals in the garage for 15 years. “Alphaville” shows no signs of rust, though, with Sharp finding his “her” voices in Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from the band Lucius. He talked about the group’s
past and present.
Q: So, Alphaville ... Is that meant to be an actual place? Or a state of mind?
A: (Laughs.) Given those two choices, I’d have to say it’s a state of mind. For me, it just means getting lost in a place where it all began.
Q: I think nearly ev-
ery song has a reference to passing time. Do you consider yourself time obsessed?
A: A thousand seasons, seven years ... there’s a lot of that in there for sure. I don’t know if it’s an obsession. The record, in many ways, was a sequel to the second Rentals record. Back then, I was able to do a great deal of new discovery and going to places I’d never gone before. I was raised in the suburbs in Virginia, which wasn’t the most culturally diverse area of the country, let’s just say. When Weezer started to do well, I was able to travel quite a bit and go to new countries. I went to Spain and, like many people, fell in love with the country instantly. Specifically, Barcelona and, more specifically, a woman there. I wrote the second Rentals record there during that period of joy and optimism that comes with discovering a larger world with more possibilities for opening up yourself. ... Many years later, I returned to the city, and all these memories washed over me. And that’s essentially what this record is about in a lyrical sense. And time is certainly a key part of that. It works because the Rentals as a group is something that’s continuously evolving. I’m always working with different people trying to do something we hopefully have never done before.
Q: Did you know when you started the band how appropriate the name would be with regard to personnel?
A: I don’t know! (Laughs.) It’s funny, it did happen to work out quite well. When we were recording “Return of the Rentals,” we didn’t have a name for it. I was producing the album with Tom Grimley, who was an engineer in Los Angeles who had his own loft studio, and it was connected to his car shop where he’d work on vehicles all day. There were all these petrol fumes in there, so you’d get lightheaded working. He had a really righteous sensibility about documenting and producing things. That approach of documenting a moment and not influencing it. It quickly evolved into this thing ... this lo-fi kind of (Electric Light Orchestra) thing. We really put our hearts into that record, and it really was more our focus than any idea of a band.
Q: Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from Lucius are crucial to the sound of the record. Did you build it around their vocals?
A: It sounds crazy, but they were the last part of the album. The very last thing. I had temporary vocals in there but knew I wanted something specific. I went on a search for just the right vocals, and it took more than a year of looking and looking. It was like a film director looking to find the right person for a role. By the time I was told about Lucius, I was near my wit’s end. They didn’t have an album, so I was going off of clips on YouTube. But I couldn’t imagine a more perfect fit.