MOTH IN FLIGHT
Brooklyn-based duo Chairlift give their new ’pop album’ a spin at Lee’s Palace ,
AUSTIN, TEXAS— It speaks volumes about the bottomless impossibility of anyone ever reaching concrete consensus on what constitutes pop music that so many observers have greeted Chairlift’s third album, Moth, as its “pop” album.
Context is everything, apparently. Chairlift was as unapologetically, albeit intelligently, poppy as they come upon delivery on 2008’s Does You Inspire You — which gave us a winsome iPod Nano TV-commercial hit to rival Feist’s “1 2 3 4” in the form of “Bruises” — and again, this time in glorious Technicolor, on 2012’s smashing Something yet a fortunate collaboration with fangirl Beyoncé Knowles on 2013’s “No Angel” has led to everything the New York duo has done since being viewed through a weird prism of its presumed, chartmad careerism.
Actually listen to Moth, however, and you hear Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly confidently embracing the slick sonic dressing and sexed-up rhythmic pulse of 21st-century mainstream pop and R&B in playful, deconstructionist service of the same, singularly eccentric and charming electro-pop tunefulness for which Chairlift has always stood. Just maybe with the luxury, on the third time around, of having had enough of that Beyoncé money lingering around to do it on their own in their own studio space — one freshly constructed in a former Pfizer pharmaceutical building in Bushwick, no less — with no one and nothing else to answer to but a shared desire to get everything sounding just right.
“We just found a space as far away from the next tenant as possible so we could be loud all the time,” says Wimberly, huddled with Polachek into a serviceably quiet corner of the Fader Fort complex in east Austin during a mid-week lull between Chairlift’s three performances at last month’s South by Southwest festival.
“And then, once we set up shop, we wanted to write something that was both personal and . . . ummm ... groovy.”
“We were both coming at it from different angles. Patrick’s coming at it from a love of hip hop and contemporary R&B production, and I’m coming at it from having spent some time living in Montreal with musicians who are very active in the house scene there and getting exposed to that kind of sound palette,” offers Polachek.
“It wasn’t to say we wanted to necessarily emulate these genres, but we wanted to get at their relationship with the body. And so a lot of our writing actually started from that point. We weren’t coming into the studio with melodic or lyrical ideas, we were coming in and very literally trying to make things that sounded good on the speakers. We were just playing with sound and approaching it in a very improvisational, texture-based way. That was sort of new for us. And then lyrics and chord progressions and melodies would come as a second step.”
Chairlift’s attempt to make — as Polachek puts it — a “less cerebral, more ‘body’ ” record have yielded in Moth, an album more minimal, more tightly wound rhythmically and more emotionally focused (“My life’s a lot better now than it was when we wrote the last record,” says Polachek. “I was angry when we wrote that last record.”) than the often frenetic and windblown Something, but it’s hardly straightforward. Despite the inviting levity of “Moth to the Flame,” the Prince-ly “Show U Off ” or the Beyoncé-bumpin’ lead single “ChChing” or the elevated, Sade-esque emo-universalism of the ballad “Crying in Public,” Moth is still a pretty complicated, arty and slow-to-take affair for the third Chairlift album in a row to be released with the blessing of the Sony-affiliated major label Columbia Records.
“It honestly might speak more of Sony than it does of us,” laughs Polachek.
“They’ve been amazing,” concurs Wimberly. “We’ve had very much the opposite of what people are familiar with, the major-label horror story. We’ve just had a lot of support. They let us do our thing and that’s really cool. It’s been a really good relationship.”
Indeed, for a major-label band to make three albums on a major imprint that bear such distinct individual character as Chairlift’s is almost unheard of. No wonder the band — which returns to Toronto for a gig at Lee’s Palace on Tuesday — embraces the confusion and mixed reviews that have accrued to Moth since its release this past January.
“Oh, it’s polarizing. Our last record was polarizing, too,” says Polachek. “People just wanted more ‘Bruises,’ and now people want more Something. So after a certain point, you just have to say: ‘Well, when we go onto the next record you’re gonna be missing Moth.’ So whatever.”