Newspaper Page Text
music
After the Dream you Are Awake
pseflGfelM’s NEW ALBUM, TRACK By TRACK
Tuesday, May 14, Local dream-pop outfit
■ ■ pacificUV released its fourth full-length, the
I I dense, engaging After the Dream You Are
Awake. The new record comes on the heels of Weekends, the
group's 2012 album, which ended up on more than a few year-
end lists, including Flagpole's. We sat down with pacificUV
frontman Clay Jordan and new bandmember Laura Solomon to
discuss the new album, song by song.
1 "24 Frames”
Flagpole: There was a pretty substantial time gap between
Longplay 2 and Weekends. But After the Dream You Are Awake
drops only about a year after its predecessor. Does it feel like a
particularly fertile period for pacificUV?
Clay Jordan: I am 37, which isn't that old, really, but in
Athens, where it seems like everyone is 22, I feel like an old
man being issued his Last rites. Couple that with rock music
being a youthful art form, and I do feel a sense of urgency to
be more prolific. My mid-20s were pretty much spent at the
Manhattan. If I had spent half of that time working on music,
the pacificUV discography would now be twice as big. Our next
record will either be a masterpiece or it will be our last.
2. "Christine”
FP: So, urn. Who's Christine?
CJ: This song is super creepy and told from the point of
view of a stalker. At first we only had the chorus and kind of
worked backwards from there, imagining who this term would
apply to. I have never written with a character in mind, and it
is quite liberating to try on another persona and not feel like
you have to express your own feelings in every song. There
are some stellar stalker songs out there, like "Every Breath You
Take" by The Police and "Climbing Up the Walls" by Radiohead.
Not sure "Christine" can be mentioned in the same breath as
these, but hopefully it fits in somewhere.
3. "Russians”
FP: Darkwave-y. Laura, how did you join the fold?
Laura Solomon: I was hanging out with Clay a lot and
kept hearing all these demo tracks and started having ideas.
Eventually, I woke up one morning with all of the lyrics and
melodies for "Wolves Again" in my head, made a demo, gave
it to Clay, who gave it to Suny [Lyons], and then they both
invited me in to start collaborating.
CJ: I think "Russians" foreshadows the direction that our
next record will go: darker, faster, more electronic. I have been
threatening for a while now to make an abrasive electronic
record (like XTRMNTR by Primal Scream), and now is the time.
I have gotten the four-minute electro-pop genre thing out of
my system.
4. "Eyes Without a Face”
FP: Lyrically, this song's pretty bleak. Or is it?
LS: No question about it, it's bleak. But it's another story
of awakening and the role dreams play as both purveyors of
illusion and revelation. And it's totally catchy, especially with
Billy Idol's questionable bridge removed.
CJ: I have always Loved this song, but the Idol version was
always a bit cheesy, with the '80s production coupled with his
pompous croon. I hope our version captures a bit more of the
melancholy and wistfulness of the lyrics.
5. "Wolves Again”
FP: This album seems to veer away from the textural, atmo
spheric stuff that characterized Weekends and more toward an
upbeat direction.
CJ: I kind of see this song as the counterpart of "Christine,"
only told from the female's perspective. Talking with women
of all ages, it's kind of astounding how often they get catcalls
on the street and ogled by men. For a lot of women, these
"wolves" are an incessant problem. Just last week, my friend in
New York got harassed by a man who followed her for blocks.
LS: I guess for the reasons Clay cites, and despite its disco
beat, I've never really thought of "Wolves Again" as upbeat—
but maybe I should. It's definitely an empowering song in
which a would-be victim gains momentum and ultimately
undergoes spiritual transformation after having taken some
hard hits. So, maybe it's literally an upbeat song? Musically
speaking, I'd say we were going for something darkly powerful
and pummeling.
6. "I Think It’s Coming”
FP: 4s soon as I say that about the album being upbeat,
here's the downeriest of all downer jams. Are you suckers for the
sad, slow stuff?
CJ: In our culture, there has been a proliferation of apoca
lyptic songs, films, etc. in the past few decades. With global
warming, wars and the myriad of other horrible things hap
pening on a daily basis, it seems like our civilization has a
collective death wish... Freud posited that we all secretly want
to die, and the more I experience humans' tendency to self-
destruct, I think he might be right.
7 "Run”
FP: What's the sample around the one-minute mark?
CJ: Laura went out with a microphone and recorded kids as
they left school for the day.
LS: The exact words are "Bye Arthur, have a good weekend,
see you Monday. Harswell, stay in line!" I can't reveal where
this was lifted, because I got in trouble with the principal for
recording it. Originally, our idea with the samples was to create
a portrait of an afternoon, coming home from school and all
that, the emotional depth hinging on a paradox: the desire
one experiences as a child to run toward adulthood juxtaposed
against the nostalgia one often experiences as an adult to run
backwards in time. But after we finished editing in Pro Tools,
all I could hear was this warning, the car horns, the crickets—
everything seemed like an alarm that whispered or screamed
"Run, get away from here." It was two days after the Newtown
shootings, and I think without our directly realizing it, we
were also meditating on that.
8. "American Lovers”
FP: Many things about After the Dream suggest to me that
it's meant to be heard as an album, one of them being that this
song, super-poppy and obviously single-worthy as it is, is held
until near the end.
LS: Thank you. I definitely hope that people listen to it as
an album. It's meant to be read like a book.
CJ: This is my favorite song on the record and, in my opin
ion, the most fully realized. We made a concerted effort to
keep the instrumentation minimal so that the nuances of the
tone and texture come through... Each instrument is clear and
resonant. One of the highlights of recording was coming back
from lunch and hearing the astounding harmony that Suny
added to the final chorus.
9 "I Wanna Be you”
FP: "In the world you know/ The dream won't last." What's
this dream you keep harping about?
LS: It's actually "In the world you know/ A dream won't
last." I point this out only because we're bringing up dream
ing in various contexts throughout the album, as delusion
from which you're eventually forced to wake, as a heightened
state of consciousness that reveals some existential beauty
or a mystery to which you might ordinarily remain oblivious.
There's the past as a dream; the future, too. There's probably a
political implication, a nod to music in general as a dream you
participate in for a while, a protest against the specific genre
we might get lumped into—and there are inevitably some "life
is but a dream" overtones.
Gabe Vodicka
pacificUV, Brothers, White Violet
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, May 18, 9 p.m.
MUCH: $6
12 FLAGPOLE.COM • MAY 15, 2013