Front man and founder of Guillemots, and the man with what is officially the coolest name in the world - Fyfe Dangerfield - phoned in to have a chat to Undercover’s Tim Cashmere about the record.
Guillemots have been causing a stir over in the U.K. with their beautiful soaring indie pop. Their songs are easy to sing along to but on closer inspection you’ll find a level of intricacy seldom found in pop music today.
“I think the thing that fed everything was the atmosphere,” Dangerfield said of their latest record ‘Walk the River’. “There was a real sense of what atmosphere we wanted the record to have, so I think that becomes the beacon for everything. The thing with this record, we wrote a lot. We had a year of meeting up and writing. I was writing songs.
“There was all kinds of stuff we could have done, but the songs that jumped out to us were the ones that were quite sprawling and vast. We just kept hearing big expanses in the songs and this is a sense of being a bit lost and trying to find something.“
While you can listen to some artists purely for the music, and others purely for the lyrics, Guillemots manage to excel in both fields, although Fyfe claims the lyrics aren’t as thought out as they might seem.
“I find it quite easy [to convey a feeling]. You work instinctively and if something feels a certain way, I know what the feeling was when I first wrote a song or when we first wrote it as a band. Generally everything passed by without trying to keep that feeling. I think that’s what the song is. A feeling that can last for half a second. It’s just stretching that out to last a few minutes.
“You don’t generally go through life constantly feeling high end emotions at all times, that’s impossible, but I think songwriting brings out those moments. It’s just about making sure that feeling is there. It’s not like I have to be understanding literally every word that I’m singing, [the lyrics are] just another part of the music.”
That’s not to say the band’s songs are purely pot luck. I brought up the song ‘I Don’t Feel Amazing Now’, referring to its bleak lyrics and uplifting melody.
“It’s something that we’ve done quite a lot. You often marry bleak lyrics to really uplifting music, or vice-versa. I don’t feel like we’ve ever done much stuff without hope I think. You can sing about being down, but there’s an inherent hope in singing about it that you want to get out of that situation. It kind of makes sense that the music is like an island stretching out for help. I don’t want people to listen to us feeling depressed.”
So when do Australian fans get to see what these guys are all about on stage?
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’re trying to sort out a visit hopefully by the end of the year, but I don’t know yet. I definitely hope so. I’ve always wanted to go out there and we’ve never managed to get it together yet, so I do hope it will happen."
The Guillemot’s third album ‘Walk The River’ is available now.
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