02/21/08
Text: Nik Mercer
Sweden's Envelopes dazzled U.S. and Swedish listeners alike with their 2005 debut, Demon, an experiment in bridging the gaps between indie-rock, the grunge of the early-90s, bedroom recordings, and straight-up rock. After a couple of singles and EPs, the quintet is back with a new album (this time studio recorded and produced), Here Comes the Wind, out now Brille Records.
For starters, tell me what you've been doing since the release of Demon? Where did you tour and for how long? Where did you record the album? Have you been working on other projects outside of Envelopes?
Since Demon we've been working on Here Comes the Wind. After we tried to record it on our own in a farm in the UK countryside, we finally recorded it in Sweden, at the Tambourine Studios in Malmö with Per Sunding, the guy from Eggstone. Listen to their album Vive la Difference if you like us... you're gonna like it too. And since we've been done with it… what did we do? We made some videos like the one for "Life on the Beach," for which we buried a team of seven dancers in sand and built a fake beach in Stockholm for our photoshoot; funny stuff like that. Otherwise we've just been wandering over different places trying to earn some money. Outside Envelopes, Henrik is hanging out in Berlin with the hard core dance scene, Fredrik is playing gigs with the best Swedish musicians from the 90s, I'm making poorly recorded demos and exchanging them here and there with some happy friends from the UK.
You've changed your sound up quite a bit since the debut. Audrey sings more often; the songs are more densely structured, I think; the production is way cleaner, crisper. This LP sounds less like a jumble of demos and more like a studio LP. Why the change and how did it come about?
You're right about the dense structure; we've gotten even further than on Demon which [was already pretty packed]. About me singing more, do I really? On Demon, I sang five songs and choruses on the rest, and now I sing four, and the rest choruses... or maybe more like verses, so it’s basically the same. They're just recorded better so you hear more maybe? Same for the sound: of course its sounds different because we recorded in a real studio so we have a super good drum sound etc., but still I found more similarities between Here Comes the Wind and Demon than I found differences. When I listened to the whole thing just after it was mastered, I remember I thought like, "shit (in a good way) we did it again?" It was interesting to realize that again all the songs were very different to each other and very recognizable from each other, and even if it was very organized, so many things were happening that you could still say it was a mess; and since the songs are so different you could say its a mess inside the album too. But it’s the kind of clever mess I enjoy. I don’t understand how we did it.
I've always been very interested to know who exactly it is that you draw your inspiration from, or at least what kind of music you like. Some of your stuff is heavy like early Breeders or Pixies; other stuff is light and poppy in that distinguishably Swedish way; other tunes still are sort of psychedelic in origin ("Heaven," for example). You've a diverse sound, to say the least. Where does it all come from?
We are in awe in front of Pixies of course. We're happy when we do stuff that feel like them consciously or not. Its true that songs are all very different. I Can't explain why. Probably 'cos we're all participating so it gives different inputs.
And on a related note, how do you construct the songs themselves? Who writes the lyrics, who does the arrangements, and so on?
The songs evolve a lot. Usually Henrik does rhythm guitar and singing and Fredrik and I add guitars on top of it. And then it starts growing. Maya, our ex-bass player, wrote a lot of songs too... he's really talented. Sometimes Henrik just found an insane but very advanced technique to create a bass line and Fredrik made guitars and programed computer voices for it, like for "Put on Hold." Sometimes I write lyrics, like the rubbish talk in "Freejazz," and the singing in "Boat." Its open. There're no strict rules. Except for one so far: Henrik has [veto power] on the arrangements and can choose the sound for everything. As Maya used to say "the band is an agreed upon and acknowledged dictatorship."
