Midlake: More housecat than panther
Wednesday 14 February @ 16:21:13 |
  by STEVE McPHERSON
When you call your album The Trials of Van Occupanther, you're practically begging for analytical music listeners to start fishing for the conceptual thread that could stitch the songs into a lovingly embroidered whole. After a couple of listens, you might begin to pick out the seams in Midlake's mini-masterpiece: The song's narratives are all told from the first person; there's a suite of three songs in the middle of the album ("Young Bride," "Branches" and "In This Camp") that revolve around marriage; there's a distinctly 19th century, sepia-toned feel to the whole affair; and the aforementioned Van Occupanther seems to be some kind of mad scientist who may have created a magical tonic, a plot that's straight out of H.G. Wells ("My science is waiting, nearly complete / One glass will last for nearly a week .... They told me I wouldn't, but I found an answer / I'm Van Occupanther"). Surely this all points to some kind of grand plan, right, Tim Smith?
"It was really just the one song, 'Van Occupanther,' that I had envisioned Van Occupanther being in," says Midlake's principal songwriter, by phone from his home in Denton, Texas. "So I didn't really mean for it to be a total concept about this guy, Van Occupanther. I just wanted it to feel cohesive and sure, I guess they share a similar kind of feeling throughout the songs and with the lyrics, but I never really intended it to be a concept album."
Dammit. So there's no overarching story here?
"No, no: I'm not Stephen King or anything," Smith says, whom I've caught in the middle of his daily musical work. Actually, he missed my call, but promptly rang me back.
"Hey sorry: I had the phone in my hands, but I had some headphones on and I guess the phone doesn't light up, apparently, when it rings," he explains. "I can't really write on tour, so now that I have a break for five or six weeks, it's really nice to come up with an idea or two. I just try to force myself to do it every day, unless I really don't feel up to it, and then I won't force it. My wife goes to work at about 8 in the morning until 5 and I don't have a job anymore, so my job is to write music."
Given that his previous gig was on an assembly line putting batteries into remote controls, it's a pretty sweet position to be in, and it's the success of The Trials of Van Occupanther that's put him there. The close of 2006 found it scattered across critics' year-end best lists, and the band spent the bulk of the year on the road, albeit often on the left side of the road in places like England and Australia.
"It's been really good," he replies when I ask him about overseas touring. "Especially the last one or two tours because more people, I guess, know about us and so when we play a show in a place we've never played before, you know, 200, 300 people come out, so that's really crazy. I don't think that will happen in America quite yet. I think some of the shows, we'll be lucky if 10 people are there. Over there, we played many places we've never played before--Italy and Austria and Australia--just really good turnouts in all those places."
As gratifying as that success has been, it's clear that Smith's heart is at home. "My thing is really writing music and recording it, so being away from home and my wife is quite difficult," he says. "Touring is very tough on me--I can go for about three weeks and then I just want to get home. I'm not the party animal that enjoys going out after every show and hanging out; I just go back to my hotel room."
 His character seems entirely in keeping with that of his band's sophomore album, a warm, limpid and generally bluster-free record that works on you slowly. The lyrical narratives are like miniatures set in ornate lockets, imbued with the eerie depth lent to early photographs by their almost three-dimensional quality, and they're set against a sonic backdrop that's no less novel. Once you get over the shock of a band drawing its primary sonic imprint not from the herky-jerk of '80s new wave and punk or from the florid and psychedelic '60s, but rather from the '70s lite-rock of Fleetwood Mac and country rock of Neil Young's Harvest, Smith's vocals will inevitably draw comparisons with Thom Yorke, a similarity that has led me to describe them to people as Radiohead, if Radiohead were made of wood.
"I can't get away from that," Smith responds when asked about the Yorke comparisons. "I think it's my voice, a certain timbre or something? There was [a song] I was just writing a couple weeks ago, but I feel like it's too much like Radiohead, so we may not do it. It sucks sometimes. They just influenced me so much when I was getting started in writing music. I put down the saxophone and picked up a guitar and they were kind of the big band for me."
In the February issue of Harper's, author Jonathan Lethem has a fairly stunning piece on plagiarism and copyright and the "ecstasy of influence," a phrase he cribs from literary critic Howard Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence. The kicker is that Lethem's entire essay is cobbled together from "samples" of other writers, all of whom he lists at the end of the article. Lethem makes a strong case for the vital and strengthening influence of theft in art, and I'm inclined to agree with him; I'm less interested in picking out Midlake's influences than in determining just how they tricked me into thinking they'd made a concept album.
Optical illusions are made possible by perceptual completion, or our brains' tendency to fill in information when presented with an image that doesn't give us the whole picture. I suspect some kind of musical version of that legerdemain is responsible for my belief that The Trials of Van Occupanther forms a semi-cohesive narrative about a character who, through metempsychosis or immortality, is forever doomed to be separated from the mass of humanity, experiencing the lifecycle at a slight remove. The songs themselves are a blend of the specific and the vague, open-ended, but not in the manner of stream-of-consciousness writing. They compel you to make sense of them, even as they defy your attempts, and that's perhaps an even bigger accomplishment than making a concept album. Sometimes, it's enough to just suggest a conclusion. ||
Midlake play on Thu., Feb. 15 at the 7th St. Entry with Elk and St. Vincent. 8 p.m. $10. 21+. 701 First Ave. N, Mpls. 612-332-1775. For more info on Midlake, visit their official website at midlake.net.
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