Brief Candles’ new album, Retreater, arrives, just like 2011’s Fractured Days before it: profoundly behind schedule. Speed has never been one of the strengths for the shoegaze quartet.Most of their lengthy between-album delays can be chalked up to the band’s methodical writing process, which involves piecing together songs as a group then exactingly pairing them with lyrics and vocal melodies, often through trial and error.
“It can be a labor to make the lyrics fit,” says Kevin Dixon, who splits guitar and singing duties in the band with his wife, Jen Boniger. “Since no one person steers the ship, and it’s always all of us together writing the songs, the lyrics and the vocal melodies come last, and frequently there will be some dissonance in a song that can make putting vocals on top of it really hard.”
This time out there were also personal reasons for the delay, though. After Fractured Days, the band lost their drummer, who had played with the band since the entire group migrated from Peoria, Ill. to Milwaukee in the early ’00s. He’d been with the band so long they wondered if they could even continue without him. As they pondered breaking up, a friend tipped the band to a drummer who performs under the moniker radishbeat and encouraged the group to give him a try.
“We had a rocky start,” Dixon says. “He was a radically different drummer than our old drummer. Then it clicked. There was one practice where it just seemed to come together like, ‘OK, I got this.’”
Then came yet another scare that might have put the group’s future in jeopardy: Before the band had even played their first show with him, radishbeat apologetically informed the group he needed to move to Fort Collins, Colo. But instead of replacing him, the band stayed the course, practicing and recording with him online. That remote setup profoundly influenced the record, Dixon says.
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“Basically, we rehearse in kind of a virtual space,” he says. “It’s really interesting, because you’re playing without amps. You’re totally in headphones. I have to believe on a certain level it influenced the way we played and the way we wrote.
“Once we got past the technical issues of rehearsing online, it almost made things easier, because there was no doubt of what anybody was playing,” Dixon continues. “You know, sometimes when you have a bunch of loud amps and you’re in a small space—because bands always practice in small spaces—there’s a tendency to only hear one or two things. But online, through headphones, you can hear everything. You can hear how everything interacts.”
Like the Brief Candles records before it, Retreater is cloaked in a gorgeous haze of rippling melodies, sunset-hued guitars and celestially sighed vocals. But it’s more taut and alert than its predecessors. There’s a drive to the whole record that a lot of contemporary shoegaze albums lack. Nearly every track is either a rocker or an immediate pop song; very few meander in the way most people associate with shoegaze—a term that Dixon says the band has grown removed from.
“When you say shoegaze, people’s minds immediately tend to go to My Bloody Valentine, or maybe Ride or Slowdive,” Dixon says. “But I was never hugely influenced by those bands. It always amazed me how shoegaze became this loaded term that meant one very specific thing.
“If you listen to their early EPs, My Bloody Valentine were a rock band,” Dixon says. “They weren’t shimmery or anything. Those songs were aggressive. They were rock songs and pop songs that had a little bit of weirdness to them. And I think a lot of shoegaze bands forget to rock. They get too hung up on the shimmery stuff and forget to have that element of rock ’n’ roll.”
Brief Candles’ Retreater is streaming at briefcandlesus.bandcamp.com.
