Photo credit: Joe Ludwig
Paper Holland
There was something charmingly straightforward about Paper Holland’s 2013 debut Happy Belated, an open-hearted indie-rock record that didn’t hide its debt to tried-and-true touchstones like Death Cab For Cutie and Built to Spill. Looking back at that record now, though, the band says it almost sounds like the work of an entirely different band, and in some ways it was. The Milwaukee group has since expanded to a six-piece, but when they began working on their debut back in 2008, their lineup was just singer-guitarist Joe Tomcheck and guitarist Andy Kosanke.
“I remember there’d be times where it was like, ‘It’d be cool if there were piano on this,’ but since neither of us played or owned a piano, there were no pianos,” Kosanke recalls. “It’s not that we didn’t have the ideas. We just didn’t have the talent of financial means to incorporate them.”
These days, there’s a lot less standing in the way of the band and their ambitions. 2016’s Fast Food EP was a tease of where the band was headed—with fuller arrangements, much richer instrumentation and a jazzier vibe—but even that doesn’t do justice to the beautiful escape they’ve created on their new album, Galápagos, a blissfully poppy summertime record that’s every bit the warm-weather escape its title promises.
For the record, the band parked themselves at Silver City Studios with producer Josh Evert of the Fatty Acids, and they made themselves comfortable there, plucking away at songs—some of which swelled to more than 100 tracks at their peak, before the band edited them down to something more manageable—and even writing seven of the record’s 12 tracks in the studio. Unconcerned with deadlines, they took their time.
“I don’t know how bands normally do it,” says Tomcheck. “They probably don’t do it the way we did where you’re writing a significant chunk of the record in the studio, but for us it felt right. It just feels like the record is coming out at the right time. I think if we had rushed it sooner, a couple of songs wouldn’t have made it. We were still writing the very last songs down to the end, and the very first song on the album, ‘Arrival,’ was one of those, so if we’d pushed to put it out sooner it wouldn’t have been the same.”
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Tomcheck said that the record began to take shape as soon as the band settled on its title. “I think originally I just really fell in love with the idea of it being a very beachy, tropical record, a summer record,” he says. “Originally all of it was going to be very sort of breezy, vacation record, but I think just as the record progressed, I think it did take on slightly darker elements. It kind of evolved as we were rewriting that.”
The other driving force during the sessions was the band’s expanded new lineup, which includes keyboardist-trumpeter Glenn McCormick and saxophonist Sean Hirthe. Their horns aren’t mere accent pieces; they’re as integral to the record as Tomcheck’s multilayered harmonic hooks or Kosanke’s sticky, Robert Smith-esque guitars.
“Once Sean and Glenn joined the band we really wanted to utilize them,” Tomcheck says. “We liked their contributions so much that I think we just wanted to put them all over the record. On Fast Food, which is when we first started working with them, those musical elements were just kind of tacked on. They weren’t primary elements. But this time, we were writing the songs with Sean and Glenn, making sure they were fully incorporated.”
Where Happy Belated was part of a clear indie-rock tradition, Galápagos is very much its own thing. While its individual elements bear the stamp of their influences—the Beach Boys tropical vibe, the shimmery Cure atmospherics, the Grizzly Bear-caliber compositional twists—they’ve never been combined into a record quite like this. The band says they feel like they’ve come into their own.
For the album’s release show, the group will have as many as nine or 10 musicians on stage, which should make quite an impression. “It’s hard to ignore that many people,” Tomcheck says. “A lot of people have been telling us that since we got a horn section, commenting on how much it fills things out and how much it separates us from a lot of other bands that do similar stuff,”
More than just the spectacle of having those extra musicians on stage, though, Kosanke says he’s captivated by the possibilities. “It just feels great having those additional sounds on stage,” Kosanke. “I feel like we’re able to do so much more now.”
Paper Holland play an album release show Friday, June 1, at Anodyne Walker’s Point at 8 p.m. with openers Mark Waldoch, Klassik and Jaill. Admission is $10, or $15 with a CD/download of Galápagos. The band will also perform on Radio Milwaukee’s “414 Live” on Thursday, May 31 from 5:30-6 p.m.
