Review Fix Exclusive: Crayonsmith Talks ‘Milk Teeth’

Review Fix chats with Crayonsmith’s Ciarán Smith, Richie O’Reilly (Guilty Optics) and Wayne Dunlea about their eagerly anticipated third album, “Milk Teeth,” as well as their influences on their two current singles, “The Fix” and Chrysalis.”

Review Fix: How would you guys describe your sound?

Ciaran Smith: Alternative pop/indie rock music is what we all seem to agree on, I guess.

Review Fix: How was the creative process different for this album than your other two?

Smith: The first album, “Stay Loose,” was very much a solo exercise in learning about the crafts of song-writing and arrangement in a bedroom setting. I got two friends to help with the structure or arrangement on “Lock-In” and “Scarytale.”

By the time it came to making the second album, “White Wonder,” the two friends I mentioned above had been playing with me live for two years so during that time, it was a case of showing them a new song on guitar or keyboard with a beat and they would write their bass lines or synth parts around those songs.

For “Milk Teeth,”having taken a break from playing live for a year to take stock, I wanted to do something with a more organic sound. I asked Wayne (drums/vocals) and Richie (bass/keys/vocal) if they wanted to work on some ideas I had and to bring all of their ideas to the project also.

In our chats at the time, a lot of the stuff we were agreeing on when hanging out listening to records, was more organic sounding stuff like the Grizzly Bear drum sound or Cass McCombs or 60s songs – just the space in the songs, where there’s not loads going on. In the “White Wonder” record, that was a big wall of sound in parts, but this time we stayed very true to the idea of three guys playing in a room, with little flourishes added later.

Wayne Dunlea: We went into our practice space and we were jamming once a week, and there was no gig deadline or anything. It was like “let’s write for six months and get to know each other,” because we all listen to different stuff. There’s a few records that we all agree on, but there’s all the different tastes coming together. For the record we decided on 10 songs, but there were about 17 or something. We’d have a laptop with us and we’d try and record everything, turn them into MP3s, send them and you’d come back to the jam room next Sunday going “See that bit? Not so hot on that” or whatever. From the start you wanted to make each song really interesting and very different from the last one, but not trying to repeat the same things musically, I guess. And at the same time trying to ensure that the album is very coherent. I think what was pretty important was recording every jam and being able to sit back afterwards and listen to stuff when you’re not actually playing it. Because it’s hard to be objective when you’re playing your own instrument. Neil Young has a rule of never editing yourself while you create – you just pay attention to all that the muse is feeding you in the moment. You then edit later in a quiet moment of reflection.

Richie O’Reilly: Yeah, I think when Wayne came to it, he was like “If you listen to any song from the 60s, the song melody is actually in the bass and the drums.” Like, in the rhythm track. For my part, I always kept it in my head that the melody has to be in what the bass is doing, and the space in what Wayne is doing. Where you can pull back for verse two and sometimes Ciaran/s not even playing anything, just singing. Ultimately, with guitar/keys, bass and drums, the arrangement from the three of us playing in the room had to be strong enough to house the vocal melody. Some songs you get 3/4 of the way through and you say, it’s not happening, let’s put it away. So it was 17 or 18 whittled down to 10. So it’s been a two and a half year writing session just getting the things and then we tracked them in Cork over three days September 2012, and then went into another phase of adding tiny little overdubs and stuff, and that was another writing session – finding the right instrument sounds as your overdub/flourish, basically cherry-picking. The thing is, there’s no part of any song on the album where someone’s going “I’m gonna tune out for this bit until the song gets back to the bit I like.” Hopefully it comes across that way, that there’s a good bit of thought gone into the songs, even if they are quite minimal.

Review Fix: How were “The Fix” and “Chrysalis” written? What was the creative process behind them? Were they inspired by anything?

“Chrysalis”

Dunlea: We had most of the writing done for the record but needed another dinger, had a few different tunes knocking around that didn’t really cut it so we said we’d start on something new. We said what hadn’t we done yet, musically speaking and Krautrock came up. We didn’t manufacture the song or anything like that but kind of had a starting point as far as the vibe we wanted to achieve. I think Portishead’s Third was being played a lot then and definitely helped me with the writing, knowing when to hold back and when not. Seeing as there’s only the three of us I think that texture and dynamics play as big a role as melody and harmony and I think this song’s a good example of that. One of my favourites, like most of them it took a while for the finished version to be eked out from the first draught, slowly figuring out where to put the dynamic changes and whatnot. The composition of the lead part on the outro nearly ended the band as well, ha! There’s loads of notes in it. It took ages but sure I guess it was worth it.When the chord change occurs after the verse and the harmonies kick in…that was an attempt to pull back. It was getting busier and louder and heavier, and then when you pull it back that’s a big change, even though it’s not getting louder. It’s actually reeling it in again. Sometimes having a bit of restraint is way more interesting than hitting a pedal or whatever.

Smith: Richie and I wrote the lyrics to Chrysalis together, and I think looking at it, and the lyrics to the other songs, if you wanted the whole thing in a sentence, it was hitting 30 or 31 and becoming more accepting of life and developing better coping mechanisms. Stuff that you would have freaked out about at 22 or 23, you’ve gone through enough life experiences to say “Well I was in this situation before and I did this and that didn’t work out, so what about this?” And the whole thing of venting to friends and family, it is that thing of “a problem shared is a problem halved.”

O’Reilly: Without explaining away the lyrics, I liked the idea of a chrysalis as a symbol for change that’s either not seen or noticed at the time. And not necessarily the wonderful miracle of nature of convention. Transformation no matter how gradual is often a painful thing, as vital as it is, and it often just ends with something flying away. A lot of it is kinda still feeling like you’re growing up after you’re already supposed to be grown up. For me, that’s what a lot of the songs are about. Sort of worrying about yourself and worrying about your friends. You still kinda feel like a bit of a teenager. I do see a lot of that throughout the lyrics on the album.

“The Fix”

O’Reilly: I hadn’t been through this process before in terms of “what about that progression or lick, but put it on a different instrument?” The Fix, if you play it in a strummy sort of way it sounds like a Simon & Garfunkel song but then to stagger things and stuff, at one stage we were playing it on an organ. It’s just trying to make each song sound different. Bjork calls it dressing up the songs and seeing that the outfit fits the song kind of thing.

Dunlea: We said we’d sit down and write properly as a band in a practice room with guitar/keys, bass and drums and arrange the songs, put loads of time into them. Then it just happened anyway. Some songs started somewhere else, and they weren’t working, so you change them around, try different things.A lot of the time they go into every single section of a song asking, “Is that the best way we can do it?

Can we make the second verse different from the first verse? Can we add something different in the mixing?” Hopefully it comes across well and doesn’t sound over the top or anything like that.

Smith: We spent a good bit of time pushing ourselves to deconstruct the strummed chord progression I played initially when showing this song in an effort to make it more interesting. At one stage the chords were played on a droney organ sound but it just sounded a bit pedestrian. We really wanted verse one and verse two to be different even though they contained a lot of the same chords. So we ended up using verse one to set the scene with just voices and guitar. The choruses are what bring it all together with the driving bass, drums and guitar hook and then the harmony on the second chorus to heighten the dynamic.

Review Fix: The guitar solo in “The Fix” is insane. How was that written?

Smith: We had tried this song using many different kinds of instrumentation and then when we decided on the instrumentation for the recorded version, we felt the song needed to go one last place before it ended. We felt that the guitar should get big towards the end of the song having been tame for the most part of the song. So I stepped on a distortion pedal and played some sliding octave notes doing tremelo picking in a Doug Martsch/Jonny Greenwood kind of way.

Review Fix: What are your goals as a band in 2014?

Smith: To play as much and in as many interesting places as possible. It would be great to play outside Ireland again having toured the US and UK a couple of times before. At the moment, we’re writing new songs and I’ve got a few new bits of recording gear so we’re going to record a couple of these new ones as we go then maybe bring a friend for a second opinion on the mixing/mastering end of things. It would be cool to have a couple of new songs online before the end of this year.

Review Fix: What do you think are possibly standing in your way of accomplishing them?

Smith: Budget. It’s very expensive to get three people around on planes and in vans, unfortunately, so it limits how far and wide you can play.