The past week has seen Sydney inundated with not just rain, but a torrent of enticing Falls Festival sideshows. Among these, at The Metro on Monday night, was The Maccabees, for whom the past year has been a tremendous success. Principally, 2015 saw the release of their fourth album Marks to Prove It, their most acclaimed to date and further evidence of the South London band’s quality and versatility.
The Maccabees are a band I’ve admired for a long time, but had not seen live before Monday night. It’s a real testament to their passion and guile that, amid a glut of sideshows from renowned live acts such as Foals and Bloc Party, they delivered a performance that will not easily be forgotten. Indeed, I write this after seeing Foals – perhaps my favourite band – unleash a set brimming with fury, style and tenderness upon Hordern Pavilion. And yet The Maccabees’ offering remains lodged in my mind for its own marvellous qualities.
With broad smiles across their faces, they strode on stage and kicked off with the blistering Marks to Prove It. Alright, boys; we’ve definitely started. It’s also worth noting that frontman Orlando Weeks was unable to play guitar due to a recently sustained thumb injury. This meant that three guitars became two, with brothers Felix and Hugo White skilfully filling the gaps. Weeks himself is as charming as they come, smiling and uttering thanks after each song. The Metro wasn’t exactly packed, but the healthy crowd were loud and unwavering in their support of the band, particularly when it came to older songs like the infectious Precious Time and the helter-skelter X-Ray. Recent singles Something Like Happiness and Spit It Out were immaculate in their performance, with Weeks’ vocals atoning for any forced adjustments to guitar parts.
Perhaps The Maccabees’ greatest asset is their mastery of tempo. They have an inimitable knack for working spectacular crescendos into songs at whim – Feel to Follow and WW1 Portraits are examples. Live, this is amplified; their equally impressive displays of patient restraint and shameless gusto make for songs crafted with poignancy and dynamism. Rounding out the set was an encore of the lullaby-like Toothpaste Kisses and the grand sing-a-long that is Pelican – a perfect end to a performance remarkably unencumbered by the band’s obvious six-string setback. Their tenacity and humour in this regard simply made The Maccabees all the more endearing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdNC9FVWdBk
Read our interview with The Maccabees’ Orlando on suntans, South London and stripping things back
The Creases
The Maccabees
It’s been a monumental year for South London five-piece The Maccabees. Their fourth album – by far their most successful to date – has seen them garner widespread acclaim, culminating in a UK #1 and a debut slot at Glastonbury, to name but two of their recent accolades. I spoke to a contemplative Orlando Weeks (vocals, guitar) ahead of the band’s Australian shows (principally Falls Festival and Southbound Festival) in January. Their success, it seems, is no fluke. And they’ve the marks to prove it.
It was a long time coming, this album, but you’d have to agree that it was worth it, wouldn’t you?
Yeah, it was a long time coming, but not an awful lot longer than previous records of ours and I think, especially now that we’re getting to play to our own crowds, it feels like it was worth it.
Perhaps it felt like longer because there was more anticipation this time around.
I think there was a bit of that, and I think there was a bit of us being in our own place which meant that we didn’t break up the process. We kind of stuttered, to begin with; we did an awful lot of work which we then decided wasn’t right. We had to scrap a lot of stuff and just for morale that was kind of a kick in the teeth.
It must be very difficult to forge on with an album after having to scrap so much work. What do you think the problems were, initially?
We’d done an awful lot of touring and I think we felt like we were playing well, but I don’t think that necessarily translated into writing well. I also think that we weren’t making enough of a different-sounding record; we were just sort of repeating ourselves. We always try not to do that.
It’s interesting you say that, because obviously in Given to the Wild, there were so many layers to that album; it was so intricate and elegant. There are similarities in Marks to Prove It, but also stark contrasts. Was it your aim to move away from the atmosphere of Given to the Wild?
Yes. Of course, the point for us is always to realise what was successful about the last record and not make the mistakes that we could hear on it again. One of the things we were conscious of is that we found it really difficult to translate a lot of that record into a live scenario. In retrospect, it feels like we hid behind a lot of stuff on Given to the Wild, so we wanted to strip it back a little bit. Personally, I wanted to not sit in so much reverb, and not triple check and double check. That became a kind of general rule, for everyone to try and reign in the layering and be a bit more decisive and commit to sounds or melodies or whatever, so it could feel less lush.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5iezedSefI
Where exactly does the phrase ‘marks to prove it’ fit in?
It was a phrase that I’d written as part of a bunch of lyric ideas. I’d been walking through one of the parks on the way home from the studio. We have very few days where everyone feels like they’ve sacked work off and gone and sat in the park and tried to get a suntan, but it was one of those days, and just seeing how people were desperately trying to get a memento of that day. It made me think about how people used to treat tans as a kind of status symbol. I remember especially when I was at school, kids would come back and the fact that they had a watch strap tan mark was evidence of the glamour of their holiday. That [made me] think about all the other things that people do – that they wear – as a kind of status symbol, and then all the things that we do nowadays that are examples or proof of our lifestyle.
Can you tell me a bit more about Elephant & Castle, the suburb where your studio is located?
I think to a lot of people it does sound pretty exotic, and I think it’s probably far less exotic than the name suggests. It’s an odd place because it’s really central and is in the process of being made to feel like the rest of central London, but for a long time it escaped that fate. It’s holding on to a unique identity; it’s still got some pretty crummy shops and it’s got a market where you can get some pretty good fruit and veg, but they also do a good line in mobile phone chargers that definitely aren’t of any kind of authentic origin. It’s got a certain character that only comes with being a bit neglected.
In October you released ‘Elephant Days’, a feature-length documentary about Elephant & Castle. Was that an effort to encapsulate how you feel about its changing identity?
The film spans the entire time we were making the record, so it took almost three years for the guys that made it (filmmakers James Caddick and James Cronin) to finish it. It was a little about trying to capture an area that was going through change. I would add that not necessarily all of those changes are going to be bad; it’s probably wanted investment but maybe it’s not the investment that it needs.
Anyway, the film isn’t really about Elephant & Castle, particularly – and that’s true of the record as well. That was just where we were and the point that we were all trying to make to ourselves was that an area like Elephant & Castle, which doesn’t have a fantastic reputation, would have plenty of material and inspiration for whatever we needed. The film in the end is about people trying to make something that they’re proud of, whether that be boots, or how far they can progress in a tournament, or how they impact on their area. It could have been [set] anywhere that has one strapline description that undermines its complexity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfP_Gy7abik
You can catch The Maccabees live at Falls or Southbound over New Year’s, or at these two sideshows:
Mon 4th Jan – Metro Theatre, Sydney
Wed 6th Jan – 170 Russell, Melbourne
With their fourth album set for release on July 31, indie-rock/pop Londoners The Maccabees have been expertly teasing fans with snippets of tracks to build anticipation. The album, Marks to Prove It will be the band’s first full length in three years and we’ve recently been hit with the track of the same name as a single after a delay of over a year.
Since their debut release Colour It In (2007), The Maccabees have earned themselves high praise as a band whose talent for crafting brilliant indie-rock has gone from strength to strength. A band of immense prowess both in the studio and on the stage, its not of impatience that fans have been hanging out for album number four for so long, but of pure anticipation.
Speaking to NME, the band discussed the album being overdue by a year and a half. However, it seems that this has been the price to pay for putting together a record that is what the band themselves consider to be their most self-assured, with vocalist Orlando Weeks explaining that he feels confident in the album, and certainly in singing songs from it. Guitarist Felix White later added that while the band had aimed for a 2014 release date, they didn’t feel it was quite good enough at that point in time. Now, Marks To Prove It is set to drop next month, following The Maccabees 2012 release Given to the Wild.
The new album is described by the sextet as being far more stripped back, with fewer layers, more piano and a lead single which also happens to be the title track. Marks To Prove It is, so far, the only full track to have been released. Rather than giving everything away in the form of singles, the band have been taking to Instagram in the lead up to the album drop to share previews of each of the album’s 11 tracks in a kind of ‘behind the scenes’ look at the recording process. So far we’ve heard Kamakura and Ribbon Road. While we can now add Spit It Out and Silence to the mix, the former is a short clip of the line “spit it out” being laid down, and Silence is actually just white noise (we see what you did there).
With a killer lead single, a confident band, a record 3 years in the making and a bunch of teaser clips only adding to anticipation, July 31 can’t come quick enough.
The Marks To Prove It tracklist is as follows:
1. Marks To Prove It
2. Kamakura
3. Ribbon Road
4. Spit It Out
5. Silence
6. River Song
7. Slow Sun
8. Something Like Happiness
9. WW1 Portraits
10. Pioneering Systems
11. Dawn Chorus