Studio Dispatches Part II: Fanfarlo

-

TLOBF favourites Fanfarlo are currently in a Connecticut studio recording their first album, and we can’t wait to hear it. Whilst we dream of their sunny, multilayered melodies from a grey Britain, the band are keeping us up to date with exclusive weekly dispatches from the studio.

WEEK 1 [HERE]

WEEK 2

This week’s album working title: Halfway to a Hamburger Threeway.

By Tuesday morning, the winds of change had blown us into a monumental freak-out whipped up by loss of inspiration and confidence, and what seemed to be a complete lack of progress. Thankfully the genius that burst forth as the day wore on was a return to form and Wednesday can only be described as triumphant. This was just in time for the arrival of our manager, John Best, who had come to visit us for a few days to “inspect the metaphorical plumping-up of my latest cash cow” (John’s actual words, as overheard by Amos) and to bring us a folding bike for “fun” which we now see as the smoke screen it was.

To mark the midway point of our musical adventure in the land of Yank, we made a weekend trip to La Grande Pomme. Like the old-time races for power and prestige in Renaissance Italian principalities, there must be some kind of competition in that city for who can build the tallest tower. And yet, despite some streets seeing their only rays of sunlight at twelve noon, it’s a bright, bustling and altogether rather pleasant place – that is, apart from our stay at a sub-optimal hostel in Harlem that made us feel like we were sleeping in a prison or hiding out with the Taliban. If the stained spring-mattress bunk beds and lack of fresh air in our room on the 7th floor of the south tower wasn’t enough, at about five in the morning, when we had finally managed to fall asleep, a large tree fell down in the street, set off about twenty car alarms and was then chopped up into smaller parts by very noisy machinery over the following hours.

Whilst in the City That Never Sleeps, we played a strange gig as part of the CMJ industry showcase circus. Needless to say, our show constituted the bastion of style and good taste in this hit-and-miss musical spectacle. But the enormous pizza slices we ate a block away from Fat Baby, the tiny venue we played in the Lower East Side, made it all worthwhile.

Other highlights were popping over to Williamsburg to check out the Muslims at the Union Pool, watching NFL football with loud football fiends in a Manhattan diner, and seeing Justin accidentally slice his finger open at a flea market and dripping blood all over the American flag whilst wielding a porcelain statue of Lenin. On the L train back from Brooklyn we were surrounded by a dozen men blasting Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” from their mobile phones. They had a curious nervous energy to them and seemed quite keen to talk to us. However, as we remained engrossed in reading our copies of the Onion, they seemed to lose interest.

Bring on the trumpets!

Fanfarlo on MySpace