Track by Track: Everything Everything's Arc

Everything Everything‘s Arc is an album to really sink one’s teeth into and – by the band’s own admission – one which provides a much more expansive and less cluttered song palette than their debut Man Alive did.

The quartet’s particular style of choppy sounds, erudite verbosity and rich arrangements has divided opinions, to the point that they could be referred to as a bit of a Marmite act. For those who are open to their sound, they are the more ambitious forebears of faves-du-jour Clock Opera, Django Django and Alt-J. For others… they’re not. But the four Mancunians revel in this dichotomy and from meeting them, the things that come across most strongly are their passion for their craft, their absolute dedication to their songwriting and their self-awareness.

We sit down with Jonathan Higgs, Jeremy Pritchard, Michael Spearman and Alex Robertshaw for a detailed discussion about Arc‘s eclectic track list, so as to provide you, the listener, with a listening companion for an album which they are, by all accounts, extremely proud of.

Cough Cough

Jeremy: I was worried that it was kind of what people had expected form us. In a way it’s the link between Man Alive and the more mature parts of Arc but, actually, the response was that we’d honed things a bit and that it was more concise. A bit more verse-chorus. But it still sounds complex to most people, I think. We just thought we’d put it out and dip our toes in the water and build a bridge into the next record. The response has been way better than we could have imagined.

Jonathan: There were more elements to ‘Cough Cough’ in the original demos and we stripped it out a bit.

Michael: We wanted it to be a bit more characterful and by that I mean memorable – and wanted it to have hooks. We weren’t necessarily obsessed by that but we wanted to pack a lot in there. I guess it’s the same with people like Xenomania.

Jonathan: But we didn’t want to do much hanging around, we wanted to get to the point quickly and be concise with it as a pop song. We are, more than ever, aware of the radio ‘chop-down’ that has to happen. You don’t want to be too long with something that might be a single. You want to try and make it concise.

Alex: But we really didn’t expect the kind of attention that it got.

Kemosabe

Jonathan: It’s one of the more Man Alive clusterfuck songs in some ways. It’s about turbulent relationships and feeling alone even if you are with somebody. It’s playing off the Lone Ranger and his relationship with Tonto. The fact that he’s the Lone Ranger despite – well, he’s always been Tonto. I always thought that was funny and a bit weird. And I liked the language: Yippeekayay and Hiyo Silver and Kemosabe.

Jeremy: It was the first thing that we wrote after Man Alive. So it’s still in that world, really. Well, lyrically and vocally, at least.

Torso Of The Week

Jonathan: ‘Torso Of The Week’ is inspired by the many exercising folk of Manchester. I was going to the gym a fair amount and I would go at night quite often, sit there on my bike or whatever and obviously your mind wanders because there’s this terrible, terrible music in there. And I was listening to Scott’s Journey to the Antarctic and just looking at these people like zombies on their treadmills. I was thinking how weird it is that in this day and age we come into a room to use our bodies. You have to set time aside to use your body. It got me thinking of the balance of work-life and the lure of the bright lights and some kind of story in my mind of a woman who is struggling to stay on top of things with all the stuff she has to deal with. A treadmill woman just going and going and going. It struck me as a sad struggle in some way.

Jeremy: It’s not meant to be spiteful. It’s sympathetic. All these external pressures that are put on women, especially to be thin. We’re not saying everyone should be unhealthy. We all have to go to the gym from time to time but the title comes from those magazines that put pressure on people to go to the gym.

Jonathan: And also I wrote it being in the gym myself. I’m in the gym, for God’s sake. There’s a torso of the week sitting in there in the magazine and that’s not me.

Duet

Jonathan: Something I have wanted to do for ages is to write an orchestral, sort-of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, quartet song. And it got a bit out of control. We slaved for ages on it. It was originally just orchestral with a far more electronic accompaniment but we really worked hard to try and get the rest of the band involved in it -

Jeremy: That was something we didn’t work on at all before we went into the studio. There was no live arrangement.

Jonathan: But I thought this was the best thing I’d done and that I really didn’t want it to be just me. I thought this could be a single and so everyone else has got to be on this. So we worked really hard to find a place for the band on it. I think we definitely got there in the end with the arrangement. I’m really, really proud of that tune.

Jeremy: I think we are – us, three – kind of the sides-men on that song. And we’re perfectly happy to be, really, because the strings arrangement is central to it. And if you take that away we’re not really contributing much. The beat is important and that was vital – finding the right thing for Mike to play, a happy back-beat .

Michael: We’d had the demo and had talked about it a lot but never actually sat down and tried to play it. It was the one I was most nervous about in terms of capturing the right spirit but in the end I think we got it.

Alex: As a whole, I think ‘Duet’ is the most poppy of the new tracks.

Choice Mountain

Jonathan: ‘Choice Mountain’ is essentially about depression and feeling like there’s no point in doing anything or that you’re not going to achieve anything, I guess. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that all animal embryos are the same and then they turn into elephants or dolphins or whatever but there’s that point where they’re all the same and all have the potential to be ‘the thing’. The story is one of those… a fish egg just drifting along and thinking what am I going to be? Am I going to be the dolphin of your dreams? I could be a lion or a whale. But I’m probably not going to. Just drifting along in the darkness.

Jeremy: It’s quite a dense allegory…

Jonathan: A metaphor of… you’re not going to achieve anything and just carry on undeveloped.

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Feet For Hands

Jonathan: The title came from the lyric “let’s get up off the floor / and use our feet for hands”, which is simply a reference to evolution. I always throw some reference to evolution into pretty much everything. But the song is really about that policeman who was shot by Raul Moat and was blinded. And it’s just a re-imagining of what he must have gone through. I read this huge interview with him and he was saying how he couldn’t remember the faces of his family. They were featureless as an orange to him. And I thought that was so stunningly poignant. It was poetic but at the same time incredibly un-poetic and devastating. It was a terrible thing to have happened. It just completely ruined his life. Some of the lyrics are quotes from the interview. He said he kept seeing the moment, seeing Raul Moat appearing in his mirror and that’s his last memory and he kept seeing it all the time.

Alex: The ‘feet for hands’ element is about trying to adjust to a sudden change, adapting.

Jonathan: But at the end of it, it gets more positive. Saying: “don’t remember this part, just remember the good times we had together”.

Undrowned

Jonathan: It sort of reads like a diatribe, it’s a rant really, isn’t it. It’s a kind of attack on the X Factor world, really. It starts off talking about how you can be false and play the sob story and you can get what you want. Well done, now you’re singing cover versions. But then it goes through the hangers-on and the yes men. It’s a reaction against the darker side of the business we’re in, what we’ve seen since becoming a band.

Jeremy: Not that we’re really that exposed to it. I mean, we see it on telly…

Michael: There is a sense of how much do you actually engage in all the fluff of the showbiz side of things…

Jonathan: And we don’t really do that very often.

Michael: It’s not because we hate it, we do go to awards and things like that…

Alex: You’re interested in it and, at the same time, you’re confused by it. All these things… you want to see them but you don’t necessarily want to be part of them.

Jeremy: And that was one of the first lead vocals that Jon did that David went: “yeah, we got that”. It’s a really good vocal, I love the vocal. It was one of the first ones we did and it really set the bar. There’s no let-up in it.

Jonathan: It’s supposed to sound like “this is wrong AND this is wrong AND this is wrong. And ANOTHER thing!”. And then there’s a pause in the middle where there is imagery of the mob. They’ve got the billionaire and they’ve killed him. The mob mentality appears at several points on the album.

Michael: On a few songs there’s a bit of a sense of distrust and also discomfort with our own collusion with it. As Westerners, as British people, as musicians – a band signed to a major label.

_ARC_

Jeremy: This is probably going to be the hardest of the songs to translate to playing live.

Jonathan: So we’re not gonna bother . No, but it’s kind of a vignette in the middle of the album.

Alex: But we’re going to play everything. One major improvement is that Jon is not stuck behind a keyboard anymore.

Jeremy: We’ve decided to swallow a bit of pride and get a guy in who can effectively do all the stuff live that previously put that physical barrier between Jon and the audience. Which means that communication is a lot easier. But as for the song itself, we had the title of the album before we wrote the song.

Jonathan: It’s actually the latter half of an older song we had. It wasn’t quite up to scratch for the record and it made the whole thing a bit too long.

Jeremy: When we first drew up the album tracklist ‘_ARC_’ was not on it but sonically it is a kind of a plateau in the middle of the record. It actually makes the album a slightly easier listen.

Jonathan: We also like the fact that it matches OK Computer in that it has an almost instrumental track half-way through . I like that, anyway.

Armourland

Jeremy: We’ve been right around the houses with this song. It is probably the poppiest of all the album tracks, or at least the chorus is.

Alex: We were listening to that Cars song…

Jonathan: …’Who’s Gonna Drive You Home’.

Alex: Yeah, ‘Drive’, and we just loved the feeling of that track and wanted to play on that, and that’s kind of where we ended up with the chorus for ‘Armourland’. We weren’t going for a big pop chorus or anything but just liked the sound of that record.

Jonathan: It’s based on something we jokily wrote during Man Alive and the melody just wouldn’t leave us in the two years that elapsed.

Jeremy: It had this sadness, which we loved. And we used to sing it to each other with jokey, puerile lyrics all the time but the tune has this melancholy to it. We didn’t want it to be sugary. We wanted it to have that Cars essence to it, a sad sheen.

Jonathan: I wanted the general lyrics to counter-act the chorus and to be very unromantic. And, yet, it is a love song.

The House Is Dust

Jonathan: It’s a family breakup/divorce sort of song. A conversation between partners: you take the family, I’ll take the car. It’s got flippancy to it but with a suicide overtone. And then, a bit like ‘Undrowned’, it starts losing it a bit. Going on about: isn’t there anything more than this? Feeling pretty dejected.

Radiant

Jonathan: There’s a couple of songs that end with me turning my own preachiness on myself. Saying, actually I don’t make any changes either. I’m sorry I’m so shit. On ‘Radiant’ I say: “you can make a difference so easy but you don’t”. And then at the end I say: “I can make a difference so easy but I don’t”.

Jeremy: ‘Radiant’ works really well live. And actually so does ‘The Peaks’. They were both conceived in that environment, really. While we were touring with Snow Patrol, they were big-room tunes and we seemed to play them every night and they came across well. We were arranging them on the fly during those gigs.

Alex: They can afford to breathe in that environment.

The Peaks

Jeremy: ‘The Peaks’ was finessed on the road. We’re not really a band that jams during the soundcheck and writes things on the road but we used that time to work on it a little more. In terms of the arrangement, it was set in stone before we went on the road.

Don’t Try

Jonathan: It’s a recurring theme in the album. Speak up. What’s up with you? Talk about it. Tell people if you’re struggling. Don’t try to hide it. What are you wrestling with?

Alex: We’ve got a different live version for ‘Don’t Try’ now with a long extended crescendo…

Jeremy: …Rather than the slightly ‘push-you-out-to-sea’ fade. We would never have had the laid-backness to do that fade-out on Man Alive.

Alex: There’s something a bit unpleasant about a band trying to do a long fade-out live… .

Michael: Play the fade!

Alex: But we don’t have the balls to do it.

Michael: It’s probably my favourite track on the album. It’s got that joyfulness about it.

Jonathan: It’s a chink of light at the end of a pretty dark album.

Arc will be released on 14 January through RCA and can be pre-ordered here.