Post Louis

Being called the “next big thing” is a dangerous and heavy burden to carry; just ask the various members of the now defunct Cajun Dance Party. Feted by all and sundry as the future of British music not long after forming in 2005 as a group containing five fifteen-year-olds, the weight and pressure of being expected to produce the greatest album since The Bends eventually proved too much for CDP – their debut album, The Colourful Life, arrived in 2008 as something of a disappointment (in retrospect, it’s actually not a bad wee record) and the band finally split in 2010.

Since then, we’ve seen singer Daniel Blumberg and guitarist Max Bloom move on to form Yuck (Blumberg left recently to start a new project, Hebronix) and guitarist Robbie Stern has finally emerged from the wreckage with a new, extremely promising, project called Post Louis. He’s joined by vocalist Stephanie Davin in a duo that holds on to the 90s influences shared by CDP and Yuck; Post Louis take the slacker-esque sounds of Pavement and Smashing Pumpkins (although Stern might disagree, there’s something of the Corgan about his searing solos on the band’s debut EP, and title track in particular) and through Davin’s gorgeously crisp and clear vocals add a touch of Throwing Muses and the criminally-underrated Madder Rose to the mix. It’s not all 90s, though, as the looped vocals of “Oldsmobile” and dreamy art-pop of “Your Hotel” attest to.

With the excellent This Could Be a Bridge due to drop on 12th November, Best Fit gets to know Post Louis a little better…

Hello Robbie and Stephanie! How did the two of you meet, and when did you start making music together?

Robbie: We met in our teens and started writing together in 2010, but we’ve only been working seriously on the project since Summer 2012.

Do the two of you have shared musical loves, or is Post Louis a band that thrives on clashes of influences?

R: The majority of our musical loves are shared. We’ve spent the last few years listening to and thinking about pop music together pretty intensely and our tastes have become more aligned as a result.

Stephanie: But we tend to focus on completely different elements of the music. Robbie is always drawn to guitar and drum parts, while I am the same with top lines and words. We definitely have different priorities. So when we come to mixing a song, even when we’re working with the same set of references, there’s a lot of debate as to how to get the texture and balance right.

Where does the name Post Louis come from?

S: One reason for the name is that my Gran’s dog, an awkward Airedale terrier called Louis, died shortly before we did our first performances as a band a few years ago.

Robbie, you used to be in Cajun Dance Party, and got a lot of press at an early age – does this experience now make you more wary as an artist, or more determined to succeed? What have you learned from being in that band?

R: It’s undoubtedly a bit of both. I’m scared by the fickleness of the music industry and wary of hyperbole. We were sat down in the office of a major record label at 16 and told we were going to make the best British album since The Bends. It’s both difficult and important to keep things in perspective when you face that kind of pressure. Having said that, I think the challenge of breaking into that world a second time does make me more determined. David Byrne’s Guardian piece on Spotify last week persuasively articulated just how hard things can be for artists.

Inflated expectations aside, Cajun Dance Party was a wonderful and very privileged experience. We were given too much exposure before we could justify that musically. Nonetheless, I learnt how fulfilling it is to produce music as a job and to create things that are worthwhile to other people. You feel that in the studio, and you feel it when you play shows.

I can hear a lot of 90s influences in your songs, but not particularly obvious references. You don’t hear a lot of bands influenced by Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Madder Rose, Belly, Throwing Muses (at least that’s what I hear anyway) so are these or other 90s bands important to you both?

R: I think we’re actually more inspired by records made in the last ten or twelve years. Records like Yo La Tengo’s] And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, Broken Social Scene’s]You Forgot It In People, Return to Cookie Mountain TV On the Radio]…these all do share a sensibility with the references you’ve listed but combine it with something more expansive and unpredictable. That’s the kind of music that excites us the most. Pavement over the Smashing Pumpkins every time though.

Can you tell us a little about the This Could Be a Bridge EP? Is there anything that ties the songs together?

S: Hopefully lyrically they are reasonably coherent. I enjoy writing about very small-scale things, and about the ways in which people can damage each other. Instrumentally we’ve enjoyed keeping things reasonably varied, and are hoping that guitar playing and vocals are distinctive enough to tie it all together. It was also all recorded at home (apart from drums) and produced by the two of us.

Looking ahead, can you see the Post Louis style changing as you release more music?

R: Recently, I suggested to a musician friend of mine that we would hope to write better songs than those we currently have for a first LP. He agreed that we had some development ahead of us before we really “nailed the techie pop song”. For me, that encapsulated the progress we want. We’re always thinking about how we might make our songs more hooky and immediate without losing the detail we love. Steph sometimes calls the end-goal “crystalline pop”. Of the songs on the EP, “This Could Be A Bridge” feels to us the most representative of our sound and I don’t think we’re done with writing in that style. But I wouldn’t rule out any changes at all and I think it’s crucial for us to experiment with the music we produce and consume.

S: Our work in progress contains a much wider range of styles and arrangements than what we’ve put out so far – from some acoustic songs to quite heavy ones and also some arrangements with much more prominent electronic elements. I don’t know if we will land on one end of this spectrum or perhaps attempt the impossible task of combining all these styles.

Are you still currently a duo? How does that work live, and will you expand the band members?

R: We wrote and recorded the EP almost entirely as a duo. But whenever we can, we perform live as a 6-piece with friends of ours who have been involved with the project since the beginning of this year. José plays guitar, Dave plays bass, Andy (Robbie’s brother) is our multi-instrumentalist and Jim plays drums. It’s a group we love being part of.

S: This means the live show is quite dense – we have 2 or 3 guitar parts going at any time, while Andy also plays a synth and soft percussion, and triggers samples.

R: Steph’s brother Mike also has a close relationship with the band – he made the drum part for “Oldsmobile”. He makes electronic music under the name Models and we’re hoping to continue collaborating as much as we do now.

I like the press shot of the two of you in the choir – where did that idea come from?

S: I’ve sung in classical choirs since I was quite young and had the idea of trying to capture the weird kind of collective physicality of it in a photo. I was interested in things like how, as they prepare to sing, the members of a well-trained choir will all simultaneously breathe in, look upward, draw their shoulders down, place their feet flat on the floor… and the exaggerated mouth movements required for specific vowel sounds in classical singing are really precise too. These quite artificial things get completely internalised.

The idea also made sense because we’d been working with Alma Haser on press shots; she is an incredible artist and focuses closely on posture. I feel like there is very arresting kind of restraint and balance in her images of people. Almost everyone in that image is an experienced choral singer so we had our friend conduct a rehearsal and Alma took photographs as they sang.

Robbie, now that Yuck and Hebronix have also come from the ashes of Cajun Dance Party, did you ever expect yourself, Daniel and Max to still be making music under new guises after that experience?

R: Yes, certainly. Daniel and Max have always been extremely committed musicians and when I quit Cajun Dance Party I thought they would continue with new projects. And as soon as I left the band I was also formulating a new record in my head. In fact, the first person I tried to write with was my friend Ben who performs as Fryars. I now play in his live band.

What interests Post Louis outside of music?

S: To be honest I’m not so sure how to answer this. At university I studied Philosophy and Robbie studied English Literature. We both read quite a lot still. But we do spend most of our time doing music at the moment.

What’s next for the band?

R: We’re so excited to spend the next few weeks on tour in Europe with Porcelain Raft. The guys are awesome and their live show is really gripping. We’re all sharing a van. Then our EP is coming out on 12th November. When we get back from tour, we’ll be working on finishing off a second EP, and preparing for our first London headline show which will be in early December. We’re curating the night and having our friends DJ between bands.

This Could Be A Bridge EP is released on November 12th. The band headline the Sebright Arms on 8 December.