Interview: Orphans and Vandals - a podcast by noreply@blogger.com (God Is In The TV Zine)

“Do you ever get the urge to run, run get gone gone/and a lot of things get abandoned along the way don’t they?!” “With a lot of the produced music you hear, its hard to hear the real person in it” points out Orphans and Vandals intriguing front man Al Joshua “I was really keen to keep it more alive: that's why we did the album ourselves in our front rooms, we set up the microphones and that's were we recorded ‘Strays’ and ‘Terra Firma.” The genesis of London based multi-instrumental five piece Orphans and Vandals was borne of Joshua’s similarly frustrating fruitless musical situation, the grind of playing in dead end bands peddling the same old same old, constrained by the hackneyed melodies repeated every night in the same clichéd form. Orphans and Vandals front man AL Joshua talks passionately about a band that changed his life, its birth inspired by a trip from London to Paris – his own pilgrimage to retrace the footsteps of poet Arthur Rimbaud. With this new found lust for escape he let himself off the leash, starting to record songs that ”we're for him” Joshua explains "I wrote and recorded the first few ‘Christopher’ and ‘Headful of Tears’ in my house at the beginning, and just gave it away when people asked for it. ...They were done my bathroom, our neighbours were constantly on cocaine fuelled porn marathons, and I liked to keep the sounds that fall through the cracks in the background... This release of creative freedom saw him giving away these nascent recordings to anyone who asked, and was swiftly followed by the union with Orphans and Vandals bassist and song writing partner Raven. They then set out with a rough idea of what they wanted from the remaining members Francesca and Quinta on strings, percussion and glockenspiel, and Gabi on drums that would form the crux of a very different kind of sophisticated rock band, one that attempts to skew expectations of form, meter, and song. A spontaneity of creative process that big label bands who take months to produce and over dub, to over think to quite frankly shine shit before its ready for your mass consumption might baulk at, thus all Orphans and Vandals sessions were recorded live: 'I like to keep the mistakes in the recordings most of my favourite albums have them.' Joshua notes 'the thing with producing is you only get exactly what you planned on doing, there’s no accidents that bring in unexpecteds, I try and leave room for slight accidents or random chance.' Maybe that's why the songs he written in the last eighteen months documented in their superb debut album ‘I am Alive You Are Dead’ stand out so much in a sea of rock pastiche, skinny boys with their guitars, and vacuous two dimensional 80s revivalists, they live and breath with life, snippets of dreamlike imagery, brutal autobiography, literary couplets and warm instrumentals that rattle with aggression, melancholia and euphoria: a reflection of the people that crafted them and the modern world that seeks to suck the humanity from our veins. The album’s finest moment is the emotionally exhausting epic ten-minute symphony Mysterious Skin, which is stupendous and life affirming. Cinematic instrumentation that rises and falls like the wild tide, below Joshua's sprawling stream of consciousness. It pierces your heart and calls to mind the seedy urban poetry of Lou Reed, the sexual ambiguity of Rimbaud, and the half spoken/half sung working class humanism of Jarvis Cocker, moving from intricate emotional details to the huge foreboding underbelly of the city, back to a stranger's bed (a boy or a girl? Who knows.) Toward a literal sexual climax, into sky scraping chanted refrains, propelling rambunctious rhythm sections, huge stirring violins musical saw, and harmonium, flailing to a cacophony. The twitching opener Strays hints at the satellite town frustration of New Model Army singer Justin Sullivan: and the stirringly life affirming choral epics of the Arcade Fire. Their last double aside single Terra Firma/

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