Auckland outfit The Mint Chicks are still doing everything - including photoshoots - their way as they deliver the highly anticipated follow-up to their award-winning previous album. Scott Kara reports
Spare a thought for the animals at Auckland Zoo tonight - they are about to endure a concert by the Mint Chicks. While the monkeys and meerkats are likely to enjoy it, because they're just as skittery and nuts as the band, you really have to wonder what the elephants and hippos will make of it.
"I think it'll be fun," chuckles Ruban Nielson. "But I'm feeling a bit sorry for the animals. How do they actually deal with it?," he adds with genuine concern.
The Mint Chicks are certainly the rowdiest band to play as part of the annual Zoo Music series. Still, they do have some pop gems like the shuffling lilt of Crazy?Yes!Dumb?No!, which may lull the lions into a slumber, and a few of the new songs on the band's third album, Screens (out March 16), are also rather sweet.
Well, sweet in a menacing and bratty Mint Chicks way - "Why are you so confused ... confused about the noose around your neck," sings Nielson's brother Kody on I Can't Stop Being Foolish.
The new album is short, sugary, noisy, catchy, and, especially towards the end, warped and sick.
"Yeah, it's quite short," laughs Nielson, who is back in New Zealand for five months from their base in Portland, Oregon, where they relocated in January last year.
They played a bunch of these new songs at a riotous - verging on obnoxious - set in support of Shihad in July last year. There was little evidence of the band's pop sensibility, and hearing the new album six months later it's hard to believe it's made up of some of the same songs.
Nielson says that when bassist Michael Logie left the band in late 2007 it meant they started afresh as a three piece in Portland and came up with "quite strange stuff".
So the first new songs to emerge last year - Enemies, Life Will Get Better Some Day, and What A Way - are the most bent and twisted on the album. It was an intentional ploy by the band who wanted to get these songs out first so they wouldn't be overshadowed by the more poppy songs - like, for example, first official single I Can't Stop Being Foolish and Sweet Janine.
"If you put out the poppy songs first then people don't really pay attention to the stuff that's less poppy. We put our weirdest foot forward just because we wanted those songs to be given enough attention. We just wanted to milk as much as we could out of the album and not waste songs and not treat them like filler. So Enemies is quite strange compared to some of the other stuff on the record but to us it all sounds like pop," he deadpans.
They've come a long way since making a name for themselves with 2003's Octagon Octagon Octagon EP, impressing with their unhinged live show, and releasing debut album F*** the Golden Youth in 2005. While that awkward first album didn't quite live up to the band's early hype, it had some great songs like the Apra Silver Scroll-nominated Opium Of the People.
They even survived a backlash of being branded pretentious art school snobs. In an interview Neilson did in 2006 he confessed to TimeOut that "we're probably less like wankers now than when we started out".
But with the release of Crazy?Yes!Dumb?No! in 2006 they nailed a near perfect album by combining clever, catchy, and often abrasive pop with their trademark jagged and raw sound. It won five New Zealand Music awards and took top spot on TimeOut's end of year album list.
Since then the trio, made up of the Nielsons, and drummer Paul Roper, have managed to keep their heads out of their collective bums and on Screens they draw on their past and look to the future.
It's a very different album from the previous two. The first album was "influenced by lots of stuff" and the second was about "responding to heaps of stuff". "We were doing all sorts of different poses on those two," says Nielson. This time round he reckons it's something unique to the Mint Chicks. "We really created a record that doesn't have a precedent."
If you're after a comparision then it sounds like an unlikely collision between 60s Phil Spector pop, the beautifully warped noise of the Skeptics, with Kraftwerk thrown in somewhere too. Oh, and of course, the ever present melodious Buzzcocks' racket and the artschool touch of Split Enz.
"The way the record sounds and the style it's in has a lot of different factors involved in it," says Nielson.
For a start they wanted to recapture the raw energy they came up with on F*** the Golden Youth. So the two brothers decided to record a rough and ready take of a song - "We did it intuitively and quickly, bottling some lightning first" - and instead of re-recording it as is custom, they worked on the raw material, laying things on top of it, and getting it to a quality that they were happy with.
Also, while putting the album together with producer Jacob Portrait in Portland they talked a lot with him about how music was made in the 60s.
They were intrigued with how bands like the Beatles were finding the latest "toys" and honing the newest musical trends to make music.
He points to the Supremes' 1968 hit Reflections as an example - "I always loved that song. It used to be on the China Beach soundtrack" - which used an oscillator sound.
Nielson initially thought it was a pioneering effect: "But I read later that psychedelic music was big in the charts at the time and the Motown producers said, 'Okay, we need to do something psychedelic and crazy because everyone's into that at the moment'. That's why Reflections is the way it is."
So fast forward to now and the Mint Chicks went looking for some of modern music's "latest toys" and stumbled upon vocal processors - although, warns Nielson, not of the autotune variety on Kanye West's latest album.
"We were trying to walk a line between things from the past that are undeniably classic, and then [using] things that the jury is still out about, like really futuristic ideas."
And for Nielson, even though he knows people are protective about music from the 60s, he believes back then songs were made for novelty value more than anything else.
"Not that the music is throw-away, because the Beatles stuff is classic and doesn't sound throw-away, but at the time it felt like what they were trying to do was just make bubblegum for people."
And that's exactly what the Mint Chicks wanted to do with Screens.
"We weren't particularly precious about anything - we find a sound and use it. We just made some really fun music."
Let's hope the animals think so tonight.
LOWDOWN
Who: The Mint Chicks
Line-up: Ruban Nielson (guitars); Kody Nielson (vocals/keyboards); Paul Roper (drums)
New album: Screens, out March 16
Past albums: F*** the Golden Youth (2005); Crazy?Yes!Dumb?No! (2006)
Playing: Tonight, Auckland Zoo, Western Springs (with Pluto)
