I want you to look at this picture and guess what it sounds like.
Got it? Now watch this.
Were you close? I’m guessing you probably were, if you think about it. While Small Black’s obvious similarity to Neon Indian, Washed Out and the like can’t be denied, they bring a refreshingly bright angle to the weed-drenhed electronics that are the status quo in — for lack of a better term — chillwave. But more on that in the interview. Mostly, I just want you to listen to New Chain, which is a really fantastic album. “Photojournalist” (above) is getting a ton of buzz, and considering how great of a song it is on a purely structural level, it isn’t hard to see why. Strip away the keyboard washes and drum pads, and you’ve still got a great pop song. That’s one of the things that struck me about interviewing band member Josh Kolenik — he comes off as such a completely normal guy. I get the sense that Small Black are a band who sound aesthetically similar to a lot of bands that have recently gotten big (that whole Neon Indian/Washed Out thing from last summer, ugh), but they actually write really, really good songs to back it up. I don’t think New Chain has any tunes that are going to blow up on the scale of “Should Have Taken Acid With You”, but really, when was the last time you actually bothered listening to Psychic Chasms?
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Smile Politely: So, you’ve been touring for most of this month, SXSW and some dates with Toro y Moi.
Josh Kolenik: Yeah, we were out for almost three weeks, now we’re home for a week, and then we’re out for another week and a half.
SP: Had you done extensive touring prior to this?
Josh: Yeah, in the last year we’ve done four or five pretty big tours, we’ve done Europe twice and the U.S. two or three times.
SP: So would you say the band gels live, then?
Josh: Yeah, it’s definitely taken a lot of time, but you realize “practice makes perfect”, and there’s no substitue for having played in front of people. You can practice all you want, but it doesn’t indicate what it’s like being up there in front of a real crowd, feeling that energy and having it inform the show.
SP: How do you go about translating your recorded material (which can be fairly dense/produced) to a live setting?
Josh: We like to think about recording and the live show as two very different things. Thing that work in the context of the studio just aren’t gonna play the same way in front of an audience. From the get-go, it started out as a recorded thing, but when we thought about how we might wanna do it live, we always wanted to have a full band, have it be more of a show than just being up there with laptops or keyboards, I don’t think that’d be very interesting. So live we have a full band, with a full drumkit, live bass, and a couple other players. I think it’s a pretty big sound, and it ends up being different from the recorded material in the way that we’ve incorporated some things for a live show.
SP: On your website, you talk about Atlantis Books in Santorini. Any update on that situation?
Josh: They’re working on fundraising, I think they’ve got about half the money and they’re just trying to figure out how to get the rest. There’s been a lot of problems in Greece with the economy kind of imploding and new taxes…[Santorini] is this very magical, utopian place and I hope that they’ll figure out a way to make it keep working. We did a lot of recording out there and a lot of it ended up on [New Chain]
SP: Yeah, after reading that post, I went back to the album again and you can definitely hear that influence.
Josh: It’s a place of rest for me, a place to gather thoughts and read a lot and just get my bearing as far as where I wanted to go with the music.
SP: What are your thoughts on the whole “Chillwave” tag? Do you find it to be legitimate? Just a buzz word?
Josh: I mean, it’s pretty silly. We’re not really interested in genres and the conventions that go along with them. It’s just a way for music critics to categorize something that they’re not really sure of what it is. The name was made up as a joke, I think it’s pretty stupid.
SP: Do you have any plans following this tour? Do you want to record, more touring?
Josh: We’re already working on the next record, reading and recording are kind of the same thing for our band. We’re just in the process of generating a lot ideas, we’ll just be intermittently touring for the rest of the year, with most of the focus on recording, heading to the studio, camping out and seeing what happens.
SP: Is there a date you’re aiming for with the next record?
Josh: Nah, it’s whenever it’s done. With the last record we had a really strict timeline and that was fun, but for this one, we wanna work on it until it’s done, and don’t care much about when it’ll actually come out.
SP: This is your first time in Champaign-Urbana, right?
Josh: Yeah, we haven’t been before, so I’m psyched to check it out, get some Illini swag. I used to have an Illini t-shirt when I was a kid, so I wanna get the same one.
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One other request: go see Small Black tonight at the Canopy. Tickets are only ten bucks. They look pretty great live. Utopian, even.