Oxford Collapse Learn About Love

Right about now, New York's Oxford Collapse are toeing that fine line between a music geek's favourite band and a group who appear on big late night talk shows. They're so good that people should know about them, but, at this point, they're not able to break beyond the indie rock market. But their latest album, Bits, may throw enough curveballs to change their place in the game.

Aside from the music itself, guitarist/vocalist Mike Pace, bassist/vocalist Adam Rizer and drummer Dan Fetherston challenged themselves in the studio. They opted to take a completely different approach to recording in the hope of creating a fresh-sounding album.

Their efforts were realized, as Bits doesn't merely rest on the band's already established indie punk sound. It comes across as a sonically diverse album that's like having your favourite punk, emo and jangle pop bands of the last 20 years playing on shuffle for 13 tracks.

ChartAttack spoke to Pace about the band's desire to mix things up, recording on cassette tapes, Metallica, the genius of The Band and, of course, love.

ChartAttack: Going into recording Bits, were there any set intentions the band wanted to accomplish?
Mike Pace: Yeah, definitely. The idea was to do something different than we'd done before in terms of the process. In the past, we'd take 10 days, record and mix, and come out with a record. Everything would be prepared in advance. And this time we decided to take our time, work with friends and record over a couple of months as opposed to a week-and-a-half. What we wound up doing was recording two different sessions with two different people, both friends of ours.

The first session was about 15 songs straight to hi-bias cassette tapes you would buy in the store — or what you used to buy in the store. So those songs have a particular feel to them that is very different from the second session, which was done more traditionally the way bands do it these days with Pro Tools. Those songs were recorded straight to the computer. So we wound up with about 30 songs from these two different sessions — half on cassette tape, half on computer. And the challenge was to mix all the songs in such a way that there was cohesiveness to them so it wasn't like you could tell "this is a cassette song" or "this is a computer song."

Ultimately, the record is about half and half from each session. So the idea was to make it sound cohesive, but at the same time retaining the uniqueness of each session.

You can feel that when listening to the album. At times, it feels like you're turning the dial on a radio and hitting different radio stations.
That's definitely a cool way to look at it. For us, we just didn't want everything to sound the same. That's not necessarily in the instrumentation that we chose, but also in the way it was actually recorded. So you could take "The Birthday Wars," which is one of the songs from the cassette session, and it definitely has a different feel than "John Blood," which is from the computer session. The way we sequenced the record — which is incredibly important to us, being an album with a beginning and an end — the songs ideally complement one another rather than detract. The way it was recorded is important to us, but it's not the kind of thing we want to notice.

Are you the kind of band whose songwriting is influenced by what you're listening to at the time?
I was listening to the song "Life Is A Carnival" by The Band. And we love The Band. You wouldn't necessarily think, "Oh, these guys love The Band," but I was listening to this song "Life Is A Carnival," and there's this one middle-eighth of it where there's this ascending chord progression that's beautiful, and so I needed to use it. I didn't knick it wholesale from The Band, but it was definitely inspired from the one part of this song.

And one night we were working on one of our songs and it needed a different part, so we sort of inserted this bridge that is inspired by The Band per se, so that sort of thing happens every once in a while where we're really taken by something, and that to us is inspiring and not derivative. But also at this stage in the game, we've been developing our own sound for a few years so everything is experimentation within our limits, so to speak. Something will still sound like Oxford Collapse at the end of the day.

What about a song like "A Wedding?" How does Oxford Collapse record a song with a cello as the only instrument?
That one came about very similarly to the way that most of the songs [from Bits] came about. We were just jamming stuff last summer and recording all of them on mini-disc. And "A Wedding" is just a guitar-based duel that we came up with and we had it lying around. It was just this instrumental thing. And Dan our drummer was talking about how it would be really cool if we transposed this to strings. Someone we love is John Cale, and he did wonderful things with strings in a pop context. So we wound up having a friend of ours coming in and figuring out how to play the guitar and bass part on cello.

Has the band reached a point where you are a bit fearless and are willing to try anything?
It's the type of thing where I'm sure it's going to be polarizing to the few people that really like our band, but ultimately, in order for us to grow within the band, we have to challenge ourselves and do different things. And "A Wedding" is exactly the type of thing someone wouldn't necessarily expect from us, but we really like the way it came out and we're really happy with it.

Is it fair for diehard fans to expect a band to stay the same?
There's a fine line. I'm a music fan and I have my favourite records, and I know what eras of my favourite bands I like that I wish they would always do. But I like the analogy of Metallica. Everyone wants Metallica to always do Master Of Puppets or Ride The Lightning and be a thrash band, and their new stuff is pretty bad, but they did that great stuff 20 years ago and you get bored doing the same thing. It's about this kind of growth.

You've said that you enjoyed the fact that you listened to the advice and suggestions of friends and different people during the recording of Bits. Were there any other great suggestions you heeded?
A good friend of ours told us, "Why don't you guys try to write something more universal?" 'Cause you know, in the past we've always tried to be too clever. So we took his advice and were inspired by that. More than one or two songs are a little more universal, drawing upon things that actually happened to me, or about love. There's a reason why there are so many love songs, because it's a pretty great thing to write about. So we weren't afraid to write a couple of love songs, essentially 'cause we'd never really done it before.