Nick Tazza: One common thread through everything is that it\u2019s all kind of fucked in a similar way. I think Philadelphia is denser and you feel the anxiety of it a lot more. Out here [in Seattle], it\u2019s definitely more chill, but you see the wealth disparity a lot more clearly, where I see people like us who are \u201cnormal\u201d and have working jobs, but they\u2019re fucking on the street. I do think there\u2019s better social services on the East Coast; at least it seems that way. I feel like people are more able to get housing a little easier on the East Coast; there\u2019s more shelters for them to go to. I live in a pretty chill area, but the cops fucking suck, same bullshit.<\/p>\n
When you were recording on the retreats in Washington and the Poconos, what were the things that you did just to relate as friends, rather than as a band working on a record?<\/p>\n
Helmis: I\u2019ve thought about this and it\u2019s like\u2026 we\u2019re a fucking band, first and foremost. We write music; that\u2019s our purpose. The message is on top of this music because we wrote this music and then we wrote these lyrics and we smashed them together. And I love the juxtaposition of that. We\u2019re having fun, you know, pointing fingers and talking shit and calling out the bullshit.<\/p>\n
Tazza: I would say we\u2019ve always been punk kids and always viewed Algernon as a punk band. It\u2019s just been an extension of what we\u2019ve always done. And I think it\u2019s really cool to see Peter align the band that way. I\u2019ve always loved Peter\u2019s lyrics, and, in Algernon, they become more avant-garde, more ephemeral. Then we did Dogs on Acid, and Peter\u2019s lyricism and his delivery became even more amazing and now to see the clarity of the message along with the music is awesome. I also think we\u2019re at a point now where if you\u2019re not using your fucking voice to promote something, it\u2019s a waste.<\/p>\n
From the earliest days, Algernon Cadwallader have said \u201cwe sound like Cap\u2019n Jazz,\u201d whereas now, the claim is \u201cJoan of Arc and Pavement in a blender.\u201d Do you still find yourself listening to those \u201990s emo records nowadays?<\/p>\n
Helmis: I\u2019ve always recognized that the music that means the most to me\u2014my favorite bands, favorite records\u2014is what I listen to the least, just because they\u2019re already up here [points to head]. So I seek out that stuff live. Seeing Cap\u2019n Jazz these days is unreal. They\u2019ve gotten even better, and the music has gotten more relevant somehow. But I listen to Joan of Arc at least once a month. If I want to listen to something, I can\u2019t think of what, it\u2019s like, \u201cwell, let me just pick a Joan of Arc record.\u201d Incredible catalog; they could have been 12 different bands.<\/p>\n
After having played at outdoor festivals and 1,000-person-cap rooms, did those experiences factor into how the new album was written or produced?<\/p>\n
Reinhart: I think about that a lot when I\u2019m working with bands. I\u2019ll [produce] their first record and you can tell they only ever played these songs in small rooms because everybody\u2019s playing bass chords and hitting every part of the drum at the part of the song they want to be loud. But once you get into these rooms where there\u2019s space and big low end, I\u2019ve heard bands come back and have more of those sorts of textures in their music. I don\u2019t know if we made any of those decisions consciously, but I was pushing the energy in the music. Seventy percent of what I listen to has that melodic punk push to it, and I think it was consciously making stuff like that and then, yeah, some of it was a ketamine jam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick Tazza: One common thread through everything is that it\u2019s all kind of fucked in a similar way.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[22591,25846,96,1952,128,15267,9012,56,54,55,307],"class_list":["post-45656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-_opinion","tag-algernon-cadwallader","tag-entertainment","tag-interview","tag-music","tag-onecolumn","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}