The Earlies are one band that you can trust not to rest on their laurels. After swarms of glowing reviews following their debut album, These Were The Earlies, they could have been excused for simply tinkering with the formula. But this band have bigger artistic ambitions that this. Rather than taking a step out into the unknown, they have plunged in head first, ramming away till they hit the other side: a follow up album that is so startling different in sound that one would be excused for not even recognising that this is the same band (the only real give away is singer Brandon Carr’s croon).

I had a myriad of questions about how a band undergoes such a rapid change in style and sound. Thankfully, Christian Madden, the band’s keyboardist/arranger, was an affable fellow, humouring my curiosity about all things The Earlies – he even apologised for missing my early calls, as he was away tending to his dog’s diarrhoea. With this emergency now under control we are free to discuss his band’s latest offering, The Enemy Chorus, and the relevance of the album’s ominous title.

“It actually comes from John Marks’ lyrics for the song. It’s not really significant in any way, but we were thinking that that’s cool, because when we came up with the first album [These Were The Earlies] we had a specific title that really suggested something. So we just wanted one that was like albums in the ‘60’s, where they were just named after a song, and there was nothing more sinister than that about it.

“Also, the last one was so loaded, every question was about it: ‘So, why’d you call it that?’, ‘What does that mean? Does that mean you’re breaking up?’ I thought we’d come up with a less loaded one, but it also sounds really sinister, because it’s a darker album it seemed to fit quite well.”

The description of the new album as ‘darker’ is very apt, as its tracks are more powerful, more menacing, denser in their arrangements, with titles reflective of this shadowy sound: ‘Burn The Liars’, ‘Enemy Chorus’ and ‘Bad Is As Bad Does’. What was the catalyst for this change?

“There were a lot of dark things happening at the time. We were splitting up with management, having a tough time with money and all that. But we actually, consciously, wanted to do something different and we really wanted to beef up the live set because we had all these light, pastel sounding songs on the first album. We wanted something more dynamic that we could go out and play at festivals, basically establish a kick arse set, and I think we’ve done that now, we’ve giving it a vigour that it didn’t have before.”

Michael England, the artist who designed the artwork for The Enemy Chorus, has tapped into the murky and ‘beefed up’ feel of the record, constructing an apocalyptic album cover that swims and swirls in colours and imagery.

“The artwork is meant to be showing this explosion going off. He wanted to make all of these videos were he blended our faces together, so you’re left with all sort of different mutant heads. It is a very distinctive looking cover sort of like the ‘70’s art work; Roger Dean’s stuff,” Christian said.

“He basically came back to us with a full story board about what he heard when he was listening to the album. This storyboard was for a film he wanted to make about the entire thing. He was saying, for the second track, ‘Burn The Liars’, it’s like a civilization, people in power getting out of control and then in the third song, ‘The Enemy Chorus’, there is a weapon of mass destruction that is released by these people; it’s sort of an organic sound wave that blasts over and destroys everything. He wanted to make the whole thing organically to capture this; out of wood and strings and things like that. Then he was going to do the second half of the album about this battered landscape, populated by mutants. He just came up with this whole thing and it really fit in with the music. If we had had a couple of million pounds, we’d set him off making it.”

For most other bands such concepts may seem nothing short of ridiculous, but one of The Earlies best traits is their ability to defy the conventional. This characteristic has been in operation since the band foundation, as the four members are split between continents with Christian and Giles Hatton living in England and Brandon Carr and John Marks residing in Texas. These problems of geography and precedent were managed by the ease of exchanging ideas over the internet and a collective willingness to join forces for the sheer joy of creating music. Christian admits that: “It’s not convenient over time, but it does make for some quite interesting accidents that wouldn’t happen if you were all in the same room with each other.”

“I never write lyrics, I come out with music. The lyrical side of it comes from Texas and when that comes back it gives this music a totally different spin, basically turning orchestral mingling into pop songs. So that’s what’s really weird, that you can completely listen to these songs again as a new piece of music that’s almost got nothing to do with you anymore. Then when you get the album artwork, it gives you a chance to step back and listen again. It’s great, because I don’t think a lot of people can ever have any distance from what they are doing. But because of the way we do things, everybody involved gets to listen again.”

What about the converse of all this, does the band ever draw up massive long distance phone bills arguing over different parts?

“We’ve had a few of them, but we’re pretty democratic. If someone really hates something that has just happened we tend to really respect that, because we’d never want to release anything that made somebody in the band feel really, really uncomfortable.

“But a lot of time, you send something away [and something you never expected comes back],” Christian clarifies. “The classic example was on the first album, we sent a copy of ‘Morning Wonder’ to London, and we actually just wanted it to be an instrumental, but we hadn’t explained it and when it came back Brandon put vocals on it and we were like: ‘Oh, we didn’t want that, but wow!’ He just took it into this totally different dimension and turned it into a pop record, by accident. That kind of thing happens all the time, where somebody misinterprets what they are supposed to be doing with something and does something totally interesting with it. I find it a really interesting way of making music.”

This is an understatement on Christian’s behalf, the growth of the singer/songwriter has seen the art of collaboration dwindle, the fact that four people can truly create together is unique enough, never mind that they live in different countries. With such an untested formula it must have come as a surprise when the band started to receive recognition, now that success has been achieved has it placed them under more pressure?

“There definitely is, making the first record was just mingling, sending things back and forth to each other. But we never thought anything was going to happen. Someone might send you a file and you might be like: ‘yeah, I can do that in about four weeks and I’ll bring it over to you next summer when I come back over to England’.

“No timelines, no pressure, no real purpose to it, just making music for the fun of it. When it comes down to the second one it’s like: ‘I’ve got to make a record, and we’ve got to make it good. It’s got to be better than the last one, and it has to be produced to a certain standard, and it’s got to be done by this time’. It’s a definite difference, and it didn’t work out too bad, because I don’t think we would have ever got round to it otherwise.”

Fuelled by these demands the production of the album is noticeably sharper, the harmonies and layering that were present on the debut are now in the forefront, making the album a less mood-driven, more sonically pleasing affair.

“Basically Tom Knott [producer] became more involved. When we did the first one we were just using Cubase and Fruity loops and a couple of programs like that. It was very much a bedroom affair. This one’s been mixed and mastered to a much higher standard. Knott did all the mixing in the studio, using Pro Tools, and I think it’s just a lot more detailed on that front; a lot of instruments are just better recorded than they were on the first album.

But it wasn’t a total abandonment of the past, Christian reveals: “We did actually have a good bedroom dynamic to it. Interestingly all the vocals are not done in the studio, Brandon did them at home and he’s a very adept producer in his own right. He did the first album in his office at work at night; he just got a microphone out and plugged it into the computer.”

While the Earlies only have four credited members in their band, their live shows are far more elaborate, attempting to recreate the sonic density of the album with a 10-person plus ensemble. While Christian has already alluded to the songs being better equipped to tackle the festival circuit, he expands more on how the band’s live show will evolve.

“We’ve just been on a bit of a tour and we only kept about four from the old album. Largely it was material from the new one, which makes for a hell of a lot more dynamic set. It’s pretty much up there all the way and comes to a real crescendo at the end. We’ve got a short tour over the next few weeks, through provincial UK and then there is a Norwegian festival at the end of that, and summer will be basically festivals. During this period we are hoping to start making the next album.”

What should we expect?

“John Marks and I have just been emailing each other about this over the last couple of days. We wanted one side of it to be a bit more of a continuous stream, not something that is overblown and pointlessly long, but more fluid music, which morphs into itself and the other side of it to be three minute pop songs. We always think in sides, even though there are CDs, we think of it as a vinyl. So the idea is to have two very contradictory halves to it. We’ll see if that actually comes off. We are hoping we can make the next album very different again, we don’t want to stay in one place.”
Will there be any chance of an Australian soirée before the next album?

“We’d absolutely love to, but financially it is a very difficult one to pull off, I don’t know if the tour support will ever be available unless someone puts in some kind of offers that make it feasible. But we’d absolutely love to get out there; just have to wait for someone to facilitate it.”

For a band with such deep artistic ambitions it is a shame to see The Earlies limited by financial means, their touring and visual accompaniment limited. While they do have a loyal and growing fan base, they are still more critical darlings than they are commercial successes, and, in this case, unfortunately critics can’t force people to buy albums.

The Enemy Chorus contains many qualities that are praiseworthy – groundbreaking production, flawless arrangements and unique songwriting are three examples – however its strongest asset is simply its innovation and refusal to be tied to the debut record. While such artistic leaps and bounds may not always make for easy listening, it is the true artists who continually change; refusing to be pigeon-holed. You’d hope that a band such as this, one that has near limitless artistic potential, is allowed the resources and the public attention to fully complete their artistic growth.