These New Puritans have consistently evolved and reshaped their albums into sonic structures rather than what we might consider a traditional album – i.e. a collection of songs with the occasional narrative arc. To speak about them in the language of genre, would be somewhat reductive to what These New Puritans embody and release. Since the release of Beat Pyramid in 2008, brothers George and Jack Barnett have consistently metamorphosed within their form, garnering them fans such as Bjork, Massive Attack, Caroline Polachek and that artist with the lime green record cover… We spoke to Jack Barnett about their latest record, Crooked Wing, and the opposing forces that lie within.
Crooked Wing is rife with references, allusions and field recordings, from Rimbaud to church bells providing familiar touchstones for the listener, that have been reimagined through the band’s mythology. It is undoubtedly ambitious and cerebral music, which suggests a radical optimism in the current landscape of the music industry. “I think you just have to make the thing you want to make, the thing that you love,” Barnett explains. “Especially if you're going to spend as long as we spent on this... you may as well spend that time making something for yourself rather than trying to please anyone else. That’s a fool’s errand, really.”
The commitment to an idiosyncratic artistic practice pulls from many mediums, whether it is Walt Disney or Stravinsky, whom Barnett quotes as having a similar attitude to music saying “I have never understood a single piece of music I’ve written. I have felt it.” One can move through Crooked Wing with feeling and perhaps eventual understanding.
One does not have to be Hemingway to understand the artistic symbolism of a bell, so fittingly it was a bell that became part of the creative genesis for Barnett. “It was in Greece,” Barnett says. “I was walking through this gorge and at the end, there was this tiny little Orthodox church with a bell outside. There was no one around, so I rang it and recorded it a few times.” He carries with him a field recorder, “one level up from a dictaphone”, for such opportunities, archiving fragments of the world for later excavation.
"I have never understood a single piece of music I’ve written. I have felt it."
“When I got back and listened to it, there was this one sound that had so much inside it. It kicked something into motion. A set of chords emerged from it. That sound became the thread that runs through the album.” Whilst these thematic bells are devotional and imbued with a calling, Barnett himself seems to avoid religious connotations within the record. Barnett, who clarifies that he wasn’t raised religious, despite his grandfather’s role as a church organist in Essex, admits to a cultural proximity to Christianity, a sense of imbued symbols and mythic residue rather than doctrinal belief. “Even the people who reject it most violently are often the most Christian,” he says. “They’re moralistic, evangelical. Just, without God.”
A definitive feature of Crooked Wing seems to be contrasting forces, rather than a theological ‘good versus evil’. It seems to play with the tension between man and machine, flesh against steel and a pull between sensuality and structure. This is reflected in the composition and production with acoustic and electronic instruments creating a dialogue between the industrial and the ethereal. As Barnett explains, “someone mentioned that to me, recently the idea of religious fanatic versus industrialist. It hadn’t occurred to me until people started asking questions about it. Sometimes you're making something and you don’t even realise what you're saying until later. But I like those interpretations, they make it richer.”
If the theme or meaning of Barnett’s songs develop later, I’m keen to understand how Barnett’s songwriting process works and a central tenet appears to be restraint. Although this may feel counter intuitive on an expansive album, Barnett tells me “you need to exclude things. If you use every sound at your disposal, then what you make is kind of, well, nothing. It doesn’t have a feeling of its own. You need rules. Limits. You need to forbid certain things.”
Barnett enlightens me on one of Walt Disney's creative processes that compartmentalised the work by having different buildings for different phases of development, one for ideation, one for critique and one for presentation. Whilst it is all too easy for artists to be judgemental and condemn a work before it emerges, Barnett, perhaps through learned experience, has more patience. “You can’t evaluate the thing while you’re making it. You have to write first. Just write. Let the patterns form. Then, and only then, you start to see what it is.”
"Things move fast now. People want consistency. They don’t care if it’s as good as the last one, just that it exists."
Once the patterns have begun to emerge, Barnett brings in his twin brother, George for his insight and commentary. Perhaps some of the magic found in These New Puritans stems from the brotherly relationship through a unified understanding and vision, not dissimilar to the Wilson brothers, or even the Reid brothers of The Jesus and Mary Chain. “I’ll send him tracks and he’ll make these really decisive comments, like, ‘Save that one, that can be for something else.’ One sentence can give you a whole direction.” Despite the density of ideas behind the project, Barnett insists that writing music itself isn’t difficult for him, it’s pleasurable, intuitive. “It’s making it into an album that’s hard,” he says. “That’s where the real reasoning begins.”
As mentioned, one of the band’s fans is Caroline Polachek who approached the brothers to collaborate and subsequently sings on the track, Industrial Love Song. Polachek who is known for her crystalline and clear vocals is one of the album's most natural elements, untampered unlike many of the other sounds. Barnett explains that “she has such a beautiful voice that I could make mine more grotesque, like a gargoyle on the side of a church,” he laughs. “It was fun, actually. That contrast gave the song a tension it needed.” In a world where vocal perfection is attainable through auto-tuning or Melodyne-ing, Barnett’s voice carries intentional humanity and character.
“I don’t think I ever thought of myself as a singer in the beginning. There are a million ways to sing. Technique can be interesting, but it can also make things too smooth, too perfect. And perfection is easy now. It’s also totally pointless.” He recalls a producer once telling him that his “slightly broken voice” was actually the glue that held These New Puritan’s music together. “If you had a more perfect voice on top of those arrangements, it could start to sound too polished, too... something else. The cracks make it work.”
I suggest that there is almost a fetishisation of imperfection – whether it’s the blemishes found in analog photography or the appeal of unfiltered takes cinematically. “Maybe,” Barnett observes astutely, “we value imperfection now because it’s the only thing that can’t be faked.”
"We value imperfection now because it’s the only thing that can’t be faked."
Barnett doesn't often reference other musicians. “We worked with a producer once who said, ‘You’re the only band I’ve worked with that never talks about music,’” he says. Instead, he pulls from imagery, poetry, and art. William Blake, Max Klinger and Hieronymous Bosch, imagery being the more valuable source of inspiration.
After years of recording Crooked Wing, the band is preparing to embark on a European tour which Barnett has grown to love, explaining that initially the live element of These New Puritans was merely a means to an end. “At the beginning, we made a band because it was the only way we could get the music across […] But now? I’d do it every day.” However, whilst tour is relished, Barnett is not yet ready to consider the album, “I’m not ready to think about it,” he admits, “but I probably should be. Things move fast now. People want consistency. They don’t care if it’s as good as the last one, just that it exists.”
The existence of Crooked Wing serves as as a dialogue between man and machine, set in a landscape that could only be of the Barnett’s envisioning, and whilst I would have easily spoken for another hour, Barnett needs to go and get his accordion repaired, an act that were his day a Ulysses-esque novel, would be deeply character defining.
