Jade Farley and Gwen Norcliffe became friends before they became a band. They met at ELAM in 2001, which probably makes them an art-school band, but that misleads as much as it informs, so don’t pay it much mind. They had just started discussing the idea of a band together when they went to a folk festival in West Auckland, where, tellingly, they pitched their tent well away from the rest of the fans and musicians. See, The Gladeyes play folk music, but not like any you’ve heard before.
Each was a classically trained musician, but not in the instruments they ended up playing in The Gladeyes. The first band was devoted to Bob Dylan covers, they only played a few times, but it provided the spur that got the band proper started. In early 2003 they began to write their own songs, inspired by fandom, pop music and celebrity. They were always obsessive documenters, and made recordings from the start, often submitting them as course work. The setup was primitive, but functional, with a cassette deck and a dictaphone, and they’d overdub by playing live over earlier recordings.
Within a few months they had plucked up the courage to play their first live show, supporting The Coolies. They found the experience doubly unnerving, because they had never sung and played at the same time. They started to release recordings with astonishing frequency – three different EPs before the first year was out, each a step up from the one prior, each telling tales of teenage lust gone badly awry, or crushes left to ferment for too long, or love not only unrequited but entirely unvoiced, for fear it might shatter in the air. The band wanted to avoid the clichés about female singer-songwriters writing only about love from their own perspective, so they created mysterious characters with names like Damian, Monika, Andy and Claudia, who started to appear in their lyrics, and never really left. It was like a witchy adolescent telenovella in song.
The ceaseless motion of the band was perhaps because they treated it like a job from the first, devoting two days a week to band-related activities – that could mean writing songs, designing merchandise, general plotting and scheming, or making films.
Over the next few years the band continued to record and release music, always what other bands would consider demos, but the rawness and intimacy of the home recordings suited the style and subject matter too perfectly to deviate. Gwen went to New York for a while, forcing a short hiatus, and on her return they decided to make a more traditional recording, to see what it might sound like, as much as anything.
They set up a home studio and over the next two years recorded their first album. It took a long time to get the sound they were seeking, and the musicians who played on it – like Ryan McPhun, James Milne and Henry Oliver – were often traveling with their own bands, so a few different people played on the album. And even while it was in progress they put out other recordings, like The Prospect Palace Practice Sessions, also released in part as mini-CD on Miami’s Cloudberry records. They played lots of shows even supporting local favourites Dimmer in 2006 on their There My Dear album release tour and international acts like Camera Obscura and Jens Lekman. Lil Chief put out Psychosis of Love in late 2009. It was a fitting way to end that first era of The Gladeyes, a proper, grown-up recording of the songs which had which had been around, in one form or another, for over half a decade.
Shadows Explode is the new album from The Gladeyes, released via Lil Chief Records on April 21. The follow up to Psychosis of Love, the duo’s acclaimed 2009 album, the new album was recorded over six months as spring gave way to summer toward the end of 2010. By contrast to its predecessor, which was the product of a decade’s worth of writing and two years of production, Shadows Explode is less laboured, and has more in common with the long string of hand-made and home-recorded EPs which make up The Gladeyes output through the 2000s.
An album of witchy guitar-pop, Shadows remains strongly informed by long-time touchstones The Velvet Underground and The Carpenters, while adding some of the hazy, romantic riffs of Best Coast and Dum Dum Girls, US all-female bands with whom The Gladeyes share a sonic spirit. It was recorded in locations across Auckland, principally at Gwen's parents house, when the buzzing of cicadas quietened down enough, but also in the studio of collaborator James Hayday, and even a car park, chosen for the inimitable echo it brought to backing vocals.
The songs are slightly less literary than Gladeyes compositions past, with the characters and narratives giving way to songs more personal but also slightly opaque - a product of a writing style which encouraged, even demanded the trusting of instincts rather than lengthy meddling. This extended to the recordings, which valued immediacy and allowed for imperfect takes if they exposed the raw bones of the song, and artwork which returns to the hand-drawn elements which they built their house on. It’s elements like this which make The Gladeyes feel incredibly close and personal - the barriers other artists place between themselves and their audience is entirely absent - here instead is a band which in both their recording and writing hones in on details others might find unremarkable, finding and glorying in the realities of life and love, rather than the unrecognisable facsimiles to which we’re all too regularly exposed.
Red Bull Studio - The Gladeyes
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