There are catchy choruses and then there are the massive hooks that could shatter a backboard. The Big Pink's "Dominos" falls under the latter. The London duo of Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell crafted one of indie-rock's most indelible pop songs in recent years (ranked the 18th best track of 2009 by Pitchfork), and in the process released one of the more highly touted debut albums of last year, the tongue-in-cheek titled A Brief History of Love. The album showcases the less savory sides of romance: rejection, one-night stands, just wanting to hold a warm body. Furze and Cordell recently kicked off their spring tour, and will play Rams Head Live! Thursday night. We spoke on the phone with the band's keyboardist/programmer Milo Cordell about the darker sides of love, the writing of "Dominos" and the expectations for the band's live show.
Some might say self-producing your debut album is a risky move.
We did 90 percent of the album. We did one track, "Dominos," with Paul Epworth. At the time we didn't think it was a risk because we had a really strong idea of what we wanted to do and could be. And I guess because to a degree we're not a band that goes to a jam space to write songs — we write directly into a computer — so there's always going to be an element of self-producing. We're talking about working with more producers in the future, though. It's always good to get more people involved. I'd love to work with ["Velvet" mixer] Alan Moulder again. That's still a ways away. We've only written one song for the next record.
Love comes up a lot on the record, but in ways that aren't always romantic. Was it difficult to write lyrics that could be seen as brutally honest? Or was it important to not sugarcoat "love"?
It was really important. Love isn't always happy times and that gets lost in love songs. So it's always about the good and the bad, but it's not quite as easy as that. It can have bitterness and cruelty, and we just hit upon that a bit. And I think a song like "Frisk" on the record is just kind of frustrated, and a song like "Dominos" is a position you get into after a relationship and try to mask man feelings with fake feelings.
Have you ever had backlash to the lyrics?
Very rarely. Like, once or twice someone has said it's misogynistic in "Dominos." I think most people get it. The actual lyrics aren't really celebratory. They're a bit pathetic, about a pathetic man or how pathetic and cruel guys can be. We just sort of mask it as a pop song.
Bands kill for a hook as big and catchy as "Dominos." What was it was like when you guys wrote it?
We were listening to records in the car that I had made. [The instrumental track was] just doing this melody. And I told Robbie wouldn't it be great if we did a melody like that. And he said we can. So we were listening and I just said "Dominos!" And he said, "brilliant." It was Summer 2008 in the car. We literally just plucked it from the air. We drove to the studio and recorded it that day.
Did you realize you had something special?
We started to play it to a lot of people that came through the studio. And they were just like, "Wow, that's a pop song." The first demos of it were a lot more downbeat; it wasn't so anthemic. When we first started it was a lot more sadder. Over time and playing it live, we became more confident with the song.
The album is one of the biggest sounding records I heard last year. Is that huge sound something
you want the band to be associated with as you look toward the next album?
We never set out to write bigness or huge pop songs or hooks. When we first started we literally wrote long, weird, noise soundscapes. It was very much more jammy. As more people got interested, and we got signed, and started talking to various people believing in the band, it was like, wow, this could be something massive. The songs mirrored that feeling. The next record, who knows? We could go back to noise.
You've written one new song. What's it like?
It's our version of [the Dr. Dre song] "Still D.R.E." No one's rapping on it, but we come close. It's got that kind of keyboard sound. We wanted to stab the whole thing through the track. You read indie-rock bands say it all the time, but we want to do a hip-hop record. And what I mean by that is make it a little more minimal — start with a drum track and then add some loops. We're never going to stop doing walls of guitar and stuff either. What we want to do is define the sound even more. The first album was a collection of songs. Now we're working towards writing an album, a piece of work.
What are the band's next moves after this tour?
For us, we finish at Coachella. And then we go back and tour the UK and do the festivals over the summer. Hopefully around September we'll start recording. We want to have [the next album] out by April next year.
For those who haven't seen you guys live, what do you hope concertgoers take away from a Big Pink show?
I guess just be moved by it. To not be nonplussed. To take an extreme feeling away from it. Either, "That was f---ing incredible" or "I hope these guys f---ing die." The worst would be for an audience to walk away and just shrug their shoulders.
Wesley Case is a presentation architect for b. Follow him on Twitter, @wesleycase.