After a stir-crazy winter, Ringo Deathstarr is back on the road, armed with new heavier, spacier additions to its shoegaze repertoire.
The Austin trio, which released second LP "Mauve" in 2012 and EP "God's Dream" two years later, often draws upon '80s and '90s influences to produce pop dreamscapes characterized by melodies, hazy vocals and heavy drums. And after five months of recording, producing and mastering, Ringo Deathstarr (a portmanteau of the Beatles' drummer's name and Star Wars' Death Star) has completed a new album, which doesn't yet have a title or release date.
Singer/guitarist Elliott Frazier, 32, called from his home in Austin to catch up about the festival circuit, recording his own music, crowdfunding and Red Bull ahead of the band's headlining show at Metro Gallery tonight.
You guys have been playing some festivals lately, right?
Yeah, we played South by Southwest, then we played Psych Fest, Levitation Fest, we're gonna play this thing called Solstice Fest in June in Austin, and then Fun Fun Fun Fest later, and I'm sure something else will pop up.
How does your live set at a festival differ from that of a normal tour for you?
I think we can probably get away with playing some more mellower stuff, or more spacey-sounding stuff, at a festival. At clubs you've gotta keep hitting them hard or else they'll just go outside and smoke a cigarette. At a festival they're already outside, so it doesn't really matter.
You've said in the past that the band has always been a vehicle for playing live, because that's your favorite thing to do. Do you still have that MO?
Yeah, I think that's the whole point, for me at least. I think the whole band feels that way when we're not touring for a while; we start getting antsy. It seems like you have to be out on the road a lot to be relevant, you know? I think this is our longest stretch of time where we haven't toured. It's been since October; we played some one-off shows here and there. I'm pretty excited to get back out there. We finally finished our album; it took like five months of work, but now we can plan our album release tour and all that. Once it's turned in for manufacturing, then we'll know and I'm sure we'll have a full plate of shows ahead.
In what way was the new album's recording process different from recording "God's Dream," if at all?
"God's Dream" was done more at a studio; Frenchie Smith produced it, he owns the studio that we've always recorded at anyway, The Bubble. He produced our first EP. And it was kind of like a reunion with him. The Bubble is a great place, but it's not really the place you can play unless you've got the budgets to record with. The way the music industry's going and everything now, it seems like the right time to take control. The gear that we used is pretty much the same kind of gear you find at any high-end studio. The preamps, all that stuff, the microphones. The main difference is that it was just done at our practice space which we acquired just for recording, and the rooms were dead-sounding. We've always recorded in more of a lively room, and it was kind of a challenge to get the drums to sound the way that we're used to. The best thing was since I was basically mixing it, I didn't have to depend on anybody to schedule the time on anyone but myself. The way my life's going now, I'm waking up at 7 a.m. so I can work on it from 8 to 4 in the afternoon and then be done. So it was just a lot more easygoing, I think.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by it being a good time to take control, with the way the music industry is going? Why now?
There's just not much cash flow for bands these days I think. Sure, there's exceptions, there's bands that are getting budgets still from their labels, but for some reason it's just never really worked out for us that way. There's a lot of bands in our boat. Some might be waiting for a label to come along and save the day, to pay for their recording and everything, but they kind of just pay for everything. "Mauve," we had to do a crowdfunding scheme to get the money through PledgeMusic. We had all the exclusive things for the pledgers, and that was kind of a bad experience for me personally, because as soon as you get your money you have a deadline that you have to reach or else you have to start refunding money, so that kind of put us in a rush. We just felt like it was time to pay for everything ourselves for "God's Dream" so that you're not owing labels money to recoup. So we did "God's Dream" that way and then this time it was like, "Well let's just record it ourselves." I've always paid attention in the studio, I've always been involved in the mixing, producing, recording other bands and stuff, so I feel like it's the ultimate way to do it if you can.
Can you elaborate on the sound of the new album? You mentioned a more stylized and mellow sound.
The spacier songs are more spacey, the heavier songs are heavier, and I think you can hear our vocals louder than any other album ever. ... I don't know, I think it's going to be pretty raw sounding, just weird. I don't really know how to describe it. I was listening to the Helmet's "Betty" album, Swervedriver -- the "Mezcal Head" album. Those are the albums I was getting my ideas for the sound of the heavier songs, I guess. It's got a lot of Alex [Gehring] singing; I think more than the rest.
Does playing the new songs live end up influencing them before they end up on the album?
Yeah, yeah. We played Psych Fest and then after that I tweaked two of the songs. I just had these feelings; one wasn't long enough, one needed this drum break thing. One of the songs is based off a loop, so it's just like, I just made it go longer. We made this weird loop in the studio that's just Daniel [Coborn]'s messing around, but it's a loop that has a tempo that wavers, it doesn't really have a steady tempo, so it's kind of got this weird feel; every time it recycles it has this weird thing going on. That's one of my favorite songs on our record, too. But that one is hard to play live, so we're not doing it on this tour.
How did you all first meet?
Daniel went to high school with me for a couple years, and his dad wasn't around a lot so he ended up in Beaumont; his dad is in the Marines as a recruiter now, so he ended up in Beaumont, so we kind of played in bands in high school. Alex, I just kind of met her from when I used to work in a clothing store. She worked in one down the street from me; I was just kind of hanging out there. Some of the stores have free beer and free Red Bull for shoppers, so I would just go in there and drink all the beer and Red Bull, mentioned I needed a bass player and she mentioned she played bass, and after like eight bass players I just thought whatever, and she never quit the band.
So we can thank Red Bull for Ringo Deathstarr. Your official sponsor.
Well, we have played a Red Bull show before.
INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND CONDENSED