by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
A five-year break between LPs often suggests a shift is on its way. Maybe a change in band members or sound, or perhaps a break was needed. Either way, there’s a sense that change is aching its way across the horizon. But with Bambara’s latest LP that’s not necessarily the case. Rather those five years haven’t led to an album different from the band's core vision but one that hones said vision to near perfection. While previous albums offered an exquisite mix of noise rock violence with bluesy tenderness Birthmarks combines the two into an icey and precise slab of spine-chilling noirish decadence. Shortly before they began their Europe tour I sat down with the band over Zoom to discuss the album's recording process, what motivated its sound, and the research behind its complex tale of murder, love, and reincarnation.
Devin Birse: Your last EP Love On My Mind was set in New York and your earlier albums were rooted firmly in the landscape of the American south. Do you feel like Birthmarks as an album is located in any particular place?
Reid Bateh: It's, is. I even talk about Marietta and one of the songs, which is a town in Georgia. But I think in this one there is New York and the South. It's Georgia, New York, and a large part of Shadow of Everything takes place in Texas. It's hard for me to write about places that I don't know intimately. So, I tend to be drawn to either Georgia or New York usually, or Texas in Stray’s case. But this one is a little of all three.
Do you consider the Love On My Mind EP a transition to your sound on Birthmarks?
Blaize Bateh: For sure, at least with studio experimentation and leaning towards a more beat-heavy emphasis. From musical standpoint, it felt like a stepping stone to me.
RB: I think we had a different relationship with the textural elements on Love On My Mind, which we carried into this record. It was more about zoning in on specific sounds instead of stacking a bunch of sounds on top of each other to make a feeling or an ambience. It was more about taking smaller things and allowing them to kind of carry the weight of what a huge wall of sound would do. That was something we focused on a lot with this record.
Speaking about texture, your earlier albums have a very Nick Cave or Roland S Howard tanginess to them whereas Birthmarks is texturally smoother. What do you think motivated that sonic switch?
RB: I think it might be a focus on beat heavy stuff because a lot of times we would rely a lot on the guitar for melody and for atmosphere, and just violence. With this one, we were way more focused on the beat, the groove, and the textures. The guitar is more in the background. It's still twangy and still violent, but it's not nearly as present.
BB: We used to use it for a lot of our melodies in the songs. If it wasn't the vocal melody, it would be on the guitar with a kind of western-y tone and we moved that over to vibraphone on this record.
You got Graham Sutton from Bark Psychosis to produce the album. What was that recording process like?
BB: He was pretty perfect at what I'd imagined a producer to be. He always let us lead the way. and he would make it happen and then give us his feedback or be like maybe you could try this.
RB: His input was invaluable, though.
BB: We've been such huge fans of his since we were in high school and getting the chance to work with him was definitely surreal at first, but then he just kind of became a really good friend of ours.
RB: And his understanding of the studio and how to use it in a way we don't know was really helpful to us. His attention to detail is insane. So is ours so it was nice to have that someone else care that much about minute details.
BB: It felt like he cared about every second of the record just as much as we did. We spent so long on it and he never lost that kind of passion. I can't imagine anybody else having that kind of enthusiasm. It just consumes him.
RB: He would take the things that we take really seriously. Like, tiny little sound in the background. Graham would do it and be like, “Yeah totally.” That's another reason why [Birthmarks] took so long to make is the attention to detail, plus the time difference of him living in England.
William Brookshire: He's also unusually dedicated, in that he's never scheduling himself for the next gig until he's completely done with the current one. He's all in until it's over.
So, he doesn’t book himself in for another album until he’s done producing that album?
BB: Yeah, he’s all in. His whole life is that record while he's working on it. It's how we see it too. So, it was really beautiful to have someone completely on board. It was amazing. He actually just finished the These New Puritans record.
That's incredible work ethic.
BB: It's unbelievable, yeah.
Talking about that shift, you guys mentioned more of a beat focus, were there any influences that went into this album that weren't on your previous albums?
RB: It's hard to say when we talk about influences. We don't think about influences like bands or anything like that. I guess maybe feelings you might have taken into it.
If you want to go more abstract, go for it.
RB: Yeah, because that's really how we work. We're not like, “oh, we want the snare of this band.” It's more of a feeling that we want to get with the record.
BB: I know with “Elena's Dream” we've never quite done anything like that. We’ve flirted with that kind of vibe before, but it was nice to just actually feel like you're in the reins. As far as other moods “Hiss” was a new feeling for me.
RB: Yeah, it's a complex emotion on that one.
BB: “Dive Shrine” was another one that felt like a new feeling to me, but they're not things you really set out to make. It's just you start making it and then it comes together.
You pick up on a mood that's beginning to emerge in the songs then you draw it out?
BB: That happens a lot where we'll pick up on the mood and realise that maybe the drumbeat is all wrong. It's like working against the mood so then you change the whole drumbeat.
RB: Like a sculptor looking at a slab of marble and finding the thing within it. You know the statue is in there, you just gotta find it.
When it came to writing the album did you mold the lyrics around the musical trajectory you found yourself going in or did you mold the music around the lyrical trajectory you found yourself going in?
RB: I always do the lyrics last because I want the songs to kind tell me what they want to be about. Otherwise, I could write a whole bunch of shit and then put it over the thinnest product and the mood isn't right. We had the songs pretty much done before I wrote the lyrics just so they could all kind of be together. So they could match each other. That's how I like to do it because a lot of times, I'll know what the song needs to be about.
BB: Same with the music. You just kind of listen to what's there and let it guide you.
You guys repeatedly mentioned moods. What would you describe the mood of Birthmarks as?
RB: Well, that's hard to say. I feel the mood that I get from it is different than what other people are getting from it hard.
BB: A lot of people tell me it's the horniest album we've made. [laughs]
RB: Yeah, that's cool. I like that one.
BB: Sensual.
RB: Yeah, it feels more sensual. Less aggressive, but still there's something underneath the surface. You never know if it's going to poke through. There's still some violence rattling around beneath the surface, but it's not the forefront of the record.
I definitely felt that tension and sensuality. To me it came across a very sleek, if that makes sense.
BB: I'd say it was our sleekest production, for sure. Because we used the studio more as an instrument then as a means.
A lot of time, your music is described as quite cinematic. Would you agree with that description?
RB: Definitely. When we're writing songs, we kind of think about them visually. It's like a scene even before there's lyrics or anything.
BB: And if we can't visualise the music, then we usually abandon the song, cause we’re not getting anything out of.
RB: You need to feel more than just you're sitting listening to a rock song. You know it needs to take you somewhere. When we're talking about music a lot of times, we don't really use music terms as much as we do like sort of visual terms, you know.
Are there any films or filmmakers that influence your approach?
BB: There's always the ones that made huge impressions at a young age. The ones that will be stuck with you forever, like David Lynch.
RB: David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, stuff like that. Other than that, it could be a large range of things you know. We don't really go in with specific influences of mind. It's the things that are working in your subconscious without you knowing about them. I feel like a fraud if I have a specific influence in mind when I'm working. Something needs to be so much a part of you that you don't realise you’re being influenced by it. That's how I've always seen it.
Talking about the album's creation process, a lot of it deals with reincarnation. What about that subject piqued your interest?
RB: That was kind of a long, lyrical journey. I started with writing “Because You Asked.” That was the first one I wrote, and that one is just a personal song. It's the only one that's outside of the narrative. It’s the idea of someone wanting to haunt someone after they died.
I remembered this book I read when I was a kid. It was all about this guy, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who over his entire life had collected and documented thousands of cases of reincarnation. He documented them in a very scientific way. No sort of religious or spiritual thing, it's just “here's the facts. Whatever you want to think is up to you.” So I looked into it and realised that there's whole department at the University of Virginia Medical School dedicated to reincarnation studies. I read a lot of his papers and then his protégé’s papers after that and some books of his. I realised that I wanted to expand on that idea of like haunting someone, like love existing after death.
But I wanted it to not just be metaphorical. If I was going to do it, I wanted to learn how. The observable mechanics of reincarnation have been studied based on the data gathered by these people. That it was a huge influence, because every part of the record is touched by it. I don't like things to be too unconnected to reality. If I'm going to be writing about things that have a have a sense of unreality to them. I want them to have a foot on the ground at all times.
Something I really enjoyed about this album and Stray is they have this puzzle box quality to them. Because it's told out of order, you have to figure out the narrative yourself. Is that something you put a lot of thought into when you're writing the lyrics?
RB: Definitely, it's a puzzle for me too, and I really enjoy that. It makes it so every line has a lot of weight because you can't waste any line or else you're missing an opportunity to put the puzzle together. This one is the most complicated puzzle yet, and also hopefully the most subtle. I realised it was going to be really complicated to write this story the way I wanted to, but I didn't want it to sound annoying. I want you to just be able to listen to the songs and enjoy them. Narratively, there's two layers beneath the thing that you're hearing in the song. I imagine it would take most people a few listens to even understand that those are there, and then hopefully it's fun for people to try to dive into those layers.
I mean, I'm still trying to peel them apart. I feel like I'm about like 60% of the way there so far. Getting back to the idea of the studio as an instrument. Do you feel like it'll be a big adjustment, making these songs work in a live setting life, especially because you have like multiple different vocalists on the album?
RB: 100% man.
BB: We don't think about having to do them live. We don't want that limitation when were in the studio. Right now, we're just constantly buying. I have a whole new drum trigger setup I've never used before. Right before this call, I was trying to figure out how to use this one setting.
RB: It's a journey learning how to play these songs live.
BB: But I'm so stoked on how it sounds. Everything just sounds so visceral and big right now. We’ve all got new things we're using.
RB: We're using a whole different palette on this record. So we’re figuring out how to be the same people touring with the same things. How do we make it sound like the record, and if it's not going to sound like the record, how do we make it more interesting for a live setting? We never want to have backing tracks. We draw the line there.
Do you feel like switching it to live is an act of translation?
RB: Yeah, definitely. It's a whole other creative process for us.
I'm interested in how you’re going to do the backing vocals without a backing track.
RB: When we tour, we have 5 people, and we just got a new guitarist. A guitarist, Lila.
BB: And she has a great voice.
RB: She's got an amazing voice, great guitarist. She'll be able to do a lot of those harmonies. Something I've always wanted ever since we were really little is to have that feminine presence, which is why all the records have a large feminine influence. It's never been there, so I'm really excited to have that.
Talking about previous records, both Shadow On Everything and Stray were quite surreal and mythical at points whereas Birthmarks feels quite grounded. Was that movement away from the mythical just something that naturally occurred?
RB: In a way, yeah. But I will say that one of those layers that I was talking about that's hard to get to on this record is pretty mythical. I didn't want it to be as far in the front. It’s back there controlling everything that's happening on the record. But you'd have to be paying attention to understand that it's happening. There's this thing outside of the reincarnation. I don't want to say too much about it, but there's definitely a shadowy mythical figure on the record. I wanted it to be as shadowy as it would be from experiencing it in real life, to where it's just an influence that you get little glimpses of. So, it's definitely there, but it's deeper under the surface than usual. A bit more hidden away this time. Love On My Mind didn't have much of that though. I think that was all pretty much grounded.
Well, to me that seemed like you were like most grounded record. I remember it was inspired by The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and it does remind me of that book in a lot of ways.
RB: Yeah, exactly.
You can combine the two together to max out your misery.
BB: [laughs] Yeah, start misery maxing.
As final question, what were you reading and consuming in the process of making the album?
RB: I turn off all input when I'm making a record. I don't watch any shows. I don't listen to anything. I don't read anything. Unless I have to for research, like the reincarnation books and stuff like that. So, for me, I don't even think there was anything I could point at.
WB: I guess I was thinking about a book that Reid loaned to me, called Hurricane Season.
I keep seeing that one at my bookshop.
RB: Oh, it’s a great one, I mean, if you talk about misery maxing that one that doesn't let up.
WB: Yeah, and it’s also fantastical in its own right. It's a master class in misery, but definitely a great read.
BB: I mean similarly, I try not to take in too much, so usually I'll watch things that comfort me, after a day of working on music, so that's usually like Alan Partridge. Or old video game walkthroughs and run throughs. But yes, a lot of Alan Partridge.
There's no such thing as too much Alan Partridge.
BB: That's a great point. Do you know when the new shows coming out? I can't find a date.
I didn't realise they had a new on Partridge coming out.
BB: It's either him in Dubai or just getting back from Dubai.
Despite being in England, I haven't caught up with British TV for a while. I've just kind of mainly been on American stuff for the last few years. But if there’s new Partridge coming out I got to get back on it.
RB: Yeah, man. And there are those audio books too, and then the the podcast From The Oat House. So good.
I get a lot of Alan Partridge reels nowadays.
RB: Me too.
In between the doom scroll it’s like a light shining down.
RB: [laughs].