OUTFIT
“Welcome to our abode” says David Berger,
drummer and producer for Wirral five-piece OUTFIT as he beckons me into their
home studio. Hastily taped together soundproofing, old analogue synths and a
deer’s head draped in headphones surround me; I get the feeling that cabin
fever may have settled in during the four months spent recording here. It’s
been a long road for Outfit since their debut single Two Islands landed
in 2011, and as that album never arrived and the months turned into years, an
increasing sense of expectation, or doubt (probably depending on how long you’d
lived here), started to force its way underneath the narrative of one of the
most promising bands to emerge from the city in a decade.
In 2011 the NME named them the sixth best new
artists in the world, echoing national media by citing their elusiveness and
mystery as a significant point of interest. Berger himself even admits that
they played up to it for a while, but as the interview continues it becomes
clear that over the last two years since Two Islands, they haven’t
really been laying low at all. “It was never even a conscious decision to stay
away. We were just very cautious”, Berger explains. “I think you can get to a
stage where everyone is talking about you and it's all happening very easily.
But unless they can quickly come up with a clear way to capitalise on it then
it's best left alone. We’d built up a load of these great contacts with labels,
but none of them were throwing millions at us. And there was even the EP last
year (Another Night’s Dreams Reach Earth Again), which was all set up to
be released via another label another label until that all went tits up”. Fruitless
label meetings, a failed EP release and a even tentative UK tour where “no one
really turned up”; all salient features of a band trying to make themselves
heard among a sea of people who just might not be listening. It’s easy to
assume that when someone is keeping their cards close to their chest, they’re
holding a pretty strong hand. And it’s true; as they sporadically put out new
best-of-year singles at the drop of a hat (Everything All The Time, Dashing
In Passing), you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a band in complete
control. Underneath though, there is a more simple and familiar story of a new
act struggling to get a break. “I guess we thought it would be easier to make
money from all this”, Berger says tiredly, echoing Mercury Prize nominees Field
Music’s admission in The Guardian last year that they only make around five
grand per annum.
We love to give bands a narrative though,
contextualising success in a way that’s aspirational for us, yet completely
unattainable. Almost every interview with Outfit has focused largely on their
time spent living in The Lodge (a twenty bedroom, almost rent free manor just
off Smithdown Road), throwing parties every week, hanging out with other
musicians and having an unbelievable time in some sort of impossible utopia
where no one has to work, pay tax, settle bills, or get an overdraft. Outfit’s
tenuous relationship with the media seems to have been built largely on this,
which has, perhaps more so than they’d like to admit, worked in their favour.
“There has been times where we’ve worried if anyone even gave a shit anymore or
if anyone even knew we still existed,” concedes Berger. I’m not so sure his
fears are justified, though. I mean, this could have been a master-class in PR
if Outfit were contrived enough to have done it all on purpose. With a full
length record soon to be available, critics, fans and casual listeners all have
a chance to nail Outfit down and figure out what they mean to them. It’s easy
to be iconic when you’re enigmatic and have the luxury of keeping everyone at
arms length, so it certainly will be interesting to see how the band develop
within the margins of a singular body of work.
Their debut album Performance comes out
in August via Double Denim Records, where their ability to of shift from woozy
jams to straight up funk-fusion in the space of just a song is palpable as
ever, resulting in a record that is wildly erratic, yet continually entrancing.
Even when the album does shift in feel, the changes still feel organic,
exemplified by one of the strongest tracks Elephant Days, which begins
as a fidgety, awkward shuffle and slowly evolves into a sprawling build and
release knockout. If there were a thread going through the album it would be
interrelated by an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. Vocals negotiate their
way across gaping intervals, dissonant harmonies and demonic chord progressions
like in the uneasy Spraypaint. On the steady chant of House On Fire,
an almost arpeggiated melody attempts to wriggle free from stabbing synths,
revealing the bands ability to make abrasion as musical as possible without
sacrificing any tension. These songs are bolder without being unnecessarily
complicated, and the nuances and the energy of early singles, which were
impressive but still sonically limited, are present but just concentrated in
much tighter places. “The singles sound more straightforward because they were
recorded in a very straightforward way”, explains Berger. “To me, I don’t feel
like the song writing for the album has changed, but the way we’ve recorded it
certainly has”. With their home studio, Outfit have had the chance to spend
time with these songs, experiment with their constraints and really challenge
them. There is even a new, beefed up version of Two Islands, where a
more distant synth arrangement makes the cry of ‘I don’t know anyone else in
here’ sound less like a statement of defiance and more like a profound, very
moving cry for help.
“There’s an element of disillusionment in
everything we’ve done. Life doesn’t turn out the way you plan it most of the
time, and recently life has got a lot harder for most people”, Berger laments,
in a statement that sounds much less general than perhaps he had hoped. It’s
been a long, arduous wait for Outfit, and the release of the album has clearly
served some sort of cathartic purpose for them.
However, you do get the feeling that even if
they can’t force away the darkness completely, they can at least find some
solace in the shadows. Performance is a brilliant record, more complete
and more substantial than anyone could have expected, and certainly one of the
best to come out of Liverpool in the last five years. They haven’t said nearly all they have to say, though. And despite the
years since their arrival, this very much feels like their beginning.
