Indie art rock band The Margins released their debut album Steady Frames via London based DIY label Crocodile Laboratories in December – a lost album of sorts, made up as it is of 10 tracks conceived between 2006 and 2012 that have only seen the light of day as a collection over a decade later. It’s a wonderful selection of skewed and ambitious folky slacker pop that takes the seemingly disparate influences of Pavement and J.S. Bach, chucks in a bit of Shakespeare for good measure and then throws the contents of a specialist music store at them. If that all sounds concerningly cerebral, fear not for this is a record whose heart is as warm and fuzzy as your favourite pair of socks. They do a fantastic job of taking familiar elements and taking them in slightly unusual directions, which is very pleasing indeed.
Now based in four separate countries, the band caught up for a cross-border conversation to lead us through the album.
In the Shade
David: One of the first songs we wrote together, and the simplest. The same four chords go round and round, and the lyrics partly refer to the computer game Loom. There are no drums but, eventually, there are three Maries.
Marie: This song makes me think of a lonesome astronaut, exploring space and new planets, it is kind of eerie…but with beautiful landscapes. I really like the images you get from the sentence “Field of poppies, growing on the moon”… such a great scenario.
Kerry: Don’t forget, David, that for a long time your part in this song was a quite unhinged slide guitar. Eventually, this evolved into the jangly picked notes you can hear on the album. It was written in Paris, in the summer of 2006, probably during a break from long battles on the ping pong table.
Ian: I love the pipe organ sound here, it stays in the background mostly, but cuts through a couple of times in a nice way. I can’t remember what instrument we actually used…!?!
David: It was one of those nice old Italian electric organs, an EKO I think.
Intellectual Intimacy
Marie: Such an elaborate song and strange but lovely song… I really love the crazy keyboard parts!
David: This is the most recent song on the album, but it’s from 2012! We’ve written lots of songs since then, and we should put out our second album much quicker than this one. Maybe it’s the most emotional song on the album?
Kerry: Is it the most emotional song? The title is interesting. What is intellectual intimacy? The song was conceived in London, during a dark afternoon in mid January. It does evoke something of that time and place, which I don’t think other songs on the album do.
David: Maybe it evokes some imaginary romantic place, London in 2012 but also half-remembered adolescences…
We Are Collapsible
David: My son asked me what this song was about today, and I couldn’t explain it very well except saying that folding oneself up might be an action that’s both physical and emotional. He demonstrated by sitting on the floor and hugging his knees to his chest.
Marie: For me this song is about being human, or maybe just trying to be an adult – “being collapsible” – is such a great way of conveying vulnerability and not being in control of everything and how impossible that all is – even though we try and convince ourselves otherwise. We are all collapsible!
Ian: My parents gave me a bowed psaltery one birthday. It’s an inflexible instrument, very awkward to tune and play and the strings resonate for too long. Apparently it was invented in the 1940s. Maybe it sounds better in ‘Russian Toffee’…
Kerry: Ian, I think the psaltery is perfect in this recording! This is the oldest song on the album. It was written in early 2006. In those days, most of our songs had an atonal ‘crazy section’, where we would just play random chords and notes for a few bars before the real song returned, which resulted in some sort of tension and resolution relationship. In ‘We Are Collapsable’, we forewent the free randomness of these crazy bits and just found a subtler form of tension by playing a b minor chord for a few bars. I suppose this was an indication that our songwriting skills were developing?
Renegade Priests:
David: This song has so many strange things packed into 2 minutes! The line ‘punks in exile’ was a mishearing from the ‘Hearts in Exile’ by The Homosexuals, which is an amazing record. My friend Andy and I once listened to it over and over again while driving around Chicago for the day, but I’d completely misunderstood and misremembered all the lyrics. I also love Ian’s harmonica playing, and was surprised when he brought a harmonica to the studio.
Kerry: I don’t think I’ve ever listened to The Homosexuals. Do you think the feast that Marie sings about at the end of the song was to celebrate the fact that renegade priests had lost their belief? I think this was written in 2011? Probably in the summer.
The Hindenberg Waltz
Marie: It is like a indie song version of a historical disaster film. But I think the song is both poetic and spooky …and I always liked singing it.
David: I find this song quite unnerving, I have to admit… we came to the studio with the parts of the song, which we’d only ever played quietly, and it ended up like the kind of loud 90s music we listened to in the 90s, but had never played together.
Ian: Yes, parts of this one sound a bit like Mogwai etc. Some of the lyrics, like ‘Inflatable Moon’ would be a good name for a 90s band?
Kerry: I find it neither spooky nor unnerving, although I find the first half quite manic. I really like the second half of the song. I like the way the guitars and violin sort of drift along with each other. It’s slightly messy, but just holds itself together. And Marie sings it so well.
The Poet’s Poem
David: This song takes bits of ancient Sanskrit poetry, along with new words, in a kind of ersatz Indian pop song form. But it’s also the simplest possible folk chord sequence. Ian, I really love your electric piano part, it’s the part of the album that gives me the most pleasure.
Ian: Thanks! Is it a Rhodes? Again, I can’t remember the instrument we used!?!
David: It’s Rhodes, which is then joined by a funny foot-pumped harmonium.
Kerry: ‘The Poet’s Poem’ has a different feel to the other songs on the album. It is one of only two without drums. It is gentle, yet energetic. I agree with what you said about the piano and the singing. David, your guitar riff is quite insistent on this song.
David: Maybe the guitar riff is like the one person on the meditation retreat who can’t relax until the last day?
Russian Toffee
David: A really quickly written song about (maybe) wanting to write a love letter but feeling too breezy to even do that. James’ drumming on it is really good, and made us play it 30% faster than we’d ever done before.
Kerry: I remember earlier versions of this song being quite different. In the studio, mostly due to the powerful drumming but also because of the party atmosphere on the night it was recorded, it ended up being our loudest and most ‘rock’ song.
Fixed Ideas
Ian: Kerry’s guitar in this is really excellent. And the bass is also great. I think Kerry suggested I do some trills on the violin, so I did, and the sound reminds me of Night On The Bare Mountain – some of the scariest music ever, I think.
Kerry: Thanks! You did well with the trills.
David: I don’t even know how to play this song! That’s why the wonky surf guitar on the choruses is so strange. Kerry, you developed the riff by transcribing part of the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz…
Kerry: Sort of. I really loved Symphonie Fantastique when I was a university student. I particularly liked the 5th movement, which included different variations of the des aerie. I figured out how to play the descending melody on the guitar and turned it into a riff. I think it was the first original song idea I showed you, David, when we started the band in early 2006.
Marie: I always felt for Hector and celebrated him in my mind whilst singing.
Kerry: I always felt for Hector, too.
The Time is Out of Joint
David: Almost all the words in the song are lines from Hamlet… and the guitar bit in the middle went through a really eccentric old magnetic tape loop device. In the background at the end there’s the only voices on the album other than Marie, with Kerry and I singing.
Marie: I like all the Shakespearean references present on this album in general, but here they are the most direct and obvious in both melody and lyrics. I think we might have had a little Shakespearean wine to go with this song too [ha ha] – “Below oh oh oh…”
Kerry: I love the middle section of this song, and I especially love how it turned out in the recording. It’s probably my favourite part of the album.
In the Night
The song kind of describes and imagines how Bach was commissioned to write the Goldberg Variations, the aria of which is played during the verses… Ian, you kind of play parts of it on the bass and other parts on the classical guitar, and the melodica too? Marie’s singing is really beautiful on this I think.
Ian: Yes the tune of the aria and the bass line are basically as written by J.S Bach except we’re playing in 4-time rather than 3, which just sort of happened without anyone deciding. This song was painful to record as I kept getting the bass wrong. SPOILER: Bach fans will recognise a quotation from another of his works towards the end of the track. But Marie’s singing is the highlight, really lovely.
Marie: I forgot about this song! It is very gentle and lovely, so well played. It is like a lullaby and the overdubbed voices at the end sound really really nice and dreamy I think.
David: It took half the night to record the basic track in the studio, like a folk-rock consort of acoustic guitars, electric bass and drums. But then it was really beautiful sitting in the control room and listening to Marie adding her voice and Ian adding other instruments.
Kerry: I remember the evening when this song was written, but I can’t remember the year. It was either 2008 or 2009. Ian’s guitar solos are lovely, and I agree that Marie sings it so well.
Steady Frames is out now on Crocodile Laboratories – order now via Bandcamp
The Margins: Instagram
Crocodile Laboratories: Instagram / Bandcamp
Article by Paul Maps
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