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printSeason of the witch
It's a safe bet that some people who had written Ladytron off as a one-trick synthpop-revival act were surprised by the band's most recent album, Witching Hour, when it came out last fall. The disc certainly bears some of the signatures that Ladytron had established on its two previous full-length outings, 2001's 604 and 2002's Light and Magic: electronic tones anchored by thumping beats and topped by the deadpan vocals of Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie. On the other hand, Witching Hour proves that the Liverpool-based group's influences go deeper than '80s new wave. The cloud-surfing iridescence of tracks such as “White Light Generator” and “All the Way” suggests a debt to the dreamy haze of classic shoegazer sounds, while the churning, techno-rock buzz of “High Rise” and “Sugar” hints at previously hidden aggressive tendencies.
Reached at a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio, Ladytron's Daniel Hunt says that hitting the road with a live bassist and drummer for its sophomore disc gave the group a much-needed boot in the ass, and the lesson stuck when it came time to record Witching Hour.
Daniel Hunt sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know.
On wanting to spend more time in Vancouver: “Every time we come to Vancouver, we want to have a day off there. When we looked at the schedule this time, it looked to us [as if we did]. We didn't notice San Francisco was next. Normally Seattle is next. We thought we were going to have a day off. We were a bit disappointed, because we never have a chance. We know some people there, and we all have fun shopping the few hours that we do get off in the afternoon. I've got some relatives who live on the Island, as well, who I so far have failed to see the three times I've been there. Maybe next time.”
On the positive effects of the electroclash moment: “Well, it got indie kids dancing again, you know? So I don't think it was a bad thing, it's just that we didn't feel like being lumped in with it was appropriate.”
On the Ladytron concert experience: “A lot of people who come to see us live, especially now, are taken aback by how much more powerful it is than they expected. We try and better the record and make something that has its own value rather than just re-create it.”
“We toured Light and Magic for a full year,” Hunt says, “and if we had recorded that album at the end of the tour, rather than before we played any of it live, it would have been a lot heavier and a lot more dynamic, because playing live so much made us aware of things that we couldn't see from being in our home studio or whatever.”
It's not as if Ladytron is about to abandon its keyboards and join the Warped Tour, mind you. Hunt makes it clear that he doesn't consider his project a rock 'n' roll band, no matter how amped-up it sometimes gets. “I think people, at least at first, got kind of the wrong impression of Witching Hour,” he notes. “They thought that we'd just gone rock or something. That wasn't the intention. And also, a lot of things that were perceived to be guitars weren't actually guitars. There's not that much more guitar on that record than there is on Light and Magic, really, or even 604. Certainly there is on the first track [“High Rise”], but what we did was start to overdrive the mono synths a lot more, making them more fuzzy and drone-y sounds, rather than bloopy sounds. Some of the sonic palette we had before, we wanted to keep. Some of it we just weren't excited by anymore, because it's become more of a common currency. When we started, it wasn't. When we started, it was more of a novelty.”
Ladytron's story begins in the late 1990s, when its taste for vintage synthesizer tones and simple but appealing melodies made it seem like something of a throwback to the time when the Human League and Alphaville still walked the earth. The sight of Aroyo, Marnie, Hunt, and Reuben Wu manning their instruments in matching outfits stirred fond memories of Kraftwerk in anyone old enough to remember when “Autobahn” came out.
Of course, that was all before the rise of electroclash, when baby-blue eye shadow and asymmetrical haircuts quickly became de rigueur for clubbing hipsters. Suddenly, Ladytron's retro-futurist aesthetic didn't seem like such an anomaly. But while most of that scene's trend-obsessed denizens have returned to rightful obscurity””when was the last time you heard someone mention Electrocute or Lesbians on Ecstasy?””Ladytron has survived with its dignity intact.
Hunt says that's because Ladytron wanted nothing to do with the fad, preferring to just keep working until the smoke cleared. “Electroclash was DJ projects, and artists who had maybe one or two tracks and could scrape together an album with extreme difficulty,” he says, dismissively. “We were two albums in and we'd written all these songs, and we were touring as a band. I think the association was shortsighted.”
In any case, that's all in the past. Hunt would rather look ahead to the next Ladytron record, which he says should be out by this time next year. With Witching Hour having silenced critics who might have questioned the group's potential for growth and longevity, the keyboardist is eager to move forward. “We have stretched the palette quite a lot, and I feel like the next record is going to be easier to make, in terms of making something definitive,” he says. “It feels easier, and maybe we've got less to prove.”
Ladytron plays the Commodore Ballroom on Saturday (October 14).
