一聽音樂網

“Deaths and Entrances was a title before it was an album – and a poem before it was a title… By Dylan Thomas… We loved how vast it was, and it seemed to sum up exactly what we wanted to do next. It gave us something to aim for. We wanted to “pull the thunderbolts, shut the sun, plunge, and mount our darkened keys”.

　　Many of the songs from the album are inspired by literature, specifically ‘Lanark’ by Alasdair Gray. The book is about life, death, dreams, nightmares, war, heaven and hell… Cycles… So is our album.

　　We were drawn into the illogical nature and conflicting thoughts of the anti-hero; the time travelling Billy Pilgrim; the cowardly Yossarian; and the main (unnamed) character in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

　　During the writing process, we were holed up in an old pub, which had been turned into a rehearsal space in Greenock, our hometown. We had the only key, and were left to ourselves to create the album. The roof leaked, there were no windows, but it was amazing to have somewhere of our own to work together. We used it for the 628 days it took us to write the album.

　　We wrote a lot of the songs on the album at the same time, rather than one at a time. I think this makes it sound much more cohesive. It sounds like a band at a certain point in time. You end up developing your own language as a band; all these ideas were swirling around in our heads and in our room… and it feels spontaneous.

　　Space and time were important to us. So much so we mentioned it in ‘Hopelessly, Endlessly’. The thought that we didn’t need to think about anything other than what was happening within the four walls we were writing in… Like we’d hibernated into our own private world.

　　‘Lacklustre’ was probably the song which was most difficult to write. It was the first we started, and we finished it the day it was recorded. It’s about a resuscitation doll called Annie, which is based on the l’inconnue de la Seine – an unidentified woman who died in the river in the early 1900’s. We thought it was a tragic but beautiful story. A woman drowns, her face is immortalised in a plaster mask which is then used as a resuscitation doll to help save people from drowning. Deaths and Entrances.”