NYPC are back with so many changes they should really be called the New New Young Pony Club.
They’ve lost a bassist and picked up a new one, they’ve swapped left-field haircuts for different left-field haircuts and they’ve whipped up a new album, curiously entitled 'The Optimist'. So, what else has been occurring in the nearly two and a half years since we’ve heard a recorded peep out of New Young Pony Club? Have they thrown out electric guitars and picked up ukuleles? Have they ditched the post-funk, nu rave, electropoppiness they proffered us with 2007’s 'Fantastic Playroom' in favour of Gregorian plainchant? As their second LP breaks, Spoonfed chats to NYPC to ask: are they now the New New Young Pony Club? And, if so, what else is different?
“Yes, that’s what we’re called now. NNYPC. No, we’re all a lot wiser, I’d say. I would say mature but that sounds really dull. The sound has changed similarly, as you’d expect. Deeper and more honest. Some people will take a while to get used to it, I’m sure, but there’s no doubt it’s for the better. We feel we haven’t really changed as much as the world has since our last album.”
'The Optimist' certainly creates an infinitely darker soundscape to the toyshop-flavoured one built from the London new wave rockers' day-glo debut. Indeed, 2007's buoyant, early-day favourites 'Ice Cream', 'The Bomb' and 'Get Lucky' could be the chirpy, hyperactive younger siblings of breathy, broody – questionably melancholic – numbers like 'Lost A Girl', 'Oh Cherie' and 'Architect Of Love' on the new collection. It’s a dance record, no doubt, but the ethos seems to have shifted.
“Our early mantra used to be ‘songs you can sing and dance to’, and I think that still works for half of the new album,” explain the herd. “The other half would probably come under a slightly different one: songs that move your mind more than your feet. But maybe not as corny as that. We are an optimistic band, very optimistic, in fact. Except when we’re being pessimistic.”
So what do the five-piece – who switched bass-pincher Igor Volk for We Smoke Fags’ Lee Godwin – feel most pessimistic about these days: the recession, or The X-Factor? “The dumbing down of music in the mainstream is a crime to the arts. We still believe in pop as an artistic form but that belief is getting rarer. The recession is bad for sales but everything has cycles. And some of the best music ever made came from darker times – that’s something to be optimistic about!”
But didn’t guitarist Andy Spence – who, alongside charismatic singer Tahita Bulmer, wrote and produced 'The Optimist', just as they did 'Fantastic Playroom' – compare making this album to “cutting my own guts out”?
“Ha ha! I did feel like that at times, yes,” Spence confesses. “What I really meant was that we revealed our true inner-selves much more on this record. The creative process is usually fraught and this album was no different. When a song has something special about it you just don’t give up until it’s finished. It’s not even a conscious choice.”
Speaking of consciousness, have the band noticed any conscious shift in the genetic make-up of a New Young Pony Club fan? At early gigs – particularly once the band embarked upon the NME Awards Rave Tour in 2007 alongside Klaxons, CSS and The Sunshine Underground – the giddy mosh-pits were stuffed with brightly-coloured, bouncy youngsters who looked as if they drank the insides of glow-sticks for breakfast. Have the people on the floor grown up as much as the people on stage?
“We’ve always had a hugely diverse set of fans. It was usually the glow-kids at the front then the intelligent, chin-stroking musos at the back. Most of the fans who have stayed loyal are not the teens but the music fans.” Plus, they tell us, in case we’re getting concerned, an NYPC gig is still an NYPC gig: fun, sweaty and loud.
This yearning to make people dance and sweat seems to be the one constant threading through the band’s six-year history. But Spence is keen to point out that their influences have remained stable since their acclaimed debut and that they didn’t fall into the cursed second album hole: being a band who can only write about being in a band. He promises that rather than becoming overly introspective and self-aware, the ponies went back to their roots to write this one.
“Musically, while making the record, Tahita and I retreated to the safety of our old faves. I did love that Animal Collective album, though. But now, we’re listening to a lot of The Invisible, T3Eth, Laurel Collective, Wave Machines, My Tiger My Timing. And Gorillaz!”
And what, other than music, inspired their second sonic outing? “Life,” he insists. And then, just to prove they’re not all doom and gloom but still fond of the sweeter, stickier things in life, “And cake.” See? Same band, different pudding.
Martha De Lacey
The Optomist is out now.
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