AU Meets: The Mae Shi

"We couldn’t describe a Mae Shi song to you, but we know one when we hear it."

Over the course of four records and countless full throttle live performances, Los Angeles band The Mae Shi have showcased a penchant for joyously unhinged punktronica. Fast, furious and willfully experimental, their 2004 debut album Terrorbird, was a lunatic laugh of a record, its sound and subject matter taking us to realms far beyond the conventional.

Populated by the most bizarre subjects; vampires, ergot poisoning in the Middle Ages, werewolves and dolphins in the military – yes, really – their lyrical tales of the unexpected were matched in oddness only by the music – exceedingly short one to two minute tracks crammed full of anarchic electronics, renegade guitar and vandal rhythms.

With each subsequent release The Mae-Shi have continued to evolve and exhilarate. Flirting with pop conventions, their 2008 biblical concept album HLLLYH has proven an artistic milestone for the band and has seen them bestowed with critical accolades from some of the foremost names in the music media. Praise still ringing in their ears they’ve taken to the road, ready to preach their singular Gospel.

Ahead of their Belfast date, the band’s Brad Breeck talks to AU.

Your older songs often seemed to be exercises in brevity, short, sharp, one-minutes shocks. What was the reasoning behind that?

“We used to have this idea that musical ideas need only be presented once within a song. In most songs you hear like three ideas repeated within a very predictable structure – our thesis was that it was more fun to hear an idea only once then onto the next one. So we’d say that our music had just as many, if not more, musical ideas than ‘normal’ songs, but minus the repetition, which makes the songs shorter.”

With HLLLYH you have switched things up. Playing with rock and pop conventions it is more immediately accessible and melodically straightforward than some of the earlier material. What prompted you to change style in that way?

“It kind of just happened that way. Part of was that Ezra Buchla left the band. When Ezra left we got to rethink the way we would write songs. We used to leave almost all of the vocal writing to Ezra because we were always so blown away by the things he came up with. So when he left, we all pitched in on writing melodies for vocals. This meant that some ideas that Ezra might have shied away from, like more conventional song structures and sing-songy melodies and things, crept into the vocabulary.”

Also, of course, HLLLYH is a concept record, concerned with notions of the divine and the nature of faith. It’s a big theme of course but why did you choose it as the basis of a Mae Shi album?

“We’ve always found the Bible to be a great source of song ideas – MOST Mae Shi songs are just reworkings of stories from the Bible. In the case of this record, the theme kind of emerged after we had a few songs. It felt like a fun thing to do, and a good way to make something that resonated with lots of people and had a strong theme that was easy to talk about.”

It’s the first record you’ve made without Ezra Buchla, how difficult was it working without him?

“It was definitely daunting to write Mae Shi songs without Ezra, at first. It kind of took a leap of faith for us to continue to “be” Mae Shi without Ezra. We didn’t know if we could continue to be the same band because we all felt his voice was so central to the way we all conceived of the band. Once we had a couple of songs in the can we realized that The Mae Shi didn’t have to be this one thing, that the idea of the band was maybe bigger than any one of us, and could continue to evolve. Now we all feel like the band should continue on forever, even after all the founding members have left. As long as the core members really understand what The Mae Shi is, the flame can continue to burn! But yeah, it was hard to write songs without Ezra at first.”

You always seem willing to embrace new styles and sounds, to experiment. Is that freedom to try different things something that the Mae Shi particularly cherish?

“Yes. If it’s not fun and you aren’t trying something or learning something, then maybe it’s not worth doing. I’ve never liked the idea of being in a band that wrote the same song or the same kind of song over and over. That sounds dreadful. It’s a double-edged sword though, because it can be very difficult to write new material when your back catalogue is so disparate. I don’t think any of us really knows what a Mae Shi song sounds like. We couldn’t describe a Mae Shi song to you, but we know one when we hear it.”

Continue to part 2

Issue #51 - I Told You This Would Be A Good Issue

Featuring Biffy Clyro, Of Montreal, Duke Special, Frightened Rabbit, Cold War Kids, Jay Reatard, Pat Mills, and more.