| Q & A: Luke Pettipoole of The Envy Corps |
|
|
| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 11:48 AM | |
|
The story of The Envy Corps is about as typical as Dr. Evil's childhood. No luge lessons or meat helmets, but how many bands from Iowa do you know of that hooked up with The Killers for an opening slot on a U.S. tour, signed to a British label, and have 56,475 friends on MySpace, all without a single domestically-released album in print? Exactly. You may have heard them on The Current, where "Story Problem," the grandest of the songs from their EP I Will Write You Love Letters If You Tell Me To, has been getting airplay. The song shows off the band's considerable debt to the lush, widescreen pop of bands like Travis and Coldplay, built as it is around driving drums, a metronomic and chiming guitar part, and a nimbly melodic bass line. It all sounds about a million miles away from Ames, Iowa, and it's carried there by singer/guitarist Luke Pettipoole's yearning vocals, which are joined towards the end of the song by a raucous chorus of friends and fans. It's a not so subtle way to make the track feel like a big happy homecoming, but what The Envy Corps lack in subtlety, they make up for in achingly giant emotion. Download "Story Problem" or stream below: The remainder of I Will Write You Love Letters If You Tell Me To is no slouch in the hook department either. "Rhinemaidens" is a tighter, slightly less anthemic pop gem that works its magic a little more slowly, but no less effectively. On "Baby Teeth" they show their, well, teeth a bit more. It's a slightly darker shade of pretty, redolent of the slow arc and subtle menace of Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)." If the band can continue to build on what they've started, mainstream success seems like more a matter of time than chance.  The Envy Corps: Pettipoole second from left This week, The Envy Corps are returning to the Twin Cities to play a show at the Nomad on Saturday, December 15. With a new full-length, Dwell, set to be released in 2008 (their debut LP, Soviet Reunion, is long out of print), and a new single pressing of "Rhinemaidens" freshly unleashed on the UK, The Envy Corps are poised to make a big splash both abroad and stateside. Reveille got a chance this week to exchange e-mails with Pettipoole. Reveille Magazine: So you guys are on a British label [Vertigo, a subsidiary of Mercury Records], but you're from Iowa. How'd that happen? Luke Pettipoole: We share management with The Killers, and they initially started on a UK label, which got them huge buzz over here in the US when they started to break. We decided to take a similar approach, so we initially shopped to British labels with our EP. We found a label that seemed interested in giving us a lot of control, which we were very keen on. RM: Is there a disconnect between working so much abroad and coming from the U.S.? LP: The culture is just different enough to take you off guard ... and when we're there we're very much in work mode. Obviously we had no friends or family over there, which can get hard after awhile, but it makes us appreciate the States all that much more. RM: And do you feel like you find a more appreciative audience abroad for what you do? LP: I'd say we get similar responses everywhere, here and abroad. In the last few years, with the advent of file-sharing, your geographical location doesn't ensure a certain sound like it used to. You could always tell a band from the Northwest or from NYC or from Manchester or Bristol, but no longer. I do think Brits are taken off guard that we are so European sounding, though. RM: I know you have some connections to Minneapolis (Pettipoole used to play drums in a band with We Became Actors' Jesse Stensby). Have you had a good time coming up here to play? LP: Since we went to the UK we haven't had a chance to tour much of the U.S. We used to play the Twin Cities quite a few years back, places like the Uptown Bar and the 7th Street Entry—and I loved it. The crowds are classic Midwestern and yet very music-hungry, so perfectly comfortable for us. RM: What's your songwriting process like? Do you tend to write songs all at once, or do they get pieced together over time? LP: It usually starts with me at home, coming up with the basic skeleton of the song and maybe an idea for the melody and a couple key lyrics. Then I present it to the band and we work it over for a few months, writing and re-writing parts until it comes out an Envy Corps song. We always have a steady stream of new things coming in, which keeps us interested at least. RM: You obviously got a whole lot of people to come and sing on "Story Problem." Who all was there and was it as much of a party as it sounds like? LP: That was recorded at our first sold out show [at Vaudeville Mews] in Des Moines. We have a mobile Pro Tools rig which we set up on stage right after the show ended. We asked everyone to stay for five minutes and we led them through the chants and claps while the tape was rolling. It was at our favorite venue in town and all our friends and fans were belting this chorus out with us—definitely one of my favorite Envy Corps experiences. RM: The music on your EP is pretty unabashedly big-sounding. Is that the way you've always rolled, and do you see the band still working in that vein? LP: We've generally always been that kind of band. The bands I grew up listening to—Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, The Flaming Lips—they all are masters of that huge build. I think we're kind of bored of that now, we are trying not to slip into the normal ways we work. RM: I Will Write You Love Letters If You Tell Me To is going for $79.99 on amazon.com right now [The low price is now $49.99, but it was $79.99 when the e-mail was written]. That's pretty amazing/ridiculous. What do you think about that? LP: I have no idea why it's priced like that. We only made 2000 of those which have sold out, so I guess they must be in demand. Lord knows I'm not making any of that money, so by all means download it. RM: You're working on a full-length right now? How's that going? LP: It's done. We ended up finishing about 25 songs and put 12 on the record and are saving the rest for B-sides and splits and other stuff. It was a great experience because we had six months to work on it by ourselves with just our good friend/engineer, no label guys breathing down our necks, etc., and it came out pretty much exactly like we wanted. COMING UP: The Envy Corps with We Became Actors. Saturday, December 15. Nomad World Pub. 9 pm. $6. 21+. |
|
| Last Updated: Monday, December 31, 2007 at 03:50 PM |
Backstage Blog
