Warp + Weft will return next Wednesday. 

The Plastic Constellations: Recording Q+A with Jeff Allen

The Plastic Constellations are young dudes, but an old band. Their French Kiss records debut, Crusades, came out last year to critical acclaim, and then they basically made it their mission to hit up every town in America. When Reveille caught up with them, they were hard at work laying down guitar tracks over the basic drum and bass tracks they'd been working on for their new record. The recording was proceeding in orderly fashion at the temporary digs for Joe Mabbott's Hideaway Studios, with guitarists Jeff Allen and Aaron Mader recording clean guitar tracks and what they called "beef"—overdriven guitar tracks. Drummer Matt Scharenbroich and bassist Jordan Roske chill on the couch, reading music magazines, and Mabbott's new dog Roxy prowls the studio. They even let us take a little video footage:

The big board.

The countdown to shaving.

As Mader works on setting up his tone for the "beef" overdubs, Allen stepped outside to talk about the session, their plans for the future (which will likely include less touring and maybe even an indefinite hiatus, according to Roske), and the best way to get around the Twin Cities in the wake of the 35W collapse.

Reveille: So do you have a title yet?

Allen: No.

Reveille: Do you have possibilities?

Allen: We have possibilities. They're all completely ridiculous. It's weird: We came into Crusades with an entire mythology built around it. It was quasi a concept record—not really—but there was a story that had an arc, and the songs followed that arc, whatever that story may be. And we knew it was going to be sort of larger than life, so we knew it was gonna be called fucking Crusades—a ridiculously epic title for a record. This one is definitely going to be different in feel, so we're not really sure where to go with it. The music is not as extreme; it's definitely a little more melodic, a little different in terms of dynamics and arrangements. The lyrics are a little more hopeful as opposed to everything is fucked. [The last record] was dire in a sort of cartoony way, but this is a little more hopeful. We don't really know where to go with the title, and we're sort of enjoying that.

Reveille: Something will make itself known to you.

Allen: Yeah, Crusades was so planned and scripted, it's sort of nice to be just letting it happen.

Reveille: So you've been writing these songs over the course of the summer mostly? How old's the oldest thing you're recording?

Allen: The oldest thing is probably a little over a year old. We were playing a couple of these songs on the Crusades tours—we did way too many tours. It was ridiculous. We were all over the country, so it was hard to find time to write, but we did manage to do a handful during those tours. But yeah, a lot of them were written this spring. We just holed up for most of the spring and summer and didn't play many shows. Just banged out the rest of it.

Reveille: So do you have a rehearsal space and just get together a couple times a week?

Allen: We get together a couple times a month in Matt's basement. Practice space rent is cheap [laughs]. He has a vacant concrete supply store on one side and a bunch of partiers on the other side, so things are a little lax in that neighborhood.

Reveille: So has the method always been to record piecemeal like this? Like basics with scratch tracks and then overdubbing?

Allen: That's how we did both Mazatlan and Crusades. The records we did when we were in high school, that was pre-extensive use of ProTools days and so shit was on tape then, and that was just with Dave Gardner and Eric Olson just live in a room. And since ProTools makes everything a lot easier, we've started moving to parsing things out, making sure the performance is right for everyone so we get perfect takes. And yeah, I've heard people argue that that takes away a little bit from the live element of it, but I would rather have it be executed to the vision of the original song.

Reveille: Well, I think if you're going to make a live album, you should make a very live album—you should not have overdubs, essentially. And if you're going to make an album where you're going to have any kind of careful of control over parts, you may as well be controlling over everything. Because I think that so often bands end up in the middle, where it's kind of live, but then there's some other stuff, and it doesn't have an identity either way. But live takes are tough, because they can be good, but one person can be like, "I guess it's fine."

Allen: And then you gotta move forward.

Reveille: And when it was all tape, it was so expensive to do it. You'd go into studios—before you knew anybody—you'd just go into any studio that would have you and you'd pay through the nose. You'd be like, "We have six hours! Let's make an album!"

Allen: I remember that was sort of the mindset when we were in high school making our records. We were always working with Dave Gardner and he was a friend, so we made it work, but still, he would explain to us the costs of working with tape and renting the studio and it was insane. And yes, we're still working with a professional producer—Joe Mabbott, who's the best of the best—but if you think about it, technology has made it so much easier for anyone to record in their bedroom. That can only be good.

Reveille: It's definitely good. I know that when I got into recording digital stuff at home, I got a ProTools setup and it cost like $1000. Now I bought a USB interface, which was like $200, and GarageBand and you have access to so much stuff. That doesn't mean you know how to use it.

Allen: You still have to figure out how to use it, but God bless the Mac operating system. They've got the iLife suite and yeah, it's not like top-of-the-line stuff, but they've totally democratized that sort of stuff. It's pretty cool.

Reveille: So what's it like doing a second album for a label? I imagine the first record you don't really know what to expect.

Allen: First album, everyone comes into it with uncertain expectations. I think French Kiss expected us to be out on the road a lot and we expected to do that, too. We wanted to do that; that was part of the adventure. But along with being on the road a lot, the label worked super hard at and, admittedly, spent a considerable amount of money promoting it and with the way the industry's changing, that's not always in everyone's interest—to spend a crap-ton of money on it. So I think both parties—the label and ourselves—are coming to this one with a different mindset, of let's release it and we don't need to spend as much on ads in print magazines. That's changed. An ad in Magnet doesn't mean as much as it used to. Everyone's sort of coming into it with a different mindset. Everyone still expects it to be ridiculously fun. That's the best part about working with French Kiss: they're in bands, so when you stop through town they want to have a beer with you after the show and trade tour stories. I'm pretty sure The Hold Steady and Les Savy Fav have us beat on the tour stories. Ours usually amounts to us getting a case of beer and drinking it in some dude's basement while he plays video games. Those are our nights.

Reveille: So on a completely unrelated note, but a current events note, were you guys in town when 35W collapsed? Everyone you know is all right?

Allen: Everyone we know is fine as far as I know. We all, in the band, texted each other right away to make sure everyone else was all right. It's very messed up and calls into question, unfortunately, some other political issues like, was the bridge fucked up, should something have been done? I've stopped going on bridges altogether.

Reveille: Yeah, it's tough when you've got two cities on either side of the Mississippi. Like, is there any way to not go over the bridges? You could go up to the source.

Allen: Yeah, go up to Lake Itasca. I've just been taking a hot air balloon everywhere.