“The transition in the band started long before Tim left,” he says. “I was doubling melodies, talking between songs, standing centre stage, even doing a lot of interviews, so it wasn’t a drastic transition. Not to take away from what Tim was or brought to the band, but I realised that with me as the lead singer now, my only choice was to own it and to say to people, ‘This is what we are now, take it or leave it,’ and people have responded really well.”
Following Smith’s departure, Midlake scrapped a number of songs, but moved right onto writing a new batch for the record that would become Antiphon. “Tim’s departure was unexpected for us, but there was no use crying over it or letting it stop us or divert our course,” says Pulido.
“Every new record that a band makes has its own unique influences and sounds,” he continues, “and Antiphon is really just a case of a band embracing a different set of circumstances and pulling together in new ways. Tim wanted to get away and pursue his own thing, and we just had to understand and respect that and pull things together as a band. It forced us to step up communally, because Tim was always an integral figure in the band before. It was a challenge, but it helped shape us and make it better. Looking back, I’m really happy at how quickly we pulled together.”
The songs on Antiphon are more loose and spontaneous than on any of Midlake’s three previous records, drawing explicitly on psyched-out ’70s rock and introducing more of a jam band sound.
“I think part of it was just us trying to capture a more organic feeling than some of what we’d done in the past,” Pulido says. “For better or worse, some of the recordings were a little bit too worked-over before, and we didn’t want that this time, we wanted the new recordings to be a bit more organic.”
Rather than being too precious about getting each individual part of a recording perfect, the focus on this album was on the recording as a whole. “We wanted to capture the magic while it happened, rather than trying over and over to recreate a single moment,” says Pulido. “This time around, we didn’t want to overthink what we were doing, we wanted to just depend on each other and trust what we knew was right, to capture all the ideas at the very beginning.”
Solidifying their bond as band members and friends, Midlake recently opened a bar called Paschall in their hometown of Denton, Texas. Located just off the town square, it’s a place for them to hang out and relax outside the studio, and a reassuring bastion of stability.
“Being in a band, you don’t really have a retirement plan, so it’s nice to have something like this Texas is a great place to live, and our bar is somewhere we can enjoy company and conversation in a warm atmosphere. It’s nice to have something else going on, money-wise, while you’re recording and not touring. It’s a great little nugget of a thing to have for us.”
Speaking of touring, Midlake are set to come to Australia, where they’ll play a Vivid LIVE sideshow at the Corner Hotel. I ask Pulido just how the band’s live show has changed in this new, more democratic era.
“Well, Tim’s absence is obviously a big change in the live show, because I’m in the role of lead singer now, I’m up there front and centre. But taking it back a step further from that, what we’ve done this time is try to add more life and a bigger sound to the overall set. The new songs lend themselves to that, but we wanted to go back and have some consistency there with the older songs as well. The new record has a bigger sound, a more psychedelic vibe, a lot of vocal harmonies, and so we’ve gone back to the old songs and added a few more of those things.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
