Features Track By Track: Landshapes - Rambutan

London’s Landshapes release their debut album, ‘Rambutan’, on 1st July. The four-piece don’t so much light up a room as gently warm up the surroundings. Their first work breezes by from a distant standpoint, but peer a little closer and you’ve an insight into a record that’s built on exactitude. Sonically, it’s all about sleight flourishes and light quips that flutter by. Beyond an initial impression however, you soon find a band that prefer to shift the structure than settle into a comfortable skin. The band’s track-by-track guide - which comes in tow with an exclusive stream of the debut - offers a full insight into how these studio newcomers become perfectionists, obsessives of craft.



Racehorse
‘Racehorse’ came together as an afterthought more or less. After months of reworking a truculent song with lots of time changes and key changes, a song that never quite wanted to settle into something very listenable, Heloise and Jemma started tinkering a new bass and guitar part one practice when we’d stopped for the night, and the first verse and chorus of the song sat easily over the top. It probably took a less than an hour to work out. We almost didn’t let it stay so short and simply but soon realised it did everything it needed to as it was. It’s one of our favourite tracks.

In Limbo
‘In Limbo’ is a pure jam track. Although the structure has changed, it still has the feel of the tascam recording I have from the first time we bashed it out, round and round for hours because it was so much fun to play.

It’s always felt like a fighting song, both musically and lyrically, it’s like building up the courage for something people say you can’t or shouldn’t do. I saw photos of the Cholita wrestlers at a photography exhibition several years ago. It’s such a powerful image, especially in Latin American society where being both indigenous and a woman is like a double sub-class. It was an image that stuck in my head whilst recording the song and I became fixated on the idea of making a video with the Cholitas. I started writing to people who’d filmed in Bolivia, and the wrestlers themselves where I could, but there was little I could really do until I got to La Paz. I met Ian who’s not only a great director but fluent in Spanish and we started making plans right away. It’s something that I think could have ended up being a crass if not done quite right…it was really important that to me that it was dignified, a celebration of these powerful women. It was so much fun to make.

LJ Jones
Somehow we lost ‘LJ Jones’ in the recording, which turned out to be lucky because in starting over we made a completely new song. We did the album in intensive bouts, sometimes with months between sessions - plenty of time to mull over and pick apart the songs as we were recording them. ‘LJ Jones’ just wasn’t working for whatever reason, and ended up being completely reworked with new bass and guitar parts, it’s now totally different from its original incarnation, which had come to the band more or less a complete song that Dan had written. The old one has a completely different feel, and we’ve put a practice room demo on the bonus cd for the album, I still love that version. This one is much rowdier, and the bass part is the namesake to the whole album: “Ram-bu-tan” is the word Heloise says to herself over and over to remember the bass rhythm, I think she’s probably got it by now though.

Threads
‘Threads’ is lots of different ideas that came together in the practice room, and it still has the feel of different parts interjecting like a conversation. It started out delicately and got bigger with Jemma’s guitar hooks and some hefty bass. We worked it out by recording it ourselves, listening back, making changes, and having everything tried and tested before we took it to be recorded properly, which is probably how we should have done everything but we hadn’t worked that out yet.

Impasse
This is the oldest song on the record, pre-lampshades even, but it was a tinkery ukulele thing that’s become something much bigger and better with the band. The organ sounding guitar shwooshes it around to a new hemisphere.

Blu Tac
Dan wrote the uke part and the first verse, I wrote the second verse and the chorus, and the violin and guitar parts made it in to this big haunting landscape. It was a bit of a nemesis song recording-wise, it used to get really loud and raucous at the end but that didn’t really work, so instead it threatens to and threatens to, but then sighs away, which suits the mood of it I think. It’s a nice relief to play live, the most demure song we have.

Night So Strong
Another song that happened when Heloise and Jemma tinkered around for a bit, I think me and Dan had popped out to the shop to get cider. When we came back we heard it from outside, I thought it was a different band, and apparently said that we should sound like that. It instantly felt like there was a song there, and the words came quick. I’d been reading an ethnography about North Korea, and one of the first chapters is a story about some forbidden sweethearts called Miran and Jungsang who meet in secret at night during the blackouts.

Demons
This is a song that we also recorded as Lulu and the Lampshades, but it felt closer to the sound we were developing as Landshapes, it’s a song that tracks that change perhaps, in the way it sounds and in how we worked on it together as a band.

Detour Ahead
Another song that was more or less jammed out. There were super slow versions and speedy versions and I can’t really remember where this one sits I sang the words to my favourite Billie Holiday song over the top with the intention of writing words at some later date, but that later date never came and I love to sing those words!

Insomniacs Club
This song is cursed. Anyone who gets involved with it gets insomnia. The guy making the video hasn’t slept for days - true story. I like that it can mean different things depending on where you put an apostrophe, one insomniac’s club? A club belonging to many insomniacs’? Or no apostrophe, a club of insomniacs, better. I’d had a particularly long bout of it and wanted to find others to hang out with.