News Track By Track: The Notwist - Close To The Glass

Considering the almost endless supply of brilliant new albums released today, it’d be easy to get your Wild Beasts’s lost next to your St. Vincent’s, your Arthur Beatrices’s in a twist with The Notwist. The latter release their new album ‘Close to the Glass’ today on City Slang (out in North America tomorrow via Sub Pop). Markus Acher and co.’s long-awaited return sees them sharpening the heady post-punk embrace in a record designed to stand out in a crowd. It’s a work that circuits snappy, cascading pop and the kind of resolute experimentalism that gave the band their rep initially. They’ve handed us a track-by-track guide, which explains how ‘Kong’ is about the actual King Kong and how they’re well and truly embracing Krautrock.



Signals
From the start, we knew this would be the first track, as the beginning arpeggios couldn’t be somewhere else on the record. The lyrics were inspired by Charles Burns great comic-book ‘Black Hole’.

Close to the Glass
The basic rhyhm-track is a small part of a long recording of analogue-synthesizer- improvisations, that we liked and looped. We added more and more to it, like the claps, that reminded me of north-african music. We all spend most of our time close to the glass, sitting in front of computer-or other screens, not knowing if we’re watching or are being watched.

Kong
We wrote this in the rehearsal-room with the whole band, all together. Stereolab and Krautrock and Suicide and the Rolling Stones ‘she’s a rainbow’ (the strings) were refrences apart from guitar-indie-rock. The lyrics are about me as a small boy. I imagined a sort of superman-King-Kong to save us, when the streets around our house were flooded from days of constant rain.

Into Another Tune
This all started with an arpeggio on a cheap keyboard. We liked the idea of having Steve-Reich-clarinets in the end and recorded them as overdubs.

Casino
Casino tells the story of a couple, I saw standing in the door of a casino close to where I live. They seemed to spend all of their time there. Drunk and proud and fragile. A sad and beautiful couple, somehow. The music was an instrumental composition by our drummer Andi, for Piano and Vibraphone, that Martin remixed to a quite different song, and I found a melody and chords for it. And in the end, we didn’t like the electronic feel of it anymore and recorded it stripped down to voice and guitar and a few sounds.

From One Wrong Place To the Next
We made this mainly from samples from old records, with madlib or other HipHop-producers in mind. For the voices, we thought of Oz Mutantes. The lyrics are also collaged from an old beatnik-magazine and remind me of an online-odyssey sometimes..

7-Hour-Drive
This was the last song we recorded. It was a lot of fun recording the distorted guitars. I had the words ‘7-hour-drive’, I don’t know why, and built the story around it.

The Fifth Quarter of the Globe
This is part of a collage we made for a radioplay. We needed something that leads into ‘run run run’. The voices are the voices of 7_Hour-drive backwards. The title I took from a book about Derek Jarman. He owned a fisherman’s house in the southeast of england, in Dungeness, called ‘the fifth quarter of the globe’, the end of the globe.

Run Run Run
This song gave the idea for the whole record in combining different parts, that don’t seem to fit in the first place to a collage-style-song. The lyrics are about loss, and that, when you loose someone, everything seems to stand still for you, but moves on for everybody else. In the end, the word ‘gone’ goes into a loop and moves on itself…

Steppin’ In
This is about a young person in a smalltown with a religious father, trying to get away… but it could be about something else, too. I tried to keep it open.

Lineri
We recorded this song live, with analogue synthesizers, electronic drums, a guitar with effects, and added some samples. Krautrock? Absolutely!

They Follow Me
It took us 5 or 6 versions to get the arrangement for this song right. It’s now built out of two different ones, the electronic first part with vocals, and the second one with lots of acoustic instruments. The lyrics are about a person, who gets into fights all the time.