Philadelphia Weekly

Paint by numbers: Espers "III" is out this week on Drag City records.

Photo by Daniel Coston

After their 2006 album II, Philly’s Espers scattered in all directions. Greg Weeks started the psych-folk imprint Language of Stone and released solo material. Meg Baird concentrated on other projects putting out the solo album Dear Companion in 2007 and the Baird Sisters’ Lonely Town in 2008. Helena Espvall made two albums with Ghost’s Masaki Batoh. Otto Hauser drummed for Vetiver, Bert Jansch, Vashti Bunyan and Devendra Banhart, among others. (Hauser got so overcommitted he is no longer a full member of the band, though he plays on the new album.)

They came back together this year, each with a slightly different set of experiences and influences than the last time they convened, and all determined that their new album, III, would be different from the last one.

“We definitely didn’t want to sound like Espers II,” says Weeks over the phone from his home in Philadephia. “We wanted the new album to be more open, a little more ethereal.” 


The differences are subtle. Both albums arise out of the same melancholy, modal, British folk tradition. Both are shot through with the same arcs of electric psychedelic guitar. But where II was heavy, mysterious and mournful, III has a lighter, more spacious feel.


“We wanted the new recordings to reflect some themes we had been thinking about, which were regeneration and trekking into new territory, colonizing new lands, venturing forth into new territory,” Weeks says. “To us, that meant taking a more minimalist approach.”


Minimal maybe, but in no way sparse. III is lush with explicit and implied sounds, with doubled guitars and otherworldly effects. In any given song, what sounds like a single guitar line might be a composite of several sounds, clean signals and distortion layered over one another for a hazy, luminous effect. 


Weeks says there’s no contradiction, in his mind, between minimalism and opulence. “Think about Herzog filming Aguirre the Wrath of God ,” he says. “Herzog went into an incredibly dense jungle setting, but he brought only a few people and very basic equipment. So in the end, it was a very minimalist approach to capturing a lush, opulent subject matter.”


As a result, cuts like “The Road of Golden Dust,” quiver with mirage-like overtones and half-heard notes, yet remain fundamentally light and airy. “The Pearl” is a weightless meringue of picked guitars and buoyant strings, a cool cloud of sound around Baird’s singing. The overall aesthetic is one of dappled sunlight, a warmth pierced here and there with melancholic chills. 


Even this relatively breezy sound contains its share of foreboding, Weeks admits. “I think that it’s safe to say that, at least the core members of Espers who do the bulk of the original writing—myself, Meg and Brooke [Sietinsons]—are probably more dark internally than the average person,” Weeks says. “So no matter what we do, that element comes through.”


“On top of that we’re not recording through a digital format,” he adds. “Digital formats tend to leave things very bright and narrow. An analog format tends to add a lot more density to the sound, warmth and harmonic distortion, which I believe tends more toward the kind of darker, sinister qualities of recorded music. We use analog, first and foremost, because we like the way it sounds. I would never stick to an aesthetic if it didn’t work for what I was doing.”


All three writing members contributed songs to this album, and though he won’t pick apart who contributed what, Weeks says it’s easy to tell whose work is whose. 


“Meg has much more of a jazzy approach to things than I do. I feel that her songs are a lot more improv based even though they are very structured,” he says. “Her timing on stuff is a lot less regimented than mine. I tend to get into locked grooves. Meg, I think, likes to go more fluid. And her songs, especially the lyrics, they definitely are more story like and kind of have more of a literary quality where mine have more a poetic style to them, a poetic approach. They’re a lot more imagistic and fractured.” 


Even the members’ approach to guitar playing is different. “Brooke is definitely coming from more of a finger style, traditional, alternate tunings and then kind of a repetitive chordal structure and slides up and down the neck,” he says. “Meg’s a lot more into hammer-ons and pull-offs. It’s that British, mid-1960s approach to making things punchy and jazzy, almost like a Tim Buckley kind of quality.” 


Weeks, though he doesn’t say so, is the 1960s psychedelic element in the band’s mix, interjecting wild DayGlo electric solos into its pristine folk melodies. 


Still, he admits, “I definitely feel very connected to past styles of music making, because I think that the best music ever made came out of periods when only analog decks were available. I do think that was a better way to make music. It was more real. It was more live, more based on actual performances. There was more craft. People had to be better at what they were doing on all sides. It’s something that, I think, is being lost.”


An insistence on sterile perfection is part of the problem. “With digital recording, there’s no end to the things you can do or the time you can spend on something to make it sound perfect,” he adds. “But imperfections are, in most cases, things that give music the qualities I enjoy.”


Espers III , imperfections and all, is out this week on Drag City Records. The band will be touring Europe in November and returning to Philadelphia for a December 3 show at Johnny Brenda’s. ■