Hometown: Marple, England
Members: Robin Richards, Andy Proudfoot, Pete Broadhead, Daniel Spedding, Duncan Wallis?
Current Release: Out of Touch in the Wild
For Fans Of: XTC, Trevor Horn, Foals ?
If odd time signatures are supposed to make for strange bedfellows with pop hooks, you’d never know it listening to Out of Touch in the Wild, the third album from English quintet Dutch Uncles. Pop history has certainly seen its share of artists who’ve funneled intricate music into accessible songs, but Dutch Uncles would likely rank among the most audacious. Where acts like, say, Steely Dan and Talking Heads built careers on their ability to disguise the complexity of their arrangements, Dutch Uncles wear angularity on their sleeve and yet still manage to craft highly polished—even economical—songs where not a single note sounds extraneous.
“It kind of feels like that’s become our campaign,” muses frontman/pianist Duncan Wallis. “The further we go, the more we’re pairing pop music and time signatures together. Slowly but surely, I think we’re getting there. We’ve been playing together now for nine years, about five years as Dutch Uncles. The other years previous, we were wasting a lot of time trying to put jazz in an indie context and thinking ‘Oh, we’re being different because we’re using minor sevenths.’ But it wasn’t actually different at all.”
A year older than his bandmates, Wallis first met the rest of Dutch Uncles in 2004 when all four arrived together to start their first year at Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College, a school that serves the band’s native Marple, an outlying town in the orbit of Manchester that is widely speculated to be the source for detective novelist Agatha Christie’s beloved Miss Marple character. (England’s “sixth form” level of schooling roughly equates to what in the U.S. would be a combination of high school senior year and freshman year of college.) At the time, Wallis was enthralled with his first musical love, The Strokes, and thought that singing was uncool because his then-girlfriend “fancied Travis Barker from Blink 182.”
“When I met the other four,” he explains on a transatlantic Skype call that veers dangerously close to teatime in the U.K., “three of them had been playing together since primary school—since they were about 8. All four of them were a band in secondary school, whilst I was at sixth form college. When they came to college, I knew who they were because Marple’s not a big place at all. I wanted to start a band with them because they were competent musicians, clearly, and I wasn’t the best drummer. So by default I moved to singing duties. I had only sung in theater, like after school amateur dramatics. I’d done a few musicals, but I’d never really considered myself a singer.”
By the time it rebooted itself as Dutch Uncles in 2008, the band had taken a pivotal, decisive step toward defining its creative direction when each member brought in a specific musical reference point to guide the overall sound: Tears For Fears, Talking Heads, Adrian Belew-era King Crimson, Steve Reich and British millenial indie group Field Music. Eventually, the master list would grow to include Kate Bush, Prince and Japan. Though all of those artists achieved some measure of overlap between challenging their audience and commercial viability, Dutch Uncles arguably reach an unprecedented balance on Out of Touch in the Wild.
Significantly upping the ante on 2011’s sophomore effort Cadenza, bassist and principle songwriter Robin Richards impelled his bandmates to think outside of the traditional two-guitars-bass-drums-vocals framework and incorporate extra instrumentation such as strings, piano and interlocking layers of marimba. All over the album, lattice-like rhythmic patterns in the mold of Reich and Crimson abound, even functioning as the primary foundation on certain tunes. But where Steve Reich and Robert Fripp embraced the dogma of their mesmerizing mathematical systems, Dutch Uncles build spacious pop tunes and imbue the spaces with hooks so plentiful the album demands none of the mental effort one might expect—all the more impressive given that the band forced itself to the do the primary writing and recording in two weeks.
Meanwhile, Wallis’ falsetto inhabits a parade of characters in the throes of addiction to violent sexual behaviors and fetishes. “Every Breath You Take” may still reign as the quintessential example of an iconic smash hit with disturbing subject matter (stalking), but if you sing along to anything on Out of Touch in the Wild, you’ll be singing about autoerotic asphyxiation, S&M, and what Wallis describes as “rough slapping about”—none of which, Wallis claims, stem from his own personal experience.
”’Threads,’ the first song I wrote for Out of Touch in the Wild,” he explains, “was about autoerotic asphyxiation, which I know nothing about. It was just an exercise in character-writing. With the next song I wrote, ‘Flexxin’,’ I was trying to make a cross between a Prince song and ‘Venus in Furs.’ It’s about light domestic violence. I kind of knew the general direction, how bad I wanted things to be getting and how dramatic they should be, but I never knew all the songs were going to go that way. It was just a good starting point to help with writing. It’s kind of like when you study art at school. You don’t know what to draw on the piece of paper until your teacher says ‘Right, we’re gonna draw two objects colliding today.’ And then you go ‘Okay, well now I know what I’m drawing.’”
Lest anyone take the lyrics too seriously, Wallis insists that he meant for them to be taken on a tongue-in-cheek level. As a guideline, he points to one example from Manchester’s long lineage of storied artists.
“Everyone thought Morrissey was being miserable in the Smiths. But he was actually being very sarcastic.”
He was winking a lot—much like Dutch Uncles are winking now.
“Yeah,” Wallis agrees. “Manchester’s got a history of jokers.”
For Wallis, that sense of humor frees the band from any feelings of pressure to live up to standards set by its Mancunian forebears.
“It doesn’t really bother me,” says Wallis. “Because if you look at the history of Factory Records, there’s always so much blundering. It had such a flawed business model. They were losing so much money on things like the ‘Blue Monday’ cover and stuff like that. There’s that characteristic to Manchester’s heritage that makes it quite lovable. What’s not to like about it?”