Portugal. The Man: offers more bang for your buck
Gourley takes the band back home on The Satanic Satanist.
Published June 3, 2009
For a band like Portugal. The Man, the divide between quality and quantity has become almost nonexistent. As the band prepares to release its fourth album in five years this July, lead singer/guitarist John Baldwin Gourley has other plans -- writing more records, playing Nintendo DS for hours a day and seeing "Star Trek" three times.
"I was very skeptical about the Captain Kirk choice, just because that dude's such a pretty boy asshole," the devotee said. "After I got over that initial dislike for that actor as a person I realized he actually pulled it off really well. He did a lot of the subtle William Shatner things."
After completing The Satanic Satanist in January, Gourley and his bandmates began writing more music and have another album in the works.
Working at such a furious pace has allowed the band to concentrate its ideas and produce records that stick to a concept -- an Abbey Road-like partition on Censored Colors, pop structuring on Satanic -- and see it the entire way through. This latest collection of songs finds the band bringing back the familiar drum loops from its debut while simultaneously playing with conventional song structure.
"How many bands have I watched make crazy records and then out of nowhere they try to make a record that's all tight songs and they fail so miserably and I'm so bummed about it?" Gourley said. "I hope that's not the case with this record, because I feel like we put a lot of art into it. I think being obvious is sometimes harder than it looks."
For the second time in a row the band worked with producer Paul (Pixies) Q. Kolderie to create an album that illustrates a laid-back, collaborative spirit. Friends, as well as the producers, were invited to add lap guitar, back-up vocals and other instrumentation. The songs resonate with bright guitars, and the rhythm section is streamlined. There's an obvious difference between the breezy music and the darker lyrics, which encapsulate the years Gourley spent moving around small towns in Alaska.
The frigid state also plays a role in the album's innovative artwork, devised by Gourley and artist Austin Sellers and comprised of a single piece of paper.
After touring 300 days a year for three years straight, the band decided to self-prescribe a break. But in the Portugal. The Man reality that means very little time off.
"I think the best thing we've done this year is take a minute to ourselves," Gourley said. "This is the first time we actually took a break to sit back and look at what we're doing and see how it all works. It's really helped us get tighter as a band and perfect some of the things that haven't been working as well."
Even better news for the year was Alternative Press's selection of Gourley as "Best Vocalist of 2008," an honor he struggled against.
"Of course they told me a little bit early just to stress me out completely," he said. "I did point out that Paul McCartney had put out a record the same year, and it was an amazing honor to be above him. To be honest I probably wasn't excited at all when I first heard. That's a lot of pressure on a person."