A new breed of bands has begun to pop up in the far corners of the fertile modern musical landscape, bringing a similar brand of fanatical fervor and showmanship devoted to nothing but the potent uplifting forces of rock. Some of them bring full choirs wearing robes (the Polyphonic Spree); others tell poignant tales of life, death, and rebirth while banging mercilessly on everything in sight (the Arcade Fire); while still others trek across the sea from remote criminal colonies (Architecture in Helsinki) to tell their ardently hopeful tales.
Chicago octet Head of Femur fits well into this new wave of revivalists. To celebrate the recent release of its second album, Hysterical Stars, the band brought a staggering 24 musicians on stage to perform the wildly ambitious, defiantly jubilant album from front to back, packing a venue that's normally devoted to bands an eighth of its size.
Named after the term for the place where the leg meets the hip, the body part that enabled Elvis to swagger so scintillatingly on the Ed Sullivan Show (the "junction of music and sex," according to the band's website), Head of Femur is led by Nebraska natives Mike Elsener, Matt Focht, and Ben Armstrong. New Times spoke with Armstrong from his new home in Kearney, Nebraska, to discuss leading such an unwieldy musical undertaking and spreading the magnificent blessings of Rock power.
New Times: Twenty-four band members. That's quite an adventure. What's it like to collaborate with so many people?
Ben Armstrong: Generally, our collaborative process is that one of us will come up with the outline or skeleton of the song either together or on our own, then we'll come together and Matt will set up the lyrics. For the more heavily composed work, the three of us compose all the string and horns and extra percussion parts, and then we'll write them out on sheet music and distribute them. So we had a string section and a horn section come into the studio and read off sheet music for the recording of Hysterical Stars and then the same thing for the live performance. The three of us, with a few exceptions, composed most of the orchestrations. At the show, there were a few more mics and a lot more instruments, but we normally play as an octet, so we're kind of used to doing a big show.
Compositionally, your albums are really complex. Have any of you guys had classical training?
No. I mean, I think Mike has a couple of years of guitar lessons, Matt took some drum lessons and guitar lessons, but neither of them read or write music. I had piano lessons as a little kid, and I do all of the transcription onto sheet music, but it's not something that's particularly easy for me because I never had any training beyond neighborhood piano lessons. I had to teach myself a lot more theory than I knew at that point. A lot of the horn guys, like the eight-piece band, have music degrees and high school bands, etc.
You toured with Architecture in Helsinki for a couple of weeks. How did that go?
Great. They're a great band and really a bunch of fantastic people. They were a really solid match for us as well, just 'cause they're an octet as well, with all of this sort of elaborate, zany instrumentation.
It seems like there's sort of a growing trend toward bands who are more ambitious in that way, that are putting more sound on stage, bringing a lot more band members and instruments into the mix.
Yeah, one thing I liked about Architecture in that vein is that they're not afraid to be a little more experimental with things. I've seen this trend happen too over the years, and a lot of times, you'll get a regular four-piece rock band and they'll just slap a horn section on the thing and call it good. And it's cool to see bands like Architecture who are willing to interweave stuff and put down the guitars sometimes and play other instruments, make things happen, make some daring choices instead of being just another rock band.
There also seems to be an almost thematic trend going on with a lot of bands now. Guys like you and Arcade Fire, bands that seem vaguely positive, almost spiritual in a sense, which for a while seemed like a real rarity in indie rock.
Oh, it was a rarity, and, in fact, a no-no for a while, 'cause you wanted to be soul-bearing or introspective, poring over life's emotional side, and the negative context was kind of the template as well. It's cool to see that people are breaking away from that and moving towards something a little more uplifting. I enjoy that trend towards more upbeat, positive music.
Kudos for coming up with the name of your band, but I have to admit that for a group that's named after the sex urge, I rarely feel like getting it on while listening to your music...
Yeah, I can understand that. We played with a German band named Missouri on this tour, and they pronounce it misery, but they're a very kind of sexual band, kind of a Roxy Music/Spandau Ballet feel. We're definitely a 180 from that. But you know how band names are. It's something someone came up with at practice, and it just kind of stuck.
You're about, what, six weeks into touring for the album? It's pretty dense and strange material sometimes. How has it been received?
Great reviews have been pouring in all the time. Pitchfork[media.com] dug it; Alternative Press gave it five stars. We haven't had any slams yet. A few raised eyebrows, a few question marks, but nobody's been like "This is shit," which is cool.
I read an interview recently, and when you guys were asked what kind of band you were in, someone said "art rock." Think that's an accurate description?
Oh, I don't know. That's the quintessential question, isn't it? Somebody says, "You're in a band -- what does your band sound like?" Most guys are reticent to say, 'cause you gotta be careful. Anything you say has a million different connotations to all kinds of people. I think we've tried to make a conscious answer not to pick a particular style, though I suppose I could see someone referring to it as "art rock," which just basically seems to refer to someone a little more creative than your traditional rock band, someone trying to exist outside of the framework of the standard stuff, which we definitely are.
