As the dark and dreary month of October squishes its way across the United Kingdom, introducing itself with rain, flooding and storms, I talk to two of The Armoires (Rex Broome and Christina Bulbenko who also run Big Stir Records) about their new album, Octoberland, set against the dappled finery and heat of a Californian autumn and hissing with the dark energy of a thin veil between worlds.
John Robinson: Your new album has a beautiful cover, drawn by your daughter Ridley, how would you describe this style?
The Armoires (who shall be referred to collectively): Art nouveau. Predominantly Art Nouveau that's based on a print by Alfonse Mucha. (a Czech painter of the late 19th century) But it's got a lot of her style as well and all of the artwork that she did is somewhere in between Art Nouveau and that sort of Neo-Anime influence. We wanted to keep that timeless vibe just of any century other than 20th basically. And the cats on the back, well we have three black cats between us.
JR: What’s October like in California?
TA: It’s pleasant, wonderful. We are from easterly areas, She's from Detroit. I'm from West Virginia, so we remember, you know, autumn with all the leaves, changing colour and stuff like that. Here, it stays sunny, but you get a breeze, and the temperature goes down from punishing heat to just the most pleasant, non-humid thing. And you always get several very, very perfect weeks. And that was even something that we thought of when we were naming this album Octoberland, it's going to come out in October. We look forward to this weather all year round. So let's kind of own it with our little work of art.
JR: In the UK our October is dark and gloomy and wet and miserable, and the art we have, that reflects October, tends to be more reflecting a time of drear and gloom. We have Halloween to look forward to! Then we get November where we have our Guy Fawkes Night, Bonfire Night on the 5th of November, where it’s not really clear whether we're celebrating that someone tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament or if he got caught. It's not clear whose side we're on.
TA: It's kind of a whole week run where depending on your culture you can just do something absolutely insane. And there's an appeal to that.
JR: For me, when I think about October, I'm thinking about do you know Ray Bradbury? October reminds me of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's about a sort of a cursed travelling fairground, but it's intensely dark.
TA: Exactly. I think at least once in a in a previous interview, we've referred to the set-up of Here Comes The Song (track six on the new album) as basically a Bradbury story. It very much strikes us as in that realm.JR: “Here Comes The Song” is about channelling the “song”, some kind of entity which has a life of its own and isn’t going to be tied to your interpretation of it. It also reminds me a little bit of the song Number One In Heaven (Sparks) which is also about a song going out into the world, on its own?
TA: Yes. It surprises me that more people haven't had this because we talked to songwriters all the time, who say, well, I don't feel like I'm writing it. I feel like I'm just kind of a conduit for it. And then it's just one more step beyond that to say. But what if it doesn't? What if it just used you, you know. It's out there now and it's not going to align with what you thought your intents were. We don't know what happens after that, which is why it feels very, you know, Bradbury to me. It's just out there. It did a little bit of damage. Maybe it's gonna do good in in the long run in some way, but not in the way you were thinking. I appreciate the fact that you delved into that. Some people just hear that as a really happy song and it's not, it's dark.
JR: There’s the line you're quoting in there from Yeats. You talk about the song “slouching towards Bethlehem” to be born. It could be a beast. It could be a saviour, and it could be a demon. We don't know what it is.
TA: Yeah, exactly. You're the first one to get that. People think it's just a straight biblical quote, which surprised me. I thought it was a commonly known thing! But that's correct.
JR: And of course The Loud Family (90s power pop band led by Scott Miller) had their EP Slouching Towards Liverpool
TA: Yep, they sure did.
JR: Throughout the album you talk about saving the “artistocracy”, who are they?
TA: That would be the ruling class or collective of Octoberland. They are empathetic, creative and not closed minded. I mean we want to be careful because we touch on some difficult things across the course of this record and we don't want to say that just because it’s ruled by people like that, that everything's gonna be great. We think what we see in creative collaboration is a better model for people getting along than most political strategies are. But it's untested, right. So we will find out sometime after the album: after we get there. You know, it's like the Lord of the Flies. But we are cautiously optimistic.
JR: I mean, there's a sort of elephant in the room, which is the election that's coming up which has to be at the back of your mind with some of this.
TA: Oh, certainly. We chose this time of year for the release because of the season and because of the “veil” being thin and all that spooky stuff. But unavoidably it is the election this year. So that did loom, and we're gonna mention the October surprise. God knows what that will be. The October surprise is: are you familiar with that term?
JR: No, I’ve not heard it used here.
TA: Our elections are in November. And often something happens in the month of October, some bomb drops of information or some horrible scandal, or and it shifts the entire thing. Which I always think is fascinating, because it also, again, is very halloweeny, you know, like, we're coming up to this this time when culture will change. Everyone's expecting what's called the October surprise, which, whatever it is, often changes the course of the election. So that that plays into it and the song Green Hellfire at the 7-11 (track 5 on the album) was literally about election night eight years ago.
JR: About trouble on the night of the election?
TA: No and yes! What really was happening there is that story is written from the point of view of my kid Miranda, who is now 23, but was just shy of voting age at the time, but becoming politically aware. We were all just shocked at Trump winning. I remember picking them up at school. We went to the 7-11, and we were in the parking lot. We were just sort of like, OK, so what happens now? I mean, are there going to be riots? And there was this big explosion in the parking lot, which turned out to be a transformer exploding. But we both had this thought, you know, someone who was like 17 and someone who was 47 and at different places in our understanding of politics. Both of us were like, shit, it's on! But then it wasn’t on, yet. Other than the slow creep of spiritual gangrene until four years later. What ended up happening at the end of Trump’s term, you know, with January 6th, was pretty much what we thought was happening on the first night. That’s a bookend there.
JR: So I want to talk about the first song on the album, We Absolutely Mean It. It’s a huge statement of intent and of your being a full band and collective finally.
TA: We are now what we've always wanted to be, the five of us. The way that we sing together, the ambiguous androgyny. I think this is the point when you know the experimentation of the past three records over the past 10 years has led us to understand what we do and to lean into that. It was a sort of a twisty road getting to where we were for this record and I think we got to a point where we said: this fundamental thing that we do when we sing together almost the whole time, let’s write for that. Let's do every song as a “WE” song from a collective perspective and just own it. We sing everything collectively. These weren't old songs that were in the closet and resurfaced. These were all written at the same time in the same span of a month and a half. And as they were written and sequenced, the sequence never changed from the get-go. Each song informed the next, the imagery started spilling from one song to another, and I think that probably we had written eight out of the 11 of them we found we were singing them all together, which we think is interesting because it's inviting. We are a male and female voice together. We're already making a statement of unity and crossover collectiveness but it's also kind of weird.
TA: I mean, it's also eerie and a little bit spooky, you know? So sometimes it's him. Sometimes it's me. So we're just like, let's play with that as our subject matter too. That song was always going to be the kick off and it was always going to make that sort of a statement and it's our manifesto, our “Hey Hey, We’re the Monkees”, our “We are Devo”!
JR: When you're a fan of a band, sometimes there's a feeling that the band has a personality of its own, so for instance although Joy Division was led by Ian Curtis, there is a personality to the band itself. It’s not a group of people, it’s not x person on bass, y on guitar, it’s the BAND that is playing.
TA: I think it's a complete collective. I think we we've sort of realised that's what we all want to do. It's just such a fertile field to explore. And I think we've noticed that there are bands that have an ego, or I mean, you know, sometimes it's an ego thing, Sometimes it's just people really wanting to explore other things, they split apart, and then don’t have that collective anymore. We have just realised the greatest thing we can do individually is to be part of this particular thing and explore the hell out of it and not find a reason to let it go. I have no interest in doing anything outside of this band. Even once you pare away all the stuff we don't do, it's still just like infinite what you can explore in there.
JR: And although it's a collective band, a lot of your songs and narratives talk about individuals and places, and that seems to be a choice you make in terms of songwriting? You seem to want to pin things to a place? I was thinking that if for instance you had a song called “Hotel Somewhere in the desert”, it doesn't work as well as “Hotel California” because you need the name.
TA: Yes, we talk about this a lot because people always say, oh, try to be universal, don't get specific. And we kind of think that’s bullshit because place doesn't have a name. No person doesn't have a name. It’s not relatable. I always thought one of the greatest things is to be really specific, that seems to make it more universal. One of the first songs we ever recorded together was Fort Ashby, which is a place from Rex's childhood Fort at Fort Ashby, a small town in West Virginia. We think those details make things more universal. They spur your imagination I think. Anyway, I love character stories. We both love character stories and I think that it gives texture that feels real.
I taught music and I would always tell my students, just think about what the world would be like without music?
JR: The last song on the album, Music and Animals, that’s a very straightforward song there, you sing about the two best things in the world?
TA: That’s the denouement for the whole album, yes, it takes you on such an emotional journey and it sort of beats you up for a while and then comes back. It's time to come back down from the cold and then how do we get by in this world? Music and animals. It was the last song that was written. When we walked into the session, we had little tiny bits and ideas and we hammered them into shape and that was the one that just kind of went out of the sky. It was based on really positive conversations we were having. You know the world is fraught. The music business is fraught. We were scared to be taking time away from running the record label Big Stir to write this album, and the dog comes by and licks us and the cat meows and some lizard visits us on the fence. You know, we have our music and how do we get by without music? I taught music and I would always tell my students, just think about what the world would be like without music? When they have stage fright, when they're afraid to offer their gift to the world, I tell them they will love you no matter what you do because of your talent, because of what you have to offer because you're willing to go out there and they you're basically showing them a courage that most adults do not have, you know, so we're sort of proxy superheroes. But they get it. A world without music would be horrible.
So on the album, after having wrestled with all these other things, big and little, we found solace in creating this thing the song just kind of goes out from there. I mean, even this song has slightly dark stuff in it. Like, you know, “they would burn us as witches if they knew”.
JR: Well of course, cats had a pretty bad time in the Middle Ages! And it was the first single release I think, which has a kind of artfulness because it means it's something that everyone knows on the album when it comes to the album, that fans are already familiar with the final track.
TA: Our producer Michael Simmons, who is a musical genius. He said that song touched him deeply and he wanted to see it out in the world. And he said that why would you put that last on your album? Why would you do that? And we're like, well, that's the narrative. That's where it goes. But you're right. So let's put it out as our first single.
JR: Your latest single from the album is Ridley and the Apocalypse, or rather A-P-O-C-A-L-Y-P-S-E, as it is spelled out in the song. What kind of apocalypse do you think we are going to get?
TA: Well, I mean, we're actually sort of sort of playing around with that even as we speak! The idea for that song has been around for a while, and it's even gotten sort of road tested because there was a brief period where my other kid Miranda went to school and it was just myself and Ridley at home, and both of us are wired to really be analytical about whatever narratives we're watching. It's often an animated show or something like that. And I just sort of had this whimsical idea: what if the apocalypse happens and we are wandering through it in this sort of lone wolf and cub kind of way. But we're still talking about it as if it's a narrative or even trying to make up a more interesting one that's full of genre tropes and stuff like that in it. Ridley world-builds, constantly, and I really relate to that. And I just tried to map it onto this song. When the pandemic happened, that was just me and Ridley, you know, going out that first night and standing in a Target with all these people. The shelves were bare. We're trying to figure out how to put on masks and we're like, wait, maybe this song is actually somewhat coming true. That’s what end times are: mundane and boring. Miranda was sent home from college shortly after so originally it was this very abstract apocalypse, but then the pandemic existence kind of mapped onto it and it flipped back to political angst and that sort of thing. It’s really another song about a thin veil, the veil between us and our narrative traditions. That's the song on which those narrative traditions are, you know, have their most modern incarnation. There’s some anime in there, there's the “magical system” stuff and “transformation sequence”. But we always talk about that in terms of ideas that go all the way back to, you know, mythology, and there's some like Kurasawa type stuff in there too. It's about 3 layers deep, at least that song. There’s what is actually happening, the fictional boring apocalypse, and there's the more interesting, invented apocalypse that's being described.
JR: Kids have such strong grasp of narrative structure, but we don't give them credit for it because they don't necessarily read novels or seem to follow anything like that, but they still understand all those ideas. They can sort of layer a narrative structure over the world and what is happening and talk about it in those terms, sort of: “I don't like this final season of Trump”, for example.
TA: Who's the final boss at work today? You know, like, in video game terms, it fascinates me too. I find it relatable. And I thought it would be. On this record we are a multi-generational band, you know, with Larysa on the viola (Christina's daughter) and we've always had these kind of conversations about creativity. The lines are fuzzy there, you know, in a good way. I think the kids are tapping into something that's there already. An ongoing mythology.
Like in Snake Island Thirteen (Track 9 on the album) when we're talking about much more ancient mythology. It's all drawing from that. It's an ongoing narrative tradition that we have and that we try to tap into. Folklore, literature, Shakespearean things, because it’s a way for us to communicate. It’s a common ground that’s kind of lacking in what I call the diseased carcass of what used to be called social discourse.
JR: Tell me about the song Snake Island Thirteen.
(Snake Island Thirteen was released as a AA single by Big Stir with Roy Crank’s Don’t Kill That World I’m Living In as a charity single for United Help Ukraine)
TA: I'm a first generation Ukrainian American (Christina) and.. it's hard for me to talk about it even still, because it's still just getting worse and worse. When the invasion of Ukraine happened, during the early days of it, there were thirteen soldiers on Snake Island. It's an island in the Black Sea, strategically important, but kind of barren and two Russian warships came and threatened them. The Snake Island soldiers basically told them to fuck off, and you thought these men, these, these soldiers, men and women had all died and we were just devastated by the idea of that. It was emblematic of the spirit of the people to resist in the face of absolutely ridiculous odds, but obviously tragic. And there was a reason why it became such an iconic event. We had “Go fuck yourself Russian warship” T-shirts that even ended up on a postage stamp in Ukraine. Then we looked up Snake Island and discovered that supposedly Achilles is buried there. The link to Achilles was fascinating. He was supposedly buried there and haunting the shore, and there are these birds that supposedly dipped their wings in the water to wash the temple walls, and we started to write the song. That's separate from the album. It was February when Russia invaded Ukraine and we hadn’t started the album yet. This was a separate idea that we had. And we had this idea that Christina was going to sing it in Ukrainian as a single. But we couldn't shrink the language down. Ultimately, though, it, it would have been interesting to do that. It would have been. It would have meant however that some of the sense of that was lost on the album, where if it were to suddenly click over to Ukrainian, perhaps would lose the impetus of the album. In figuring out the key iconography and the story that that takes place in two different time frames, in the modern day and in mythological times, that duality started to be such a big part of the way we were writing the lyrics to the rest of the songs on the album. The song not only fell in line with that, but also became the climax, the place where the rubber really hits the road, about how important storytelling is to us and we. It also became about how important memes are now, and when it's for something meaningful, how that's essentially the same thing as a folklore tradition and brings its own mythology. What we first thought of as an interesting parallel became the central parallel across the songs on the album. And of course the topic of this was the biggest of all: life and death, sort of. You know, existential cruelty versus aggression, or empathy versus aggression. The most heightened expression of that. And after that, on the album, it's a good time to come back down from the cold, of course, to Music and Animals. That's what we were saying.JR: Again the veil between worlds, between the past and present, ancient Greek Heroes and modern Ukrainian heroes.
TA: And we thought that the way these stories reach us was actually oddly similar. Despite the vast technological difference between modern people posting these memes on Twitter or ancient people collecting these stories into epic poems, it's not that different you know. There's a reason why Bible verses are numbered. That was just whatever Saint Paul was tweeting that day, compiled, basically, you know.
JR: I remember reading someone's theory that we always describe the universe in terms of our latest technology. When people invented the wheel, they started talking about the sort of Buddhist philosophy of the world and the universe being like a wheel. And then when we invented the printing press, everything was a book. The in the industrial revolution everything was clockwork and Newton described the universe as a clockwork mechanism. And then we invented computers and decided the world is a computer. Now we have AI. We think the world is an AI or we're in a simulation. Whatever we have most recently invented, we think that's what the world is.
TA: That coalesces these ideas really, really quickly. We’ll probably steal that for the next interview. Absolutely. Try to credit you! I was kind of succinctly put the cosmology together for my kids, how we are perceiving this stuff. And the only thing that's really true is the general order of the universe or nature, which is down here. But right above that is the level of narrative tradition, linguistic tradition that's close enough to universal that we can all pull on it, and then everything else gets kind of like a little bit, you know, fuzzier or less valid.
JR: Oh, absolutely. Everything we say is is a way of an attempt to usefully describe the things around us, which we can't describe in literal terms, because we don't know what's really there.
TA: Right. It’s glancingly rare that we can agree on things. You know how can we even say something is the same, for example, colour, because how do we know we are seeing the same colour? There aren't too many universals and we're kind of losing them. I think we see that in the politics. You know, it's rare if just 3 or 4 people can agree on the same thing. There are families being torn up because of politics. One of the reasons I have a hard time processing what even the appeal of a person like Donald Trump is, is that this is not someone who could be viewed as heroic by any of our narrative standards. For example, you would not green light a Hollywood film with a guy who says “fuck the poor” and is just out for himself, you know, he would be portrayed as an anti-hero at best and probably not even that. And nobody would even believe it. Reality TV didn't and was something I ignored. But here is something that's kind of outside of our normal narrative structures because it's just people being depicted being shitty to each other and has become a form of entertainment. I'm always interested in more art and sophisticated storytelling. But you know, it seems you can put some cruelty on screen and people will have a chuckle at it. Have you seen Idiocracy, the movie?
JR: Yes. I remember reading about the Crocs… That they used Crocs as the footwear in Idiocracy because they thought this is utterly ridiculous. No one would ever wear these. And of course, they've become one of the most popular brands of footwear in the world. Now we live in Idiocracy. And like we just said about modelling the world on our latest technology: we seem to have modelled the world on our latest media invention, which is reality television. That's perhaps inevitable, that people look to Trump and support him because instead of looking at him as a leader, they look at him as a good “character”.
TA: Yeah, it astounds me. It baffles me. I mean, that was that was the thing where I think it departs from our narrative traditions or our character archetype traditions. Christina would point out to me that people like him because they feel like they know him. He came into their living room and like, well, that's what happened, when he was on television. But he came into your living room, and he was an asshole you know, he wasn’t your friend. He was a jerk. And that's where I missed the fact that people being nasty to each other is entertaining to a large swathe of humanity.JR: To move on, one of the songs on Octoberland is a tribute to a Swedish band. “This One’s for The Swedes”.
TA: There's actually a whole other song called “This one's for the Swedes” on You Tube. It was a title that I think Larysa had mentioned and showed us this little video and it was this sort of cute little novelty thing. And then we started writing this song about our Swedish friends, the Swedish band In Deed from Upsala. We've been on a mini tour with them. They came over and stayed with us and it pretty much documents the experience as a travelogue, in many respects, although it also taps into the fact that this communal artistic experience was elevating to everyone involved.
JR: The whole record has influences from power pop down the ages, but clearly a British influence from Robyn Hitchcock, XTC, do you think you’ll tour the UK any time soon?
TA: We are talking about 2025. Although it’s hard to say. Big Stir Records was launched in the UK we announced we were putting out our first record and that the label existed and the next day we went on tour in the UK and then we haven't been back since. Some of our bands are based there of course but we are stuck running the label! We've put so much into the additional media for this record that in terms of getting the band together, if we had a choice of like, hey, we've got to start rehearsing these songs or maybe we need to get this video done, it all went to the media side. Back when we did that UK tour, we toured and played a lot, we were a very busy live band and since the pandemic we have definitely not been because the label became such such a big deal. But maybe 2025, maybe, we have to start rehearsing. We would love it.
JR: And what is next from Big Stir?
TA: The next big release will be from the band Librarians With Hickeys, November 8th. I think it’s a very good complement to our own album. It’s a zeitgeist thing maybe but a lot of albums this year have had that “world-building” thing. In talking with the people that have been making these records there is something about that on their minds. It's like every time we go into an album let's try and create a time and space in a way that we haven't maybe seen as much in recent years.
JR: Progressive rock?
TA: Even if the material itself isn't super proggy, it has that sort of feeling of narrative arc and imagery, and I think that's healthy because the kids love it. Maybe it's bubbling up again from that younger crowd where they're kind of not shy about being gamers or going to Renaissance Fayres, you know they do not separate their media as much between what they listen to, play etc. I think it has been a year when a lot of that kind of stuff did happen. I mean like with the Hungrytown record, ours had a lot of kinship to it, and the album by the Jack Rubies, and Sparkle*Jets U.K. In the next year there may be something from Chris Church, early on next year. We have an association with the Sorrows and Arthur Alexander, and that will be another. Some really straight up power pop from some trusted names!
JR: Well thank you The Armoires, I know everyone is looking forward to this record and we’ll be certain to speak again!
TA: Thank you!
Essential Information
It's Armoires Week in Outsideleft!
More about The Armoires at Big Stir Records, here
