The Chapman Family Album Exclusive

Fans of The Chapman Family are in for a treat today as Artrocker.TV presents the first ever exclusive stream of their hotly anticipated debut album Burn Your Town.

Described in the next issue of Artrocker Magazine as "Awesome, hypnotic and exhilarating", you can find access to the stream right below this text.

While you're listening, scroll down even further to read singer Kingsley's sleeve notes on the making of the record, and check out some behind the scenes photography from the studio - also all exclusive to Artrocker.TV this week!

Without further ado then, here is Burn Your Town.

INTRODUCTION

Regardless of the supposed growing importance of downloading individual tracks from bands and artists, we always intended our debut album to be an inter-connected body of work and not just a compilation of songs we'd just happened to generate between point A and point B.

We wanted to hark back to the days when people actually bought things in shops and a CD or a vinyl was a possession of worth and not something to use as a coaster or to rest your pizza on. Even on the version that's streaming here, significant parts of the album are missing due to separating the tracks out and editing but you'll just have to buy the actual album to realise what I'm going on about.

A CERTAIN DEGREE

In a way, we wanted to mess with people's preconceptions of us from the off. We know we've been stereotyped in the past as a band that purely does three minute songs of noisy distorted guitars with shouty angry vocals so we didn't want to live up to those expectations with the opening album salvo. I remember going to pantomimes at the theatre as a kid and being really fascinated with the weird tuning up noises of the orchestra before they went into the opening overture and in a way that's the sort of effect we were going for with A Certain Degree. We were trying to create an atmospheric and brooding introduction that would hopefully be the last thing people expecting a wall of noise would think we would do.



ALL FALL

We realised that since we'd released the original versions of "Kids" and "Virgins" in 2009 that we needed to create something akin to a statement of intent as a "comeback" single late last year to remind people that we still existed. "All Fall" for us is a short sharp shock of a song purely built on the drive of Pop's thunderous bass and Phil's pounding drums. The guitars and the vocals were designed to build and crescendo around the pounding heavy core of the song. We roped in Richard Jackson (the producer) to twiddle with a vintage echo machine while we hit guitars to create the sound of a spaceship taking off towards the end of the song.



ANXIETY

Sometimes songs come together really quickly - like in The Doors film by Oliver Stone where they write "Light My Fire" in about ten seconds - and sometimes they're laborious slogs that seem to take an eternity of tweaking in order to become listenable. Pop had the song worked out pretty much in it's entirety on guitar so slotting everything else over the top was really easy, Doors style. I had some lyrics that I'd wanted to use for a while burning a hole in my sketchbook and they seemed to make a good fit. Originally I'd envisaged having it as the very last song on the album so that it acted as something of a poppier-antidote to the darkness that had come before but thankfully I was shouted down and we decided to slot it in with the opening exchanges instead.



THE SOUND OF THE RADIO

This song has been in and out of our set for a couple of years now in various forms and I think each of us has fallen in and out of love with it on various occasions over that time. We never ever felt that we'd got it "right" despite demoing it and readjusting it probably a million times. Originally it was a bit of a driving epic that went on for over five and a half minutes but once we decided to chop out all the bits we deemed as unnecessary and added bigger peaks and troughs it began to make more sense. I wanted the song to feel like an adrenaline rush of euphoria underpinned by a pretty melancholic tale of someone who's seemingly in a perpetual existence of hearing sad songs on the radio.



1000 LIES

Hopefully this song signifies a bit of a mood change in the album from songs which on the surface at least may seem fairly innocent and possibly vaguely "pop" in style to an altogether darker place. Similarly to "All Fall" the song is built around the power of the bass and drums until the guitars eventually catch up in intensity and volume toward the end. We chose to work with the producer Richard Jackson purely and simply for moments like this : we were blown away by his work with Future of the Left and Mclusky and it was all about how much apocalyptic force we felt he could generate with the rhythm section. We build a lot of our songs on heavy foundations of bass and beats so we felt he would be the perfect fit - it helped that he was a great guy to work with on a personal level too. Despite the gloomy nature of the song we again tried to inject a feeling of euphoria into the end section - gradually building up the backing vocals and laying guitar on top of guitar to create something with an almost insane choral quality.



SHE DIDN'T KNOW

Lyrically it's one of the oldest songs on the album, (the original song was on the very first demo we ever made using a crummy drum machine and a lot of naivety in a studio in Middlesbrough in early 2006) but this definitive version came together in early 2010 when Pop suggested practising some of our older songs at less than half speed. As we crawled through this particular tune, Paul found melodies from out of no where and by taking out a couple of choruses and adding huge amounts of distortion everything seemed to finally fit into place. One of the only direct briefs we gave Richard was to make the last minute coda of the song sound like an astronaut floating further and further off into space with no hope of getting back to his craft.



SOMETHING I CAN'T GET OUT OF

"Something I Can't Get Out" is another song which seemed to come together at precisely the right time for recording after a furious period of development last Spring. We knew we had the building blocks of something good and exciting but for some reason fitting all the components together was difficult. Pop took the whole thing away and reconstructed it on his laptop and I ripped away all the original hooks in the lyrics that had become stale and attempted to find new ones. Sometimes you've got to destroy things to get the best results : I think in the past we've had a tendency to be a little precious over the songs we've written and probably scrapped a lot of songs that we thought were complete but in actual fact just needed fucking up a little. This was also the first song we recorded with Richard that we decided to include a heavy dose of accordion on. My grandfather left me it in his will so it was nice to include it to alter the dynamics in a few of the songs on the album.



KIDS

We felt that it would have been wrong to just shoehorn the original version of "Kids" onto the end of the album as an extra track or to hastily throw it into the mix in a random fashion. With it realistically being one of the only songs people may have possibly ever heard by us it would have probably been lunacy to leave it off altogether so the solution we came up with was to completely re-record it - speed it up, double up the intensity and make the "noise" even more chaotic and ear crushing - so that it was more inkeeping with the recordings we were making at the time. One of the descriptions for a guitar track for instance was "create the sound of an iron warship sinking," (this made perfect sense at the time). The very last thing we would have wanted with the album on completion was for it to feel like a compilation of songs rather than a fully formed piece in itself so it was vital that we didn't include any recordings that were nearly two years old.



A MILLION DOLLARS

"A Million Dollars" is a song designed to destroy rock and roll mythology and lies by taking various classic cliches and smashing them to pieces. It was a staple of our summer festival set in 2009 and in a way it all got a bit too much for us to live up to on a regular basis so the decision was made to leave it alone for a while. We had set ourselves a ludicrous standard of self-destruction and instrument demolition and I don't think any of us had the energy or finance to live up to it anymore. We brought it back in early 2010 as we felt the song was fundamentally vital to the finale of the album and we wanted to show people exactly what we could do. The problem we had was in trying to recreate the excess and excitement of our tried and tested live version and put it into a recording. For instance, when the song is performed at a gig an awful lot of the power is visual - whether that's a guitar being smashed or a microphone cord being yanked around a neck - either way we felt it was important for us to attempt to do something to trump that. In the end we attempted to throw everything but the kitchen sink at this song.



VIRGINS (REPRISE)

Similarly to the song "Kids" we didn't want to include our 2009 single "Virgins" on the album in it's original form - we felt like we'd be going back over old ground and in some way neutralizing all the hard work we'd done with Richard. So in the end we set about deconstructing the song completely - ripping out it's heart and replacing it with a hand grenade - resulting in a minimalist acappella intro and leading to a Sergeant Pepper-era Beatles inspired frenetic distorted finale. We always knew that it would be impossible to outdo the ludicrousness at the end of "A Million Dollars" so in a way this song doesn't even attempt to do it - it's simply there to round off the corners and refer back to the beginning of the record where the atmosphere was similarly designed to be gentle, not mental, (if a little dark in the corners).