A conversation with Matt Flegel of Canadian post-punk act Preoccupations; show with Protomartyr Saturday at RecordBar

Matt Flegel, bassist and vocalist of Canadian post-punk band Preoccupations, was in a Montreal recording studio when I called him this past October. He’d been “crashed out” there, working on new music, and hadn’t left the building in two days, apparently. Since he and his bandmates left their day jobs, he says they grow bored quickly between tours and jump back into writing and recording.

Preoccupations’ latest album, New Material, was recorded at five different locations in Canada, America, and Mexico, and had no deadline (Flegel says they didn’t even tell the label they were working on it until its completion). This creative freedom and adventurous spirit spawned a record full of dark psychedelia, experimental recording techniques, and some of the band’s most gratifying music yet. We touched on the band’s unique sounds, the new album, and their upcoming tour with Protomartyr in a recent chat.

I noticed that on New Material, as on past records of yours, there have been these grand openings that kick them off and set the tone. Is there something that draws you to that?

Yeah, I guess we kinda started the record similar to the Viet Cong self-titled. I don’t know. We like to mess around in the studio. I think most songs we put out are a product of just tinkering around in the studio, us nerding out with all the gear, running drums through weird effects, mic-ing drums then putting the mic into amplifiers in the next room and then recording those amps. We just kinda like tinkering around with the percussion sounds. I think a lot of it sounds a little more straight up, but I like trying to make the drums sound a little different from what you hear on your average rock record.

You guys recorded New Material by yourselves across several different locations. Was it ever difficult to keep focus when you’re jumping around so often with nobody to rein you in?

Yeah, we definitely lost focus more than half the time [laughs]. That’s probably why it took so fuckin’ long. Once we get going, we’re pretty good at keeping our heads down and finishing an idea. Whether or not it’s a good idea, we usually see it through to the end. And we end up scrapping probably half of everything we record. At the end of it, it’s usually us just picking the eight or ten best songs that kind of all fit together the best, and then maybe revisit some of the stuff we scrap for the next record or not.

Something I was thinking about listening to the album was how most modern rock bands that incorporate psychedelic sounds into their music are mostly kind of fun and bright like Tame Impala or Animal Collective. Were you guys looking back to the darker psych stuff from the seventies and eighties at all while writing it?

Yeah, I mean we listen to a lot of that kind of music. It probably all comes through, whether it’s subconscious or not. But again, a lot of it is just the production of it, and I think that’s something a lot of new bands maybe don’t think about much, or aren’t as adventurous with. It’s just trying to get different sounds. That’s kind of our main goal anytime we’re recording a song — make it sound a little bit different. And I think that’s what everyone was doing in the sixties, seventies, early eighties. I think [it was due to] a lot of new advancements in technology and gear and those kind of things, too.

The electronic drums used on “Compliance” are very untypical of a modern rock song. Was that inspired more by electronic and hip-hop music, or that spirit of wanting to experiment?

More of wanting to experiment. I know Monty [Scott Munro, guitar and synth player] is the hip-hop head of our crew, he listens to a lot of that, and he’s essentially the main engineer on everything, so that’s probably where that came from. Again, probably more subconsciously. And that one came together really quick. It was a couple hours late at night, just messing around with old synths and getting crazy sounds. I think we recorded that one basically in one shot. It doesn’t really sound like anything else that we’ve done, but I kind of liked that as sort of a finale for the record.

Besides adapting the new songs to the live setting, is there anything that strikes you differently about this set of dates?

We’ll see. We’re using all new gear; we got everything stolen from us on our last trip in May, so we ended up having to replace everything … Also, we’re co-headlining with Protomartyr. We’re good friends with them, they’re our contemporaries. I think a lot of people that like their band are into our band, and vice-versa, and I think it’ll be kind of a good rivalry. We’re gonna wanna be showing each other up every night, so I’m kind of looking forward to that.

I like that approach. A lot of hip-hop is very publicly competitive and, to an extent, I think it’s healthy for the genre and pushes things forward. You don’t see that as much in rock music.

Oh, I think so. And I know those guys pretty well. But yeah, I’m looking forward to having the chance to one-up them every night, and hopefully they’re thinking the same thing. I think it’s a good exercise if anything.

♦

Preoccupations plays at recordBar (1520 Grand Blvd KCMO) with Protomartyr and Rattle on Saturday, December 8 at 8 P.M. Tickets and info available at therecordbar.com.