Photo courtesy of Casandra Marie
Over the course of their 23-year existence, punk-spirited, post-rock group Fairweather, have developed a working chemistry that’s allowed the band to express themselves sincerely and creatively with each recording endeavor since their pop-punk debut, If They Move…Kill Them (2001).
After releasing an EP (Alaska, 2002) and one more full-length (Lusitania, 2003), Fairweather decided to take a break from 2003-2011.
Now, an additional eight years after the band’s self-titled comeback album in 2014, Fairweather returns with their latest four-track EP, Deluge. The EP released on June 24 via Equal Vision Records, a label they’ve been loyal to since they formed, and contains the band’s most musically layered, emotionally driven, and overall mesmerizing material to date.
Ben Green, one of the founding members of the band, who plays guitar, keys, and performs additional vocals, has had the opportunity to contribute to every step of the band’s journey. Rewinding things back to the time before Fairweather made the decision to take a break, Green shares that there were “a lot of factors, most of which were external to the band,” that contributed to the pause.
Green describes the musical environment that the band came up in as something that wore itself out quickly after the natural magic of the scene had already been generated.
“We saw the scene we were in explode very fast, and watched the mechanisms of the market spring into play to try to capitalize on it, quickly. It was really the first time seeing and realizing how the market is directly downstream of an organic culture and tries to replicate the same accidental magic that a culture generates on its own, usually to the destruction of that very culture,” says Green.
“We had started in a musical world built on relationships of like-minded musicians and promoters, and when we released Lusitania, it had really become a world based on your ‘representation’-a word I kind of detest to this day.”
Ultimately, the members of Fairweather, Green included, grew exhausted and became discouraged. “It had become centered around behind-the-scenes figures, making the world move how they wished, and bands went along with it! Hell, it was making money. We just didn’t play that game willingly, and it hurt us … We found ourselves under pressure to keep momentum up, even doing foolish tours that exhausted us, playing in front of the wrong audiences, and it really took a toll on us,” explains Green.
He continues, “We decided to just leave the band behind and stay buddies. I remember a few of us really just wanted to break from the road, and just focus on writing music, and some of the rest of us wanted to keep charging ahead. It just made sense at the time to not try to force it into the new paradigm we were dealing with. It worked! We’re all still best friends and have managed to make some other music since then.”
Returning in 2011, the old pressures that pushed the band into parting ways were somewhat alleviated, and Fairweather found that they could come back together to focus solely on making music. For their comeback, self-titled album, Fairweather wrote a collection of straightforward punk songs that were stripped down and just fun to jam.
However on Deluge, it’s clear that Fairweather took the opportunity to explore broader soundscapes, revealing a more carefully crafted music collaboration, with a seemingly deeper sense of purpose.
At this point in the band’s life, and to each member, Fairweather “is 100% about friends hanging out and working on creative problems together and complaining about our health problems like proper old men,” says Green. “In terms of the creative process, it is very collaborative. There is no single songwriter, and so we all work towards a common understanding of a song … It takes ages, but it’s how we’ve always worked.”
Green admits that as a band, Fairweather tends to get bored of one specific sound. “For these new songs on Deluge, we added a new friend to the mix, Nick (bass), who we’ve played with for years in different forms. It just made sense to try some slow and lush songs, work really hard on vocals and get some big beautiful recordings of them. Everything is linked together by Jay (vocals), really, he can sing over anything we do and it sounds like Fairweather.”
As far as production on the new EP goes, Green took on the duty of recording and producing a majority of it in-house, at his studio Ivakota in DC. He explains, “We really wanted it to have huge left-right space, but also a deep front-to-back feeling. We filled a lot of moments with melody and motifs, so the moments where those disappear stand strong also.”
“This album was more about experiencing something built and labored over, rather than a typical record or archive of a performance (like our last record). The depth of a record like The Cure’s Disintegration is always in my mind with the more lush Fairweather songs and recording,” mentions Green.
Green recalls an overwhelming flood of factors feeding into the dynamic and emotive sound transmitted on Deluge. The direct impact of not only the pandemic, but the climate of American society over the course of the last few years “loomed large” when it came to the band’s collective headspace. This inevitably influenced how personal emotions would come across and be expressed to the listener.
“A lot of the themes on the record revolve directly around our experiences as people living through not just the pandemic, but the last few insane years of being an American. The title of the record is a reference to a rumored quote by Louis the XV ‘Après moi, le déluge’ or ‘After me, the flood.’ To me, this sentiment encapsulates modernity in America—just a deep, cynical lack of attention or care to what may come after us,” says Green.
“The pandemic put us into a weird state of focus, a confusing depth-of-field. Our internal personal lives moved forward slowly while the external world has been moving forward almost like a train out of control, blurry and sometimes incomprehensible. That foreground/background framing is present in a lot of what we did on Deluge, in an attempt to understand it.”
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Watch the video for “Untethered” here: