The latest 5-track EP, Salvation Memorial Hospital by the LA indie rockers The Loud Bangs, is a dreamy, ethereal sonic explosion of colors. The band incorporates elements of shoegaze, dream pop, and ambient indie music with the nostalgic sounds of synthwave to create a surreal and otherworldly listening experience. On top of oscillating rhythms driven by heavy reverberating guitars and ethereal vocals, the EP features obscure snippets of spoken words that add an extra layer of dreaminess to the already complex soundscapes. We sat with Alice Street, the singer and guitarist of the band to talk about the EP. Check out the conversation below:
1. First of all, interesting name! How did you guys come up with the name ‘Salvation Memorial Hospital’? What’s the story and inspiration behind it? Did you have any specific theme in mind?
Alice Street: Thanks for the chat! We love your magazine! So, yes – as you probably know– a lot of our songs are about mental health. Not to get all Syd Barrett confessional on you, but I know what the inside of a hospital looks like. I’ve never been inside one named ‘Salvation Memorial Hospital’, but those three words together embody a lot about this set of songs. We all need rescuing, we all want to be remembered, and we’re all unstable AF.
2. I’ve noticed most of our colleagues dub you guys as the new age My Bloody Valentine. While you have mentioned them as an inspiration in the past and it reflects in the sound, do you take it as a compliment or has it gotten old?
Alice Street: We adore MBV – obviously – we’re a shoegaze band – and everything in shoegaze starts and ends with Kevin Shields. The catalog is so brilliant but oh so slim. We love that there are so many other good artists with a similar blurry vibe for us to enjoy. Sometimes we hear an excellent sg band – like Fleeting Joys – but we didn’t want to tie ourselves entirely to the sub-genre. For us, it’s better to use sg as a foundation and then add onto it other sounds we like. For example, I’m a big fan of Charli XCX, so you get to hear a lot of electronic drums that are like her sound. We like to think of this as extending the sg sound rather destroying it. And for that reason – and maybe others – some sg critics complain. We certainly aren’t getting the numbers of our peers for listeners, so we’re doing something wrong. It’s tough to be a pioneer!
3. Continuing the topic of your sound, we previously discussed your creative process of coming up with a song. Could you tell our readers what gears and setup they’d need if they wanted to imitate your sound?
Alice Street: Well, it’s not a big investment, I can tell you that. We’re poor, so all our gear is pretty frazzled. We all have cheap guitars and loaner pedals and broken amps. Somehow, we’re able to make it sound good, but God knows how or why.
I play an Epiphone SG and also a Danelectro with a RAT distortion pedal, a Cathedral, a Pitchshifter, and a Boss chorus through a Marshall stack. Daisy, our lead guitarist, plays a Fender Strat through a Boss distortion, a Boss chorus, and a Peavy and a much-used tremolo (hello MBV). Sometimes we do digital augmentation of the guitars using plug-ins like the VandalSE. Hannah plays a Fender Jazz bass through a Marshall guitar amp, which is sort of strange because that makes it a LOT more aggressive than a bass should be (and we love that!). Marcus has a shit-ton of drums I can’t even name. And a vintage TR-808. He’s a collector! Oh, and I have Gibson acoustic that I play when I want to be all fragile.
If you wanted to copy our sound entirely, it’s very complicated, so (maybe) hard to steal. Each song has like 200 tracks with only tiny fragments. If you solo any one track it’s mostly blank and, on its own, kinda boring. It’s about stacking all that sound into a cohesive sonic unit that’s the real challenge. Our mixing to performing ratio is about 30 to one. We record very fast – mostly first takes without much thought or precision. We’re often playing things without even hearing back past tracks. Then when the tracks are unmuted, the fact that they sound ‘on purpose’ is a fucking miracle. It helps that I come in with a kinda-sorta structure and intention to the song – so we’re not totally lost in such a dense forest. Most of the time we’re talking about ‘this not that’ in the mix and trying different combinations. The time behind the board is way more than in the recording room. We thought about take more pictures in the studio, or posting some videos, but everything we’ve done is sooo boring to watch – it’s just us looking at a monitor and nodding our heads, moving faders, watching ProTools editing. Yawn. Plus I won’t let anyone film me playing or singing. Yet.
4. The obscure dreamlike vocals– a staple of shoegaze and a big part of your sound, how do you go about the parts that are often shrouded by the layers of instruments? How about the lyrics and sometimes the lack thereof?
Alice Street: I have a completely different idea about singing than, well, everyone in the universe. If I heard a song and any one of the instruments – like, a guitar, for example – was noodling EVERY FUCKING MEASURE you would shut that song off – fast! Why do we ask that the singer do that – sing every second of the song? When I was a teenager, I would fill a page of my notebook with bad sad girl lyrics. One day when I was 20, I just circled the four or five phrases I thought were the best. Now I just sing the circles. The rest doesn’t matter. The result is usually only eight words a song, and – believe me! – people give me shit for this ALL THE TIME! Sometimes I’ll do a song with more, like this unreleased track called ‘Sex Complex,’ and it just sounds like waaaay toooo much singing. To everyone else, it’s, I guess, normal, but it just sounds so over the top to me. I’m not really an instrumentalist, though there are songs that are nearly instrumentals, like ‘Prescription Headphones,’ because I circled almost nothing and couldn’t think of anything else that was as good as just hearing music by itself. So far, we have only one true instrumental (‘Zaera’). Even ‘I Was a Bad Penny’ – which a few people have called an instrumental – says ‘bad’ and ‘the bed’ – which is all you really need anyway.
If I’m gonna sing, it better be worth it! My greatest hope is that I start a trend. It’s not likely to happen in this age of rap and country, where the vocal is ever-present. But maybe in shoegaze and dream-pop kids will care. Stop! Singing! All! The! Time! It’s dumb.
Added to that, I’ll say that I often also make the vocal very hard to decipher, even when it’s loud. I have a lot of misheard lyrics from my youth that I love and I’m sure if I really knew what they were singing I might be disappointed. On our song ‘Playboy Tattoo,’ I sing, ‘First to say I won’t make it.’ The band thought I was singing, ‘Birds will say I was naked,’ which I kinda liked better. So, fuck me. What do I know?
In a song, instead of singing ‘I can see it there’ like I did the first pass, I might sing the next time around sign it as ‘I can see it blur’ so that causes some confusion as well. In ‘The Gloria Films’ I say, ‘Do you want to dance?’, ‘Do you want it down,’ and ‘Do you want to die,’ so… I’m devious like that!
Oh, and sometimes we’d do manipulations that have weird results. On an older song, “The Stacey Diagram,” I sang “flower and fire” but it was too many syllables. We ended up combining “flower and fire” to “flow-eyer,” and – though it’s not a real word – it sounds pretty great. Cocteau Twins would be so proud.
5. In what aspects do you think your audiences are gonna connect with the songs? Were there any personal messages you were trying to get across and do you think is it important for fans of your music to understand the real story and message driving each of your songs, or do you think everyone should be free to interpret your songs in their own personal way?
Alice Street: Music is a happy thing. The happiest. I hope listeners find some universal belonging or shared community from my very isolated headspace. Though a lot of these songs are about my trying to feel all right, I don’t think I’m alone with trying. I don’t want to push anyone willing to listen away with the content, so it’s not as bleak as Pink Floyd – a comparison we get a lot – or The Cure or Grouper or someone. We love pop stuff like Lush and The Primitives and Altered Images and even Taylor Swift – though I do love a good heavy metal guitar, so we’ll probably never sound like those acts.
6. Do you have a favorite motto, phrase, or piece of advice, you try to live or inspire yourself by? And do you have a specific vision or goal set in your mind that you would like to achieve in the near future?
Alice Street: The Loud Bangs has been a fun art project, but I’m not sure what the future will hold for us. But you never know. I was told there would be no interviews and now I’ve given like four or five – I guess it’s possible to change my mind, and that means tomorrow might be very different from today.
I know I’m going to get some tacos from the truck downstairs after I type this. So, my motto today can be, ‘Sometimes good tacos are just enough to make you forget you really have very few options.’ There. And if that was a lyric, I might just circle ‘very few options’ and that’s all! You! Get!
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Photo credits: Kim Withers