Issue 48 / September 2014

8
Bido Lito! September 2014
BY
THE
SEA
Words: Christopher Torpey / @CATorp
Photography: John Johnson / pooloflife.co.uk
Four years ago Bido Lito! spoke to BY THE SEA for the first time,
and encountered a band with not only oodles of tunes but oodles
of promise too, yet they were afraid of their own shadows. It
seems pretty fucking obvious to say that a lot can happen in four
years, but By The Sea may well be the living embodiment of this
old cliché. The By The Sea that pulses and twinkles through new
album Endless Days, Crystal Sky (their follow-up to 2012’s self-titled
debut record) is virtually unrecognisable to that band who we
described as “the grandchildren of The Byrds playing Townes Van
Zandt songs” back in our second issue. The summery shimmers
have been replaced by brooding melodramas, all Depeche Mode
synths and Johnny Marr Chorus pedal guitar noodling. Endless
Days, Crystal Sky is a record that brims with conviction, and this
newfound swagger suits them well. So what changed?
Where we were curious four years ago about where they came
from, now we want to know where By The Sea are going with this
new album, and what it took to get there. So we sat down with
them and tried to pick apart the building blocks of Endless Days,
Crystal Sky, and find out how they pieced it all together. Halfway
through the interview vocalist and guitarist Liam Power stops to
reflect on the direction the conversation has taken. “This is like
bidolito.co.uk
some kind of a monster therapy session! We all needed to get
this out, I think – we’ll be here for hours!”
By The Sea on… the gestation period of Endless Days, Crystal Sky
Joe Edwards (Keys, Synths): We recorded it last summer, then
obviously the mixing was done from then. The week that the first
album came out [in November 2012] we had Endless Days already
there, as well as some other demos. And then we had it all done
within about six months – written and demoed.
Liam Power (Guitars, Vocals): It wasn’t the fact that we wanted
to rush and do a second album, it was more due to how long we’d
sat on the tunes for the first album for. We had Endless Days, and
then we thought ‘Can we do this, is it that much of a jump?’ And
by the time we were five tunes into the second album we thought
that it wasn’t that much of a jump. It still sounds like us. It all just
got a bit synthy.
By The Sea on… a more synthetic approach
JE: That’s probably mainly me! (laughs) That wasn’t really
intentional though.
LP: I was kind of conscious to get more synths in… We lost our
other guitarist [Steven Campbell] and so that meant there was
loads more room in the arrangement for the synths, and we’d
kind of always wanted that.
Daniel O’Connell (Bass): It was more of a practical thing though
because we were demoing it [this album]. We never demoed the
first album at all. I think the first album’s songs are like sketches.
For this one we sat down and wrote it as we were demoing it, and
we did most of it in Joe’s garage.