“What’s new?”, Brendan Kelly responds incredulously. “Nothing,” he wearily continues. “There’s nothing going on, man. There’s probably been no time in history where that has been a more accurate statement.”
Amid the seemingly endless tedium, The Lawrence Arms have released a new record. It’s their seventh in an over 20-year career, and the first one they’ve recorded away from their native Chicago. Titled ‘Skeleton Coast’, its name is inspired by a stretch of shoreline hugging Namibia – known to the local people as “The Land God Made in Anger”, while sailors simply dubbed it “The Gates of Hell”.
This desolate expanse is frequently blanketed in thick fog, whilst treacherous currents and rough seas drag marine life and vessels to their fate. What’s left in the ocean’s wake are decaying carcasses of beast and machine, unable to escape the relentless energy of the surf, and its notoriety felt apt for a nihilistic punk band from Chicago.
“It [‘Skeleton Coast’] seemed like a really rich metaphor for how the world is,” Kelly pauses before, in a rueful tone, adds, “a lot of dead things”.
The Lawrence Arms’ own interpretation of the lashing waves of the Atlantic can be found in the dusty, wide-open desert of West Texas where they chose to record. A landscape where the scavenger is king, and the only noise that pierces the vacuum is the howl of the coyote, and while it may seem like an inspired decision to not only set a record on these blood-orange horizons, but also to record it in the remote city of El Paso, Kelly admits it was more dumb luck.
“I would love to say that we set out to make a record about desolate zones and scavengers, packing it with references to foxes, wolves, coyotes, and whales, and record it in the middle of fucking nowhere, but none of it was planned, it just happened,” he wryly admits.
There was no grand plan, no great vision – just three friends attempting to blow each other’s minds with new material. A “shitty Days Inn” with a glistening swimming pool lying by the I-10 highway appealed, and Kelly, guitarist Chris McCaughan, and drummer Neil Hennessey converged from each corner of the US to the dust bowl of Texas.
A record six years in the making often betrays a long, drawn-out process. One in which inspiration was carefully drawn from the world around the artists. “I don’t totally believe in inspiration,” Kelly laughs. “I think it’s more like you just have to do it. I think it’s the fallacy of anybody that purports to be an artist saying they need inspiration to strike. You’re not an artist, an artist just goes out and creates something.”