Clumsy
The coordination and cult of San Francisco’s Clumsy.
The sleek nu-psych sounds from San Francisco’s Clumsy were first made known to the world at large with their debut album Concentration, and now return with their new EP Love Pop. Matthew Horton here returns with an arsenal of talent to make the most massive Clumsy sound to date featuring an assist from Fabrizio Incerti (percussion, vocals, conga, samples, etc), Adam Wilson (bass, synths, shakers), Spencer Owings (12 string guitar), Jake Levy (sax), Nathan Ho (viola), Jesse Jenks (cello), Anya Hirota (background vocals), Marika Stuurman (background vocals), and more produced by George Rosenthal at San Francisco’s Complex studio.
Love Pop commences with the interlude segue that is present between all the tracks that Matthew described with the following words on these track segments:
For this record, Clumsy turned to several talented amateur voice actors to complete the EP’s emotional spectrum. Featured first is a crosswalk on Market Street saying “wait” over and over to represent city life and the impatience of youth. After the first track, an anonymous bus driver let Clumsy record him saying “next stop, Love Pop” because Clumsy thought it would be sick, and they were right. After Simple Desire is perhaps the most important and legally dubious sound byte, wherein Spencer Owings and Casey Schryer recreate a scene from the television show Adventure Time, which has been dear to Clumsy for a long time. Ben Fischer provides the penultimate interlude, offering his opinion on the shortcomings of the 21st century’s modes of personal transportation. Finally, Clumsy crosses the street.
The opener “Seven Minutes In Heaven” coasts on a wave of romantic whims and ephemral pulls and pushes that initiates the new expanded ethereal world of Clumsy. Bringing out the big arrangement guns, “Simple Desire” combines the traits and pangs of passions into urges and inclinations transformed into dance-dreamed chord progressions that kick up a fog storm of sound. The closing cut “Modern Ecstasy” finds Matthew putting his feelings all on the line delivering the jangle-twee pop with the barely-tonal illustrated pains of modern romance that ends with the street crossing recording that indicates our hero’s cue to cross the dodgy sidewalks of SF’s Market Street.
Matthew Horton from Clumsy talked to us fora bit about the making of their most ambitious release yet:
The songs for Love Pop were written about a year before we recorded them in July/ August 2015. At the time when we were writing the songs for Love Pop, we were going through hard times and wanted to shift the negative energy into something positive. I think a lot of the record is about trying to deal with the confusion that romantic relationships bring. The songs went through many incarnations before we recorded the final versions of them in July/ August. The recorded versions of the songs are a culmination of the year we spent working on them.
We had the vision of Love Pop planned out months before we went into the studio. We wanted to expand upon the traditional rock instrumentation that dominated our debut album “Concentration”. We wanted to have string arrangements, horn parts, and female vocals. Also, we wanted the songs to be joined together by interludes to make a cohesive listening experience. We wanted to go into a studio and record the album in high fidelity sound because we thought this would capture the maximalist sound we were going for.
Inside the confines of Clumsy’s inner-sanctum.
We found the sax player Jake Levy, the cello player Jesse Jenks, the viola player Nathan Ho, the vocalist Marika Sturman, and the vocalist Anya Hirota through mutual friends and asked them to record with us at the Complex Studio in SF. Our friend Spencer Owings who produced our last album “Concentration” and played guitar with us at a show layed down some lead guitar tracks and co-produced the album. We also put together the interludes at his studio. We really wanted Spencer to be involved because he really knows our music and is super fun to work with. Over the period of 5 days we recorded and mixed the album with the producer George Rosenthal. We then got it mastered by Ash Clayton and had our friend Dawn Cardenas do the cover art.
It was super exhilarating having tons of people involved in this project and it definitely would be very different without all of them being involved.
Listen to more Clumsy via Bandcamp.
