Pitchfork

If you have the balls to break up your band when people are still pretty psyched that you exist, the least you can do is start another band. It's just common courtesy-- especially if your contribution to inner-band squabbling is rumored to be at least half the cause of the breakup. After all, musicians are our dancing monkeys, here to entertain us at our command, are they not? Personal lives and creative differences be damned! We want our rock. We want more songs than a song convention. Sing it!

Welsh primal stompers Mclusky are the case in point here. As we reported in June, bassist John Chapple is spending his post-lusky time with a new band, Shooting at Unarmed Men. Pitchfork spoke with Chapple recently and about the group's debut EP, Soon There Will Be Shooting at Unarmed Men, due this Tuesday, December 6, on Too Pure, as well as his future plans.

Shooting at Unarmed Men began its life back in 1999, when Mclusky was still alive and kicking. Their influences, according to a cheeky press release, include "a variety of British garden birds that sing in our streets, the highly addictive and unhealthy past-time of smoking tobacco, driving our polluting and fuel-consuming automobiles to and fro, drinking whiskey, working shit jobs for too little money and which hold no future prospects." We're assuming this is code for Skynyrd, cocaine, and blowjobs.

The trio's debut EP is rawer and more stripped-down than Mclusky's recordings. When asked about the Shooting at Unarmed Men sound, Chapple replied: "Some guy asked me why I recorded lo-fi for this album, and I said sarcastically that we're recording pi-fi to the nearest decimal point. I don't believe in lo-fi or hi-fi. A band sings the way they sing and somebody presses record. We did this whole recording in one weekend. Some people would say that was rushed. Other people would say that was pointless. I say we took as long as we needed to and we got what we wanted to get done, done." So... multiply pi-fi by the circumference of the record and square it to get its area and overall worth? You always wondered how we structured our 10-point rating system, didn't you.

Here's the EP tracklist:

01 Taking Care of Business
02 Four Eyed McClayvie
03 When Potent Doesn't Mean It
04 Impunity Rules
05 The Long and the Short of It
06 No-One Can Waltz
07 The Pink Ink
08 There's a Reason It's Called the Easy Way Out
09 This Much Is a Lot

Shooting at Unarmed Men aim to record their first full-length within the next month or so, for release in the spring. While the studio time frame is a bit shaky, Chapple has a good idea of how long the second album will be. He told Pitchfork, "Short records are good records in my book. The Minutemen never did eight songs over forty-five minutes, you know. My favorite albums are eight songs and exactly thirty minutes long-- exactly four songs a side on a vinyl. It's a perfect length for an album; it doesn't need to be any longer than that."

We didn't want to point out that Soon There Will Be Shooting at Unarmed Men has nine tracks, even though it's being billed as an EP, because we were afraid he'd find a way to climb through the phone line and kick all of our asses. He was in Mclusky, after all. Their old singer was a sex criminal!

Shooting at Unarmed Men hope to tour North America early next year, though no definite plans have been set. Chapple filled us in on the business of the band, saying, "This is a very small, very centralized project. The band handles everything outside of the record company. We book our own shows, we finance our own shows, we do everything in house, basically."

As for Mclusky, that three-disc set of singles, B-sides, outtakes, rarities, and live recordings we told you about way back when is still in the works, with a January or February release in the cards. Chapple said he has been in contact with drummer Jack Egglestone, but added that "there has not been a syllable exchanged between me and Andrew [Falkous] since I left Mclusky." Ouch! Both Egglestone and Falkous are in rehearsals with members of a "very seminal local band" called Jarcrew, though the new band remains unnamed. May we recommend "Mcrew", "Jarluskey", or, since we're already going this route, "Brunch"?

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* Mclusky: