Dappled Cities: Once More, With Feeling!

Dave Rennick from Dappled Cities tells JP HAMMOND how their new album 'Zounds' is a riposte to the adult contemporary pleasantness the band are continually fighting.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Dave Rennick sounds restless.

The receptionist at his work patches me through but, just for a moment, there’s a pregnant silence, the shuffling of papers indistinct down the phone line. It’s an early Thursday morning and as we greet each other, the Dappled Cities co-frontman confesses almost immediately that I’m the first person he’s spoken to all day.

It’s possible it’s the early start that makes Rennick charming, affable and good humoured for the majority of the interview but alternately direct and forthright in rejecting any proposition that he doesn’t like. More likely, it’s the burning desire to ensure his band, and their play-for-the-big-game third record Zounds, get their point across as clearly as possible.

Zounds, as first single ‘The Price’ hinted at, is an epic work. It’s an insular, introspective record that is contrastingly the band’s most expansive-sounding to date. It’s a record of big emotions, translated from intimate gestures. This is Dappled Cities’ masterpiece. It’s their time, and they’re ready to take it.

Rennick is candid about that desire from the outset. He states that, in creating Zounds, the band put themselves under a lot of pressure to move away from the sounds explored on its predecessor Granddance (2006). “The direction we wanted to move away from was jangly guitars and pop aesthetic we had developed,” he says, “and move onto a more expansive, darker and more meaningful existence.”

It’s a recurring theme for the interview and for the record. When discussing this desire to become more meaningful, Rennick jokingly refers to how Dappled Cities were dangerously close to becoming an “adult contemporary” band. It’s a joke that tastes bitter, made clear by the revulsion in his voice.

The genesis of Zounds is in New York City, where Dappled Cities holed up in the aftermath of extensive US touring on the back of the release of Granddance and a positive review from Pitchfork. Original drummer and founding member Hugh Boyce was involved in the first writing sessions for the album before he “decided he’d done his dash” according to Rennick, and was replaced by Allan Kumpulainen.

Boyce’s departure is an incident Rennick doesn’t discuss in much detail except to say that it was “a bit of an earthquake in the band … invigorating as well as mountainous”. Boyce and Rennick founded the band as 15 year olds (they had a penchant for bad band names back then too, calling it Periwinkle) and it’s not a difficult bow to draw that the broadening of scope and ambition on Zounds is partly a response to Boyce’s departure; pushing through adversity and loss by ascending the mountain. At the same time, the band were also battling some PR demons of their own. Describing the early writing sessions for Zounds in New York, Rennick says that Dappled Cities “had been sort of pitched across the environment as a very pleasant band, almost banal … we were sweating it a bit.”

“When you’re in a band you subscribe to the romantic ideal that you get to work with a big shot producer whose work you admire and it’ll work out all peachy. Unfortunately the reality doesn’t quite work out like that.”

It’s worth remembering that the band’s first record, A Smile, had made only a marginal impact on national youth broadcaster triple j when it was released. With Granddance, Dappled were suddenly on a Pitchfork watch list, being monitored by ill-tempered bloggers at every opportunity and touring back-to-back across the United States. Rennick describes these situations with nothing less than effusive enthusiasm but the reality of the situation gives truth to the lie. It’s not just Don Draper from Mad Men who gets ennui from a life of being marketed in the bright lights of the big city.

This point is articulated clearly when Rennick describes the process of writing Zounds’ centrepiece/highlight/prog-masterpiece ‘The Night Is Young At Heart’. The song – the first written for the album – was conceived with the intention of being a riposte to the “adult contemporary” pleasantness the band were fighting. “We thought we’ll just write a song that is big and long and angular, and I’m going to scream in it and it’s going to have a beat that’s annoying and out of time and it’s going to have a long outro.” In other words: Fuck. You.

‘The Night Is Young At Heart’ is evidently the high-dudgeon mark of vaulting ambition for Dappled Cities’ existence. Rennick even discloses that they’re fighting to make the song, at an unedited six minutes, the record’s second single.

Zounds is also an infinitely more personal record than Dappled Cities have made in the past; one where the emotional content of the song is less likely to be refracted through complex imagery and metaphor. Rennick states that he and co-frontman Tim Derricourt consciously “tried to relate more on a human, emotive front with the audience on this record”.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] If all this sounds like the band are pushing hard to be taken seriously, the process of recording and mixing Zounds suggests that those efforts were at times counterproductive, or productive of conflict. The publicity material for Zounds explicitly mentions “artistic differences” between producer Chris Coady; an assertion Rennick confirms. The band had chosen Coady because of his work with TV On The Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but Rennick is peculiarly dismissive about his involvement.

“When you’re in a band you subscribe to the romantic ideal that you get to work with a big shot producer whose work you admire and it’ll work out all peachy. Unfortunately the reality doesn’t quite work out like that,” he says.

“When he [Coady] actually arrived, we learnt a lesson that it’s really just people vs people, or people working with people. The methods he applied were so different to ours that it was quite frustrating. In terms of the sound that you hear it’s really just Dappled throwing everything against the wall.”

The finished record was also mixed by three people – Coady completed an extensive mix of the full record before a dissatisfied Dappled farmed out songs to Scott Horscroft and later Wayne Connolly. Despite the hiccups, Rennick is quick to stress that the lessons learned making the album have proved invaluable. “We came out of the record learning that we don’t need a producer ever again,” he says, adding that before they went into the studio they had been playing the songs for over two years and could play Zounds live from beginning to end.

Rennick still sounds restless though. I can hear it his voice, the way he laughs slightly at the suggestion that the “adult contemporary” concern didn’t stop the band from appearing in Disney series Alphabreaks before the reality of the cheap shot actually hits home. He’s evasive about what artists inspire him but he urgently agrees that Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest has a similar quality to Zounds, in that both records are about “tapping into something inside”. He talks excitedly about “expanding deliberately and excessively on all the songs and all the sounds” when the band take the record on the road for a tour that will be “full of little treats”.

His restlessness is justified. Dappled Cities have made the record of their lives, it’s out in a few days, there’s a tour around Australia to come and then they’re back off to the US. Rennick even discloses that a second version of Zounds (containing more restrained versions of the songs) will be coming out with accompanying clips in the next few months. All in all, it feels like Dappled Cities have only just hit the ground running. It feels like the start, rather than the culmination or apex, of their achievements.

As we end our conversation, I wish him luck, all but a marginal offering, unnecessary with a record this strong, this definitive. “We’ll see you in Melbourne then,” he says. A statement, not a question.

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Zounds is out August 15 on Speak N Spell. Tour dates here.