Over the last years British band BLUENECK evolved to one of the best alternative/ambient bands. Shortly NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION sat down with singer Duncan Attwood to talk about what can be expected from the new BLUENECK album (out “in the front half of 2014”), musical comparisons, favorite bands, instrumental albums and of course hope and passion.
With “Sirens” you released the first song of your upcoming album. What can people expect from the album?
Well, what we tried to achieve on this album is a bit more diverse. We wanted to do the production more dynamic. I wouldn’t say we go mainstream now, but perhaps it is a bit more mainstream. For example we’ve pushed my vocals a lot more up in the mix, you might have noticed that in “Sirens”. Also the drums are a lot more prominent. So with this album we’ve experimented a lot more rhythmically, sometimes the percussion is driving the songs a lot more. I’m a big fan of interesting rhythms and I wanted to try a few different things on this next record. But when we say it’s mainstream… I think it’s not really mainstream. We’ll never gonna be mainstream. It’s certainly not pop, but what I mean with “mainstream” is more the production side of things. It’s more punchy. So now we have to think a lot more about the rhythms that we’re using, because a lot of the tracks have multi-layered percussion… with electronic drums and live drums. It’s a more exciting album and I’m generally quite excited by this album. I think “Sirens” is the most BLUENECK-esque track of the album. There’s a few different things on that from which we’re really hoping people will like. The album will be out in the front half of 2014.
What would you like to see happening with the album?
It may sound a bit cliche, but I’m generally happy with how BLUENECK has been received so far. There’s not many bands that get heard as much as we do. We are not aiming to make a living out of BLUENECK, but we get to experience some amazing things through BLUENECK. So I guess the best experience being in the band is touring different countries and meeting people. My hope is that this album maybe gets heard by a lot more people and that it opens up a few more doors. Maybe we can play in some countries we’ve never toured before. Also hopefully some festivals, since we never really experienced that – we always struggled at that point. I played some festivals with CULT OF LUNA last summer when I joined them for a week and played the keyboard. It was such a great experience and I would love to do that with BLUENECK and my boys in the band.