“I’m just reminding myself how to change a tyre because my girlfriend’s car got a flat tyre yesterday during a tornado warning,” Andrew Fisher begins with the same half-excited / half-nervous matter-of-fact tone that any Englishman would have when now living in a country where tornadoes occur regularly.
But, for the Basement frontman, there is no better pathetic fallacy for the whirlwind few months coming in support of their fourth studio album ‘Beside Myself’. From stretching out the summer with countless US festival dates, radio slots and listening parties then tours of both their adoptive and native homes soon after the release, Basement are just gearing up as the year winds down.
It’s fair to say that despite the frenzy, the band are ready for it. “This is the most excited I think anyone has been for a release because it’s been such a long process,” says Andrew. And it’s true. After releasing their last album, ‘Promise Everything’, in January 2016, Basement signed to Fueled By Ramen who called for a “Deluxe” re-release of the album in March last year and in doing so slowed the pace on what is now ‘Beside Myself’.
The decision to revamp ‘Promise Everything’ is somewhat diplomatically described as “a really nice way to understand how the label works, and it took the pressure off us, but the songs were already there.” Ultimately, that delay has resulted in Basement’s best album yet.
With time on their side, ‘Beside Myself’ became more “complete” than anything Basement have ever done before. The themes introduced in ‘Disconnect’ (written now three summers ago) are cathartically, neatly, wrapped up in the closer. There are grungy reflections of their past albums and bold, bright, signals of where they are heading alongside moments of frailty and that broader spectrum to this album is all the product of having more time and an open mind for how the album should sound.
“With this record, I think everyone took a step back and let their own shit go to one side and be very open-minded to what everyone else wanted to make. And we’d get to the point with a fully finished song – even if someone didn’t really like it – because we were really like, ‘Lets look at the song and where we can get with it’, and not let our taste or idea of what we want to be [get in the way].”
