S
tuart MacKenzie isn’t kidding when he confesses a certain lack of business acumen. His latest and perhaps best musical aggregation, DAAP Girls, is currently sitting on their almost indescribably excellent sophomore album, now due for its fifth (and likely not last) mix. The band has yet to title the album or establish a track sequence, and the septet’s upcoming promotional video shoot at the Woodward Theater will feature brand new songs that won’t appear until the band’s next album. Still, there’s a method to the DAAP Girls’ madness.
“Once we get it all mastered, we’ll probably let it sit for two weeks,” MacKenzie says over beers at the band’s Newport practice space/recording studio where the new album was tracked. “We’ve hated and loved every song on the album. We’ve added parts and we’re like, ‘That’s my new favorite song,’ or ‘This song sucks, why is it even on the album?’ Once it sounds good, we’ll sit down and have a big fight and eventually have something that nobody loves but everybody doesn’t hate totally.”
The landscape has changed considerably for the DAAP Girls since their Best New Artist win at the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards at the start of the year and the release of their stripped-down Stonesy debut, Tape Songs. The horn players they brought in to spice up their 2013 set at the Bunbury Music Festival (saxophonist Brian Gilronan and trombonist Collin Thompson) have become members, and guitarist/backing vocalist Michael Felger has added an exciting new wrinkle to the proceedings.
As a result, the core of DAAP Girls — guitarist/vocalist MacKenzie, bassist/vocalist Jay Duckworth, organist Alex Duckworth, drummer Daniel Peterson — has become stronger and more malleable, a slinky quality that shines on the new album’s 11 tracks.
“We wanted to have a really good band and have fun playing music and not worry about any business side,” MacKenzie says. “This has been seven people coming together to make diverse music and we have a really bold way of doing it. We’re really proud of it and we want to expose it to as many people as we can.”
With the expanded lineup, DAAP Girls’ songwriting methodology and sonic perspective have changed as well. Tape Songs was essentially a demo that MacKenzie had brought to the Duckworth brothers and Peterson — all from Newport Secret Six, which is also finishing up a new album — to flesh out. Although some of the new album’s songs actually predate Tape Songs, the group’s new collaborative atmosphere has transformed them into band compositions.
“We take an idea, beat it to death, resurrect it, hate it, fall in love with it, boil it down into a powder, cook it up in a crack-spoon,” MacKenzie says.
“A lot of this stuff we’ve played live and it goes by and you don’t think about it too much,” Jay Duckworth says. “But you realize that you want people to listen to this shit over and over again, so we’re really cognizant of trying to avoid the ‘good enough’ disease.”
The new DAAP Girls album is diverse and intense, as the group explores its Soul roots to a greater extent, tightens the bolts on their Garage Rock frenzy and folds in fascinating Psychedelic and Pop elements. Even as the DAAP Girls broaden their horizons, the band maintains a shambling continuity due in large part to MacKenzie, who seems to channel his Soul-shouting inner Greg Dulli on the new material.
The DAAP Girls’ secret studio weapon might turn out to be engineer Brian Niesz, who has worked closely with Jay Duckworth on the initial mixes. Niesz has brought not just a finely tuned pair of ears to the process but also a philosophical perspective that somehow accepts and challenges simultaneously.
“Brian has been a huge difference,” MacKenzie says. “We did everything on tape besides vocals to maintain that sound and not clean it up too much. It doesn’t sound like it was recorded in this shithole, but it sounds like it was recorded in some shithole, like a Stones record, like Exile on Main Street.”
“When we were mixing it, we had an imaginary meter where it could be played on the radio, and we would take it to there and then drag it back a little bit,” Jay Duckworth says. “We didn’t want it quite there. Brian is really professional and he wanted to make things good and I’m super lo-fi and I want everything to sound terrible. We restrained each other’s impulses.”
In typical DAAP Girls fashion, the band is juggling completion of the new album, a possible vinyl component, the set list for the Woodward video shoot and a national roll-out for the imminent LP. That would be enough for any band, but the DAAP Girls have never been just any band.
“We already have over half of another record done,” Felger says.
“And it’s just as diverse,” MacKenzie adds. “We’ve got slow, Dusty Springfield songs and Soul rockers.”
It’s gotten so crazy that a rehearsal of new songs for the Woodward show yielded an unexpected benefit, which speaks to the band’s natural evolution and everyone’s part in it.
“We were messing around and Collin played this horn part,” Duckworth says. “And we were like, ‘Oh God, we have to write a song around that horn riff.’ Now we have to write a song, goddamnit.”
“When I first joined, it was like, learn the parts and do the best you can, concentrate on listening to what everyone wants and ask a lot of questions,” Felger says. “Then we started playing with Collin and Brian and it was sort of the same thing. Then we hit our arc at the right time before we recorded and we were able to hone in on every song and everybody was able to express themselves properly. Now everybody has a 100-percent crucial role in the writing process, which is fucking awesome.”
Everything about the DAAP Girls comes frontloaded with an extra dose of chaos, so delays, changes and personality clashes are par for a long and challenging course. MacKenzie offers a partial explanation of how the band hangs together through it all.
“We can be really rude to each other, but luckily there’s seven people so everybody can be mad at another person, it’s just nobody can be mad at the same person,” he says. “Or if someone makes them mad in the meantime, they can forget about it.”
“I hate all you people,” Alex Duckworth declares.
And you know what’s on the flip side of hate, baby. ©
DAAP GIRLS play Friday at Woodward Theater with Black Planet. More info: facebook.com/thewoodwardtheater.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2014.