Octoberland is the album of the year, for its creativity, innovation, and originality, the daring way they use their influences (like putting Jefferson Airplane and The New Pornographers together), and just for all around good vibes, even when talking about the war in Ukraine and how vital the fight is on “Snake Island Thirteen.”
Rex Broome (vocals, guitar) and Christina Bulbenko (vocals, keys) were kind enough to answer some questions for me.
Andrea Weiss: Is Octoberland a concept album?
Rex Broome: It's pretty close to one, or a “song cycle.” Those are sort of scary terms because they often imply a sort of pretentiousness, right? But we do love albums that have a real sense of time and place, unifying themes and recurring imagery, and as we sat down to write all these songs at once, which is something we hadn't done before, it kind of took on a life of its own. We would edit the lyrics from one song to line up with another one, and that would suggest something that would go into yet a third one, and before long we had eleven songs that suggested an overall track sequence, and the word “Octoberland” as a destination. It all fell into place as a loosely unified arc of songs that shared a lot of themes and iconography. It just made us happy.
Christina Bulbenko: You'll hear us sing about omens, cats, crows and snakes a lot. We also use the band's own name in a few of the songs, and we keep circling around this idea of October as a season, the “October surprise” that's expected in election cycles these days, and ultimately this fictional, semi-utopian destination of Octoberland. There's an undercurrent of mythic, folkloric and literary references, too. That's all part of the bigger theme here, which is that self-involvement is a real problem. We need to be opening up to each other, and these rich storytelling – or songwriting – traditions, all of which are based on the empathy of the creative act, are a place to start, because they're part of the cultural fabric. And we like the idea that we're building on that in the service of the idea of community.
AW: Who were you listening to during the making of the album?
CB: It's easier to remember what we listened to afterward, once we knew what we'd made and could think about what it reminded us of! And of course, we spend a lot of time listening to the releases we're putting out with Big Stir Records. We had this thing happen where just after we'd finished the demos, we signed two bands at once, which we almost never do – The Jack Rubies and Hungrytown, very different bands but both seemed connected to our headspace in writing Octoberland. The Jack Rubies have this postpunk drive and bravado that felt like what we'd just done, and Hungrytown is very lyrical, folk-based and evocative. We felt like we'd written a record halfway between those two realms!
RB: Like Christina said, we were so deep into creating our own thing that we figured out the influences later! I immediately gravitated back to the early work of The Band, where they had all these sideways reinterpretations of mythical stories, and, oddly enough, Siouxsie & The Banshees. There was something witchy, but in a thoughtful way, about the Octoberland songs that made me want to immerse myself in that stuff. Plus Camper Van Beethoven, always.
AW: I love the complexity, and how gently wry and happy and positive the lyrics are. Could you say more about them?
RB: I think we're always going for that, even when the songs get dark, and there's some serious darkness on this record. But we always want to have an element of playfulness about it. I think we're pretty unflinching . We don't put forth any delusions that things are just gonna be fine, but we also want to push against the notion that you can't be intelligent and joyful at the same time. Creativity is something to celebrate. We'll leaven our darkest moments with humor, or revel in the fact that we're fortunate enough to be expressing ourselves. It's a miracle that's so absurd that you really need to remember that it's a true joy just to be able to do it.
CB: In our collaboration on the lyrics, we always check each other, especially when we're dealing with the dark stuff (like the war in Ukraine on “Snake Island Thirteen” or some of the toxic cultural currents we run up against on “Ouroboros Blues” and “Sickening Thud”). We'll try to find a way to let the light in, if only subconsciously. Sometimes it's just an absurdly funny arrangement thing. On “Ouroboros” we had this crazy line “the Ouroboros eats itself with relish and abundant greed” and we decided to sing just that one line in these Simon & Garfunkel close harmonies that just really amused us. Or sometimes it's just one line at the end of the song, like “a single passerby looks up like she might hear it too” in “Sickening Thud,” a brief suggestion that whatever is wrong, we might not be alone in facing it. Subtle things like that.
AW: Larysa’s viola playing is a lot like a great lead guitar player playing a galvanizing solo. Did she always do this in her playing?
CB: We've all grown up in our playing over the ten-year history of the band, and Larysa was already brilliant as a teenager when the band started. But we've also learned a lot more about playing together, and what kind of stuff works the best in the band, and there's a real maturity to what she plays now. She's essential to the sound of the band, for sure.
RB: We tend to do the “lead parts” last, which will be Larysa on viola and me on the 12-string. On Octoberland we all knew the songs really well by the time we got to that stage, so we were both picking up on melodic figures from the vocals and the keyboards and using them as “themes”, and then we kind of work out how we want to play in unison, harmony, call-and-response, or as solos. And we kind of have a sense of “well, this song is one where we need to really nail down the parts, and this other one is looser and we can kind of just go off.” When she really cuts loose, like on “This One's For The Swedes” or “Green Hellfire At The 7-11”, it just commands your attention completely. We don't want it to be like that all the time, or it becomes too “jammy.” It has the most impact if the viola is always there in the fabric of the arrangements and then suddenly it just takes over. We really take our time making those decisions. It should be really nuanced until it's not, and she's masterful at both approaches!
AW: I know you’ve been compared to Jefferson Airplane and The New Pornographers. Would you say this is accurate?
RB: It's as accurate as you can get, probably! It's kind of interesting, because the key part of our sound, wall-to-wall male/female harmonies, is sort of outside the realm of a “genre.” There was more of it in '60s folk rock than any time since, but there's a small handful of bands in every era that do it, and we're part of that continuum – very consciously so. We kind of study how those bands work, what kind of psychology that ambiguously androgynous vocal sound creates, and on this album in particular we write specifically for it.
CB: Yeah, I mean, Jefferson Airplane is the rock and psych side of the sunshine pop sound in the '60s, but then you get Fleetwood Mac in the '70s, you have X doing a punk rock version of it, you could consider The B-52's part of that lineage, and later on The New Pornographers and a lot of new indie rockers. Our approach makes us more a part of that lineage than any specific genre or scene or era, in a way!
AW: “Here Comes The Song” sounds like a great song to wake up to. Would you agree?
RB: I think we know that it can sound that way. For sure the arrangement is designed to build from a whisper to a big ol' crescendo and then come back down! But even though it's kind of a sunshine pop song, it's also pretty dark. It's not essential that anyone hear it that way, because it's up to each listener to decide what a song means, but it's not a happy story, that song.
CB: It was always meant to be the last song on Side 1, because it's just such a story in and of itself. It leaves us dangling a little bit... what happens to the singer, what happens to the song after this story is done? Like, you might want to take a minute before turning the LP over, and you're looking at the track list and thinking, uh oh, the next song is called “You Oughta Be Cut In Half,” that sounds ominous! But then it hits you with this really lighthearted intro and this big sweeping chorus and you're like, oh, okay, we're moving on, then!
AW: “Snake Island Thirteen” is part of a benefit single for Ukraine. Could you say a little bit about it?
CB: It's hard for me as a first-generation Ukrainian-American to talk about how it felt in the early days of the Russian invasion. We felt that all we could do was make some kind of creative statement as the Armoires to raise awareness and perhaps some money for humanitarian aid. “Snake Island Thirteen” was inspired by the story of the battle for a small, strategically located Ukrainian island in the Black Sea. The Russian navy captured it, but not without resistance from a brave Ukrainian garrison, including an instantly iconic radio message from the seeming doomed soldiers that was heard around the world. Their instantly inspirational defiance of the Russian warships calling for their surrender set the song in motion, but it was so difficult to live up to the responsibility of getting it right. Later, when we were writing the songs that would become Octoberland, the themes we've been talking about started arising, many of them informed by mythology and folklore. “Snake Island Thirteen” became a cornerstone of the record. It’s deeply connected to the other messages on the album: the vital importance of empathy and the way sharing stories brings us together in the darkest of times.
RB: Feeling a sense of urgency about creating the song, I plugged in a guitar and tried a number of approaches, from angry to mournful, but the windswept jangle approach just felt right – coastal and somehow ancient. The blend of the details of the modern conflict and the mythological background of the island seemed to come to life in that context, and we're very proud of the song. We hope it speaks to people about what’s still tragically unfolding in Ukraine today.
AW: “Music And Animals” is a wonderful ending. Did it just seem to fit as a closing track?
CB: We had the entire album almost written when that one dropped out of the sky. It was as easy and breezy as it sounds, just truly us speaking and singing our hearts. It was really that question – “how do we get by in this world?” – and in that little magical window where we were focused on the creative process, we knew that our pets and our creative enterprise were the things helping us hold onto our sanity and our souls, and with all the album's imagery at our fingertips, we just said what we felt, and it was a song. The final piece of solace we could offer our listeners after a sometimes rough journey through an often-indifferent world. I think you can hear how emotional we were on that song. It really means the world to us!
RB: It was the last song written and really felt like the “epilogue” the album needed, so yes, it was always intended as the closing track! Our producer, Michael Simmons (musical genius) loved the song and kept telling us we couldn't bury it at the end of the album. Our compromise was to put it out as the first single, almost a year before the album was scheduled to come out – we were dead set on releasing Octoberland in October! – so that it got its day in the sun, and we hope people will hear it as the summation of the album's themes, a ray of hope at the end, and a musically sweet treat that makes you want to take the whole trip again.
AW: Do you plan to tour?
RB: If so, it'll be next year. We used to be an incredibly busy live band – we did over 150 shows in the five years before the pandemic, in California and the UK – but have been so focused on Big Stir Records in the years since, that it's been impossible to schedule rehearsals. That would have to be a process that we ramp up to when we're not busy prepping and promoting the album itself. The promo campaign for Octoberland has been really complex, and it's included a lot of unique stuff like videos and singles and special treats for our fans that we hope are keeping us in touch with them even if we're not out on the road!
CB: We'll see what 2025 brings! We're a different band now than we were when we started. Back then we could do any kind of show just to introduce the band to audiences, and if they checked out the records they'd get the real story. Four albums later, it's almost the reverse: people know what this band is about and what we sound like, and we keep thinking that if we go onstage without, for example, Larysa doing the amazing string parts people expect, or John Borack on the drums on the songs he helped to craft, or Cliff on bass and filling out the big harmonies from the albums, we would run the risk of giving a lesser experience than our fans deserve, so we'll need to carve out time to get these new songs into stage-worthy shape... and we hope to do that, when all the activity around the release of Octoberland calms down.