The Consultants

A nice photograph of the lively Brooklyn pop-scene, the Consultants' "Work From Home" has proven itself to be a strong album, growing steadily after intensive listening. Combining their love for the deepest recesses of eighties music and nineties UK britpop and shoegaze scene in a lot of different ways, the Consultants sound manages to be fresh and exciting like every indiepop record should be, full of suprises and unexpected twists, turning a supposed lack of homogeneity into its greatest value. Here's what Marisha Chinsky and Brett Whitmoyer, the duo behing every Consultants' song, had to tell us about it:

Can you introduce yourselves and give us a small story of The Consultants?

Marisha: I'm Marisha Chinsky, singer, guitarist, and co-song writer for The Consultants. Brett Whitmoyer is guitarist and co-song writer. Mike Hollitscher is the bassist, Tris McCall is our keyboardist, and Jed Smith (of My Teenage Stride) plays drums. The band formed in early 2003 when Brett and I started writing songs, just two guitars and my vocals, on a sort of home recording-boombox project, just to see what we could come up with. After recording a couple of songs (James, Snow Fell It's Night) with our initial producer Chuck Blake (former Garlands), we decided to bring in bass, keyboard and drums and try the songs out live. In the summer of 2004 we recorded Work From Home at Melody Lanes Studio, a now defunct studio under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. We shared the recording with Ed from Shelflife and now we are Shelflife catalog number 056! A very happy ending!

Brett: Marisha and I have been friends since 1999. In fact, it was the indiepop music scene that brought us together. At the time, she was the music director at her University and she invited my old band, Garlands, to play a show at her school with another band that I'm sure you have heard of, called My Favorite.
I was the drummer in Garlands and by 2003 was I developing song ideas, but the creative hierarchy of Garlands didn't allow any input from me beyond my drum parts so I taught myself guitar and started writing songs. My Garlands bandmate, Chuck Blake, had a mini studio in his apartment in Manhattan and agreed to help me record two songs, which were early versions of "Snow Fell (It's Night)" and "Internet Love Letter". At this point, the titles and words were different and Chuck and I were playing all of the instruments and doing all of the drum programming on his computer. We thought it all sounded pretty good except for the awful vocals, because I can't sing to save my life, so I auditioned a few singers. Fortunately, none of those singers worked out and during dinner one night with Marisha I asked her if she could sing. She said that she'd love to sing and that she also played guitar. Within a pretty short span, we got together and rewrote the words to Snow Fell and Internet Love Letter and recorded them. They basically sounded almost identical to what is on the album. After that, we started writing more songs together and really liked what we were doing, so we decided to form a band. Most of the songs were written in our apartments, just playing guitars to each other until we had "Hollow Bodied Evening", "Internal Monologue" and "James". Chuck recorded those as well. It was at this time that we asked Mike Hollitscher to join and he played bass on those recordings. By the time we solidified the live band by adding Jededia Smith on drums and Tris McCall on keyboards, I think we had every song written except for "Calling The Embassy". In fact, Tris ended up playing synth on all of the other songs on the album and Jed played drums on "Calling The Embassy". Well, It looks like
I've given you the long version - sorry...


How would you describe your music? Is the album title meant to suggest something homemade or does it have any other meaning?

Marisha: Work from Home is a allusion to the business-speak culture of jargon that's mostly euphemisms. Especially at the time when the songs were being written, Brett and I were coming to terms with how to have a serious day job in an office, and how to simultaneously manifest our creative goals. Even the name The Consultants came off as a funny reference to business consultants - people who are brought in to a company who don't quite belong or have a defined identity - but are part of the working world nonetheless. Kind of like if we just showed up on stage in suits and no one knew who we were, but we're your entertainment for this evening!

Brett: That's the kiss of death question and I prefer to let other people do that, but I guess it combines eighties post punk with nineties indie pop. Most people bring up The Bunnymen, New Order, Velocity Girl and Heavenly when they describe us, and all of those are fair comparisons, I suppose.
The album title fits in with the band name, which we picked because both Marisha and I were working corporate office jobs at the time and shared an understanding of how strange it is that companies often hire freelance consultants to come in to do special projects. These people are a bit like hired guns, in the sense that they are usually hot shot types who breeze in and think that they know everything. They often only show up to the office once or twice per week and work from home the rest of the time. I think we both felt that it was the kind of concept that most American indie poppers would understand and find a bit funny, because most of the bands we know are in similar situations, meaning that they are young professionals by day and indie poppers by night. Basically, we are all really just consultants, working from home.


You have been compared to many different bands (I have done it myself) and there seems to be a strong english influence to your music. What kind of music do you listen to and what bands would you say have influenced more the Consultants' sound, and why?

Brett: Well, Marisha and I do have some crossover in our influences, but it's probably a good simplification to say that the eighties influence comes from me and the nineties influence comes from her. I listen mostly to The Bunnymen, New Order, Joy Division, U2, Galaxie 500, Ride and other similar bands. In fact, even the modern bands I listen to sound like they're from the eighties. I'm thinking of bands like Babybird, Interpol and My Favorite. Eighties music has a very distinctive sound that I love. I think it's the most idiosyncratic sounding decade, other than the sixties. I am most attracted to the crisp guitars that really cut through and form a lot of the melody. I am bored by most songs that don't have instrumental hooks. In fact one of the things I love so much about a lot of the Joy Division songs is that they often substitute guitar hooks for vocal choruses. Songs like "Disorder" were very inspirational in that way. In fact I used that song to justify not having a proper chorus in "The Mark". I like messing with accepted structures. As long as the hooks are there, you don't necessarily need to write verse/chorus songs and I think eighties bands understood that more than pop bands from any other period.

Marisha: When I started getting into music around 13, 14, middle school and high school age, it was around the time of shoegaze and the rise of Brit Pop in the UK (Blur vs Oasis, etc). I think a lot of the music that stuck with me the most were those bands from overseas (Boo Radleys, Ride, Catherine Wheel, Pulp, Suede) and even going back to the 1980s, I was very taken with New Order, The Cure, and The Smiths. I've always felt a bit out of place in American music - even though there are some fantastic American bands - the majority of my favorites and top influences are from the UK. Even though I'm
constantly coming across new bands that I enjoy and going to shows of local NYC bands, there's a certain pedigree on which you're raised. I was ages 11 to 21 in the 1990s, so there's a special place in my heart for 90s bands. It's funny too when people make those comparisons about the Consultants' sound -- some of it was intentional, much of it was subliminal.

The sound and tone of each song is quite different on this album, it sounds like a greatest hits or something. Is this something you have struggled for (having songs being as far away as possible from each other while remaining on the pop spectrum) or it's just the way you write songs?

Brett: That happened half out of necessity and half by design. As I said earlier, the first five songs were recorded direct to computer in Chuck's apartment. All of these songs have programmed drums and very sterile guitar sounds, which was really the only way we could do it, but also was a method that provided the sound that we wanted at the time. Months passed before we had the rest of the songs ready and by that time, Chuck wasn't able to work with us any more, so we hired a guy named Mike Flannery to record us in the now defunct Melody Lane Studios in Brooklyn. All of these songs feature live drums and the nature of the songs required a different overall sound. We felt that they needed a harder edge - especially "The Mark", "Pop Pop" and "Talking To No One", and this time around, we had the equipment to make that happen. I know it makes for an uneven sounding album, but I think it's more important to produce each song according to its own individual requirements than to make sure that the album as a whole sounds similar. The fact that the songs are so varied in style, really wasn't a conscious decision. Once we start writing, it kind of takes on a life of its own and the finished products end up like they do based on the our moods at the time, or what we've been listening to at the moment. I remember that "Pop Pop" was written just after Johnny Cash had died, so that's probably why it sounds a bit like a country song. We never actually spoke about it at the time, it's just the way that it came out. The other songs are similar in that they just reflect what was going on in our lives at the moment they were written.

Some of that had to do with an inconsistency with production. We had three different producers on the album -- Jed Smith, Chuck Blake, and Mike Flannery. We were working with three different producers who had different styles and technological resources available. Secondly, part of it is the songwriting, that this was The Consultants' debut album and there was a lot that we wanted to communicate. We needed a sad song, an angry song, and a happy song, to put it crudely. Lastly, part of our winning formula is the diversity between Brett and I, and even the diversity between the five of us when we perform live, we're coming at the songs from a lot of different perspectives, and I think that keeps the music from sounding too homogeneous.

If I have a complaint about the album is that the sound is not as crisp as I wish it would be, especially on some songs (calling the embassy, the mark, where I quite can't figure out any word). Are you happy with the outcome of the album? How much have you worked on the songs?

Marisha: I'm relatively happy with it, considering I didn't set out to have the album reviewed in the NME or be signed to Shelflife or to play the San Francisco Pop Fest this past July or to be answering interview questions from a music journalist in Italy...! I'm proud of how far Brett and I have taken the project, in addition to the enormous support and encouragement we've received from fans. It's been an incredible learning experience and there's a lot to consider as we approach the next album.

Brett: Interesting question, because like anyone who makes an album, I usually just pick it apart when I listen to it and think about all of the things we could have done differently. That's not to say that I don't like it though, because I think it's a true reflection of what we wanted at the time. I would like "The Mark" to be a bit more crisp, but every instrument is basically playing melody, so you can't really pick one instrument to spotlight in the mix. As for the words being indecipherable, I think that's down to some of Marisha's shoegaze influences.

The Brooklyn scene has received a considerable push in later years, at least over here in Europe. What's it like being a pop band in Brooklyn?

Marisha: To some extent it's great because the global music world has it's eyes and ears on your community and that's a significant boost for exposure and attention, right off the bat. The downside is that you're just another fish in an enormous pond of talented fish and strong swimmers. We've received a lot of support from our friends (Metric Mile, My Teenage Stride, The Besties) as part of the Brooklyn Pop Renaissance - something ingeniously coined by Alistair Fitchett of Tangents.co.uk and Unpopular Records - which can't be more true. The indiepop scene, even in a city like New York, is close-knit and friendly and that's made being based in Brooklyn a lot of fun.

Brett: It's funny, because Alistair Fitchett writes a lot about the "Brooklyn Pop Revival" and it's really just all of our friends. I play drums in "My Teenage Stride" with Mike, Jed and Tris. My roommate is Mike Dempsey from The Pathways and we play a lot of shows with bands like The Metric Mile and The Besties. It really is a lot of fun and it's always nice to play shows with bands who you share sensibilities with .

What are your lyrics about? I can only grasp bits of them but they seem to be deeper than most average indiepop songs, and so is the little poem on the inside cover.

Brett: Marisha writes most of the words, so I will let her speak about that. I will say that we usually have a full instrumental song though, before the lyrics are ever written and that the lyric writing process is usually prefaced by our discussing what general emotions the music dictates. There are a few exceptions to this, but that's generally the way it works. The little poem is actually just one line from each song. I'm glad that even though they're all varied, it sort of works as a whole in the booklet.

Marisha: I'm very interested in diaries and journals, especially since blogging has taken over society. For me, art is about introspection, even if your art is a comment on politics, science, something remote from the first-person "I," you can't remove the filter of yourself and how the world appears to YOU. The songs are written like my diary, and it was a powerfully transitional time in my life. I wanted to capture the undeniable power of first-person. The poem is taken from lines of each song on the album, in order of the track listing.

What do you do when you're not playing?

Brett: Nothing too exciting, actually. I've been watching a lot of film noir and Buffy The Vampire Slayer recently. There are a lot of shows to see as well, I guess. It's New York City, so there's always an interesting band playing somewhere.

Marisha: I listen to music, paint, read, walk around my neighborhood in Brooklyn. During the day, I work in public relations. I also DJ every Saturday night at the Tainted Lady Lounge in Williamsburg. My husband James and I have a side project band called Polar Bear Parade.

I have read an unusually mean review of Work From Home on the internet. How do you guys react to a bad review?

Brett: Ha! You must be referring to the SoundsXP review where the mean-spirited reviewer makes a point to use ALL CAPITAL letters when he says that Marisha can't sing. First of all, he's dead wrong, to the point where every other review specifically mentions her voice and how perfectly suited it is to the songs. Secondly, he completely misses the point of what we do. None of us pretend to be virtuosos in any way, shape, or form. I'm most definitely the worst guitar player I know from a technical standpoint and most of the time we don't attempt more than two or three takes before we get the one that we use. We care far more about whether or not the songs convey the core emotions that were the impetus for writing them in the first place. When you compare Marisha's vocal in "Calling The Embasssy" to Morrissey's in "Suedehead", you are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that you just don't understand what it is that we do. Having said all of that though, a bad review is just accepted as being inevitable. Not everyone will like what you're doing, unless you're The Beatles, and even then there are still some naysayers.

Marisha: Yeah, I was a bit shocked by that review! Luckily there's also been an overwhelming amount of good press, so I can't help feeling bad for a few minutes and then I move on. By getting feedback from reviews, I find it interesting how people listen in different ways, people have different aesthetics and understanding of what they're hearing. I'm not changing anything so we're not for them! I think that organic sound, a wrong note, natural variations are a beautiful thing that can be expressed in music.

How did you meet up with Shelflife? What's the story about you convincing Ed to publish records again?

Brett: When we started shopping for a label, Shelflife was the first one we thought of. It just seemed to fit our style perfectly. In addition, Ed and Jill used to live in Brooklyn and were part of our circle of friends until they moved to San Francisco, so we sent them a demo first. We were a bit disappointed because he said that he might not be releasing any more new music, but that he really liked what he heard. A few weeks passed and we shopped to a few more labels when Ed called to say that he wanted to release it, which made us very happy. I think the story about us convincing Ed to release records again may be a bit of an overstatement, but it's certainly a good selling point.

I later found out about Shelflife deciding to put out records again when we came along and was pleasantly shocked! We didn't do any convincing, but I'm quite happy for future Shelflife artists and fans that we could be in some way responsible. Ed has been a friend of ours for years beginning from when he lived in Brooklyn, initially since I admired the records he released, and later had the opportunity to get to know him personally.

Salvatore

Links:

The Consultants Website: www.theconsultantsband.com
Would-Be-Goods@indiepop.it: bands/consultants.htm