When Feeder's through getting high with their friends, they'll be just about ready to release another album. Though Polythene is only beginning to make a sales dent in the U.S. following its February release, the album's been ringing up cash registers in the band's native Great Britain for more than a year now.
So, instead of waiting the requisite two-and-a-half years to make their next album, the power popsters are making another, in between U.S. tour dates, with hopes of releasing it in both countries simultaneously some time next year. For the first time (well, they do have *one* full-length album), the band will throw some mellotrons and strings into the "experimental" sound mix, according to frontman Grant Nicholas. The trio also enlisted Mono keyboardist Martin Virgo to play piano on two tracks.
The album, which features the working-title Life Through Headphones, is being recorded in Woodstock, N.Y., and London. New songs include "Paper Faces," which Nicholas calls "a very slow, kind of ballad-y, acoustic track" and another with the working-title "Who-y," simply because it sounds like the Who.
"It would be really easy to sit down with the same old kind of form as the last one," says Nicholas, "but I want to reinvent this one in some way. I'm not saying that we'd become a waif band overnight ... nothing like that. We're still gonna have those 'Feeder' elements. I just think the songs are gonna have a bit more to them."
BLAIR R. FISCHER
(June 26, 1998)