Digging Beach Fossils

When you put the word "Beach" in your band name and release your record just before Memorial Day, you're basically asking critics to label you as "sun-drenched" and fill their reviews with a bunch of metaphors about sand. To be fair, Beach Fossils' barely-there drums, sleepy harmonies, and jangly guitars -- like early R.E.M. playing early New Order after drinking a bunch of Robitussin -- speak to a lazy day spent by the sea. But there's something much darker at work on the band's self-titled debut than in the music of their more summery peers. For one thing, singer/guitar player Dustin Payseur uses reverb (lots of it) not to obscure any kind of pop sensibility, but rather as the band's most prominent instrument. It sounds less like lo-fi with the effects knob turned up to ten and more like top 40 radio chained to a block of concrete, blaring away as it sinks to the bottom of the river. We caught up with Dustin and his guitar foil, Chris Burke, recently to talk about the new album, the difference between a song and a poem, and -- of course -- reverb.

You haven't been living in Brooklyn for very long.

Dustin Payseur: Two years.

You're from North Carolina?

DP: Yeah. I played in bands there, but it seems in a smaller town, there's only so far you can go before it starts to get really boring and you have to go someplace else.

So how did moving here change the way you write music?

DP: It's motivated me. To be around so many people that are just on top of their shit. I feel like some people get scared of that when they come here and they run away. But I've been excited about it.

You've written and recorded by yourself in the past, how was it finding people to play your songs with?

DP: I was worried about it. I had honestly tried to play music with so many people and it just wasn't working. Our influences were way too different and it just wasn't coming together the way I wanted it to. As soon as I met Chris and John [Pena], we all have really similar influences.

Like what?

[long pause]  

Chris Burke: Guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar.

DP: We like guitar [laughs].

Your album has this very distant feeling to it. When you record do you listen to music, or try to close yourself off from everything but the album

DP: I'm always listening to music, but as far as influence goes, I try to close myself off. I wasn't really listening to a lot of contemporary music. I didn't want to be subconsciously influenced by that while I was writing songs. I didn't want it to be parallel with everything else that was happening. I wanted it to be like listening to something...

CB: Totally different.




You also write poetry, Dustin?.

DP: I self-published a book in 2007. Stuff I was working on from 2004 to 2007. I thought I'd have two more [books] by now, but being so busy with music I haven't found time to write. I guess that's kind of a bullshit answer. There's always time to write.  

You can only write so much in a day. When you sit down to write a song, how is that different from writing a poem?

DP: It's not very different. For the most part when I'm doing either I try not to think too much about what's going to come out or what the result's going to be. I just let it flow. Poetry has been a huge influence in the way that I approach music. I like a lot of Beat writers. A lot of that is just stream of consciousness, the most direct way to get something out. You're not censoring yourself -- just putting it out there before you can even think about it. So approaching music the same way: letting it do what it wants, rather than trying to control.

I think it's interesting that you write poetry because your lyrics and singing are so obscure. Lots of reverb -- so many people use it as a crutch.

DP: Yeah people do. But reverb has been a huge thing since it was first introduced. A lot of people use effects in general as a crutch, whether it's distortion, reverb, chorus, or anything. I think a lot of singers are self-conscious. For me it just makes it really dreamy. I think the most beautiful way you can ever hear a song is if you put a record on, and you're laying on your bed, and you drift off into sleep. Then you start to wake up and the record is still playing. That's the best music ever sounds! Everything sounds like it's drenched in reverb. It's still hazy and you're just coming to. That's a very intimate sound. Being able to capture that -- without someone having to fall asleep while listening to your record -- is a good thing.

Do you have a full tour planned yet?

DP: We have a lot of things in the works, but nothing set in stone.  

You did play SXSW this year.

DP: South By proved to me that I have way more energy than I thought I had.

CB: We played four times a day.

DP: Something like that.  

CB: It's tiring. We were beat.

DP: It is tiring, but as soon as it was over I wanted it to happen again. I thought my voice was gonna be gone, I thought my fingers were gonna be shredded, I thought my soul was gonna be exhausted, I thought it was going to be awful. But I wanted it to keep going. Playing this much every single day, we got really tight. It proved to us that we're actually a band, rather than a few dudes who are just playing music together.