BENT
Sep 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Christine Hsieh
The two members of Bent are some lucky bastards. The Nottingham, England-based partners are almost frighteningly casual about their work — nearly to the point that their cheery optimism bleeds into devil-may-care recklessness — yet they still manage to craft some surprisingly intricate, unashamedly whimsical downbeat tunes that sound just as good blaring through headphones as they do oozing through bass bins at a lager-fueled barbecue. “We talk bullshit, basically,” Simon Mills says of his and recording partner Nail Tolliday's work habits. “We'll be sitting around sometimes, rambling on about absolute bollocks. Other times, we'll just sit and scratch our heads. And then something will come out of his mouth, and I'll go, ‘That sounds interesting.’”
If all this sounds a bit too easy, it is. Bent's new album, The Everlasting Blink (Guidance, 2003), picks up where its easygoing debut, Programmed to Love (Ministry of Sound, 2000), left off. But though the hokey sound effects, sci-fi squeaks and odd samples are all still present, Blink has a far more refined sound. Where Programmed was guiltless ear candy, The Everlasting Blink is undeniable brain food: a fine progression, this is, for a pair whose music-making chemistry revolves around not taking anything too seriously. “We once used a sample of myself and Simon in the tub,” Tolliday recalls with a smirk. “It sounded fairly homoerotic, especially when Simon asked me to pass the soap.”
This undeniable sense of playfulness is apparent throughout the album, but what's not immediately obvious is the painstaking construction of each song, from the cheeky vocals to Bent's trademark lush, orchestral soundscapes. Take the dreamy poptronica of “An Ordinary Day,” for instance, with its sweeping arrangement of full, vibrato-heavy strings. “We've got thousands of records that are really bad,” Mills says of the song's origins. “If you get [string-arrangement software] and add real samples of real orchestras on top of it, the listener can't tell the difference between what's real and what isn't. It's quite nice because you can add your own bits and then add all of these special bits you'd never be able to do [live].”
To go with some random phrases that they plucked from non-hit wonders of the '60s and '70s, Mills and Tolliday collaborated with and sampled some old-school vocalists: Jon Marsh of the '90s pop/dance band The Beloved, '70s pop star David Essex (England's answer to Michael Bolton) and the so-camp-they're-cool duo Captain & Tennille. Those vocals, combined with quirky sounds from the duo's dozens of synths — Tolliday has a particular fondness for their vintage EMS Synthi AKS, a BBC Radiophonic Workshop castoff that comes in a suitcase and “looks like a giant Battleship game,” he says — form Blink's mad tunes.
The big, but rewarding, test for Bent was working with such quirky gear and C-level sampling fodder to create an album with everlasting staying power. “I like the idea of getting something that was potentially shit and making it good rather than taking something that's already good and making it moderately the same,” Tolliday says. “It's more of a challenge, really, to try and turn all of this terrible, awful music into something we'd actually listen to ourselves!”
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