In a recent chat with Les Jupes singer/songwriter Michael P. Falk, I ask him what kind of a band he considers Les Jupes to be, to which he replies, “I think the songs are pretty energetic with a strong lyrical content that hopefully has some meaning or thought behind it. We want to be a band that you can have fun with, but that there’s something more behind it.” Les Jupes are actually an amalgamation of a few of my favorite things. They write epic folk tunes, with a morose echo of Post-Punk (Like Nick Cave at his most anthemic and least scary.) The Winnipeg-based quartet released their debut full-length, Modern Myths, in 2011 and they have shared stages with the likes of Handsome Furs and Mother Mother, yet their US debut, Negative Space (recorded with recently-profiled-on-Philthy Rusty Matyas of Imaginary Cities and Weakerthans’ engineer Cam Loeppky), doesn’t drop until this coming Tuesday, October 1st, courtesy of Head in the Sand. Aside from the four songs found on Negative Space, the band have around an additional thirty songs that they’re hoping to get out in the near future and spend the next year or so promoting. “We’re hoping to get a good proper release for 2014. We’ll tour the record like bananas, then probably take a break, then probably do another one. We’re just constantly writing and there are already like five or six songs that didn’t make the record that I’d like to continue to work on,” Falk says. And he tells me that the upcoming EP is a relatively small taste of what the band are currently creating, musically: “Whereas the EP is four songs with a lot of drive, the LP is gonna sprawl a lot more. It will be a lot more textural, with different sounds. The sonic pallet is a lot bigger.” The band are currently touring Europe, but they will be back in the States in early October with a short string of dates on the West Coast and through the Midwest.
[youtube http://youtu.be/hgJVFNj-txw]
