Domestic bliss suits Peaking Lights. The already pretty damn chill duo of Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis seem to have plumbed new depths of spiritual calm since the birth of their son Mikko and the slow-blossoming success of their breakthrough album, 936. Thankfully, their outwardly calm demeanor has made them no less active musically, with latest full-length Lucifer showing they are far from the creative doldrums. This new album continues the theme and sound of 936, though early interviews have seen the band refer to it as a darker version of its predecessor.
“We had four or five people say, ‘Oh, this really sounds like a night-time version of 936‘,” says Coyes on the phone from Barcelona. “It was more danceable, it has more of that vibe. I think for us, it was kind of that metaphor and feeling like it was a completed cycle. We saw it as a second-half, like an extension in a way.”
“We knew it was going to be this cycle from dusk to dawn but looking at night not as a negative thing but more just as part of this larger cycle where you can get lost in this dream world. You know when you wake up from a dream, a lucid dream, you have this kind of epiphany? It was kind of in that vein I guess.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH-9_ddFKk8?rel=0]
The sea change their lives saw last year also provided more than enough dramatic, positive experience to serve as inspiration for the new songs. “2011 was a really busy year for us,” says Coyes. “We moved across country, we recorded that record, we lived in New York for a month, we went on tour with our seven-month-old child. It was a real big year filled with transition and I think, coming out of it, it was like a new day. Like a birth at the end or something.”
The somewhat surprising and organic success of 936 saw the band sign to Domino-imprint Weird World and the shows they’re playing now have increased in size accordingly. Coyes, as ever, seems relatively unfazed by the change. “I guess we have played them [festivals] but it’s more the first big ones we’ve played, like Field Day in London was pretty crazy,” he says. “And the one in Dublin. I had never played on a stage that size, it was insane! The sound systems are so cool.”
That Field Day performance contained one of Coyes’ proudest moments to date – “When we played on Field Day, we got a noise complaint from the festival which was pretty cool!”
The vibe on stage is weighed down with sub-bass and weed smoke. “The low end that we try to create is the real low subby stuff. I was talking to someone in Germany about this, about how you get to this bassy level where you don’t know if you can handle it but, at the same time, you can’t escape it.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2fCSJQPJp8?rel=0]
The band’s half-structured, half-improvised approach to live performance is nothing new to Coyes, but it did represent a challenge for Dunis. Her background in traditional songwriting with her old band Numbers was to be questioned by Coyes jammed-out approach. In the end – like in all good relationships – a compromise, a balance, was found. “The first time I did play live and improvised with Aaron, I was quite nervous but it’s a really good way to learn to be really in the moment and to feel the music rather than think the music, if that makes sense,” she says. “So once I did that, it was like there was no going back, this is kind of an incredible way to be playing music. So when we perform Peaking Lights, we want to keep that feeling of always being in the moment.”
The song remains at the heart of the Peaking Lights experience, something which could be seen as an important factor in their transcendence of the somewhat more marginal scenes they sprang from. “We do try to keep the overall song intact, because it’s nice I think for people to hear the songs they like,” says Dunis. “We like playing them also, but there’s always room in there for changes. If you’re playing your song over and over again, it’s nice to keep it fresh by really feeling the moment and feeling what is the essence of that song and trying to really lose yourself in the music. I think that’s a really important part of our live shows, trying to really lose ourselves in it and not just like we’re playing the same thing over and over.”
