North Elementary: Deconstructing Pop

by michelle gilzenrat

photo by zeno gil

North Elementary founder John Harrison writes pop songs. He really works at it — there are beautiful hooks, familiar layouts and catchy melodies in all of his music. Then he finds the loose threads and starts pulling.

It’s not that he doesn’t love pop music — he’s an avid fan. But for Harrison, the joy of songwriting lies in the experimentation and manipulation that comes after composition. A pop song ends once the lyrics and melody are in place, but for this Chapel Hill group, that’s where the songwriting process begins.

“We definitely experiment a lot with sonic landscapes and purposefully deconstructing things that normally people would strive to create,” Harrison explains.

It’s during this essential process that North Elementary comes to life as a musical collective. Since Harrison left The Comas in 2001, he has worked with a rotating cast of musicians under the name North Elementary. Although he serves as the primary songwriter, Harrison relishes the opportunity to kick around a song with others.

“That’s a very collaborative process,” Harrison says about experimentation. “That’s what sets North Elementary apart from just a guy who’s a songwriter that disguises himself as having a band.”

Each of the six tracks on their new release, Berandals, showcases a distinctive approach to songwriting with unique arrangements and instrumentation. Highlights include the Casio riff that drives “Lovesday Dead Down” and the 20-minute closer “Concept of My Ghost (Japanese Honor).” It takes a couple of listens to really delve into this material, but it’s all very accessible and strangely familiar despite some of the unconventional techniques.

“A lot of these songs, they are just pop songs — which I love — but I can’t play that every night and still get behind it,” Harrison says. Instead, Harrison takes those songs to his collaborators to figure out a unique way to present them.

“We’re coming at it from the left or right a little instead of straight on,” he says, “and that takes everybody. I can’t do that all on my own, nor would I want to. That doesn’t sound fun to me.”

In addition to working with a number of musicians, Harrison has had the opportunity to work with some distinguished producers. Most notably, it was his recent collaboration with Sparklehorse and Lucero producer Alan Weatherhead that resulted in “Concept of My Ghost.”

Harrison didn’t originally intend to create such a vast, sweeping song. This was just another experimental approach to songwriting that happened to work itself out perfectly. Harrison had stayed in contact with Weatherhead over the years since Weatherhead’s days working as an engineer in Richmond in 2000. Harrison approached him about a possible collaboration, but left out the details of his ulterior motive.

“Alan had no idea what I was doing,” Harrison reveals. “I just asked him for a stand alone string arrangement, and what he sent me was simply amazing. I had no idea if the song would work, but in my opinion it turned out to be really beautiful.”

The opus begins with North Elementary’s distinctively lo-fi sound. Sparse electronic drums tap like a metronome under a woven layer of warm guitars and keyboards. Hovering gently above it all are Harrison’s hushed yet emphatic vocals. After about seven minutes it sounds like the song is diffusing towards an end, but just as it blips and beeps into oblivion, Weatherhead’s composition rises triumphantly from the silence. It’s a gradual but dramatic transition that ascends to an absolutely cinematic climax. Harrison knows he’ll take listeners by surprise, and he finds that rewarding.

“I like when you hear something sound completely different at the end than it did at the beginning and you are like, ‘Wow, is this the same song? Is this the same band?’ Sometimes passively listening to music as you clean your home, wash dishes or do laundry reveals more than intently listening to it.”

Weatherhead was not the first producer to lend a hand to North Elementary. A surprising collaborator in North Elementary’s formative days was Jason Ross of alternative one hit wonder Seven Mary Three. While Harrison jokes that his indie peers might frown upon the association, he acknowledges that Ross is very generous in lending his studio space and equipment to young bands. Ross ended up producing three of the tracks on North Elementary’s debut release, Out of Phase, Lose Your Favorite Things. Following closely behind was Sir Jerry Kee (Superchunk, Mendoza Line), who offered his expertise on a subsequent 7-inch.

Those early releases were critical to the band’s success, garnering national acclaim. Jane magazine gushed that North Elementary was “one of the best freakin’ bands in the world” while Dominion Post heralded a “lo-fi music masterpiece.”

Berandals is poised to achieve similar acclaim with its Pox World Empire release this past August. Simultaneously, North Elementary has another record, Not for Everyone, Just for You, waiting in the wings for its U.K. release in 2008 on British label Last Press. That record was completed with Weatherhead back in 2005, before the Berandals sessions.

In the meantime, Last Press will release a collection of “Lovesday Dead Down” remixes available exclusively on iTunes in September. Among the artists contributing remixes are Mild Davis of Black Box Mixtapes, Radical 9 (who has done remixes for Tahiti 80) and The Rosebuds, along with several other surprises.

In support of these releases, North Elementary will be get to make their live debut in the U.K., as well continuing to tour in the U.S. Ironically, Harrison and keyboardist Holly Baranski are the only members of the current line-up that actually contributed to Berandals. Nevertheless, Harrison is optimistic that bass player Mario Gonzalez, drummer Chad AC and multi-instrumentalist Betty Rupp will remain as the permanent members of North Elementary.

“Hopefully, this is the band for a while,” says Harrison. “It’s my desire to have the same group of people as long as I can, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.” Harrison has seen way too many band members run off to pursue careers in New York or join tours with bands like Belle and Sebastian and Sparklehorse, while others have chosen family time over their music career.

Still, North Elementary has long persevered through rotating lineups, and Harrison thinks of his past records as sentimental reminders of those past relationships. For example, he smiles warmly as he recollects the origins of the Berandals title, which came from former drummer Kuki Kooks.

“When we were on tour, [Kooks] would always call us ‘berandals,’ and I didn’t know what that meant,” he says. “So, I asked him one day and it’s Indonesian for, like, ‘slacker’ or ‘punk.’ I’ll go back and listen to the record and see the title and it will remind of Kuki.”

While the element of nostalgia is endearing, the name doesn’t seem to be all too appropriate for North Elementary any more. While the band prepares for an international tour and several upcoming releases, “slackers” doesn’t quite sum up their progress. What’s Indonesian for “over-achievers?”

www.northelementary.com