Breaking The Static: We Came Out Like Tigers Interviewed

“When everyone is self-conscious you are stuck in your place, because you’re always aware of everything, and you will never make the big leap like falling in love or creating a revolution or doing anything really radical because you are so aware of yourself and all the pressures on you.”

Adam Curtis believes that we’re stuck in a time of ‘static culture’. Music doesn’t progress, no one sticks their neck out, and everyone looks around them or, worse, behind in a way so as to absorb past contexts without ever trying to further them. The crux of Curtis’ attack was aimed at Savages, a little misguided, as the minimalism of post-punk will always retain its relevance during times of bloat elsewhere – in their instance, reacting to a lot of the fat of all-access technology in the 21^st century – but his point rings true enough. We’re in an age where ‘leaving things open to interpretation’ has become a stock answer and by-excuse for ‘nothing interesting to say’. Sure, not everyone should be bleeding their sleeve crimson but nor should so many be turning away the realities of a world that at times feels as though it’s hanging by a thread.

We Came Out Like Tigers are a band based in Liverpool. They don’t turn away, they confront. Fiercely politicised, they’re a group who believe strongly in fighting the current social structures we exist within to live actively. “When we started this band Labour were still in power, the economy hadn’t crashed, things didn’t seem that bad for most people, so you could make vague political statements because it hadn’t come to your door,” says vocalist and violinist Simon Barr as we meet in a Liverpool café. “But now it’s come to the point where people in this country are relying on food banks, people die over winter because they can’t afford to heat themselves, and we’ve seen bands turn away from that.”

Their politics, Barr says, simply come out of a desire to “make the world better”. His group are strictly DIY, their politics green, pro-working class and opposed central powers. They inspire by their bloody-minded attitude to getting across their convictions when so many of their 20-something peers are so easily driven to one-click distraction. “It’s not to do with individuals not caring, it’s the problem with advanced capitalism,” comments guitarist Fabian Devlin. “You’ve got a working class that’s dismantled and a consumer class, whose role in the eyes of the government is to just do that. I’m hesitant to blame people because the whole Western environment is geared towards us living this way. You’ve just got to do your best to disrupt it.”

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"We’ve been around a few years now and seen a lot of DIY bands go back on things they’ve said very quickly. I thought screaming was more than just a vocal technique" – Simon Barr

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Musically, the group are well-travelled around a screamo and hardcore scene that stretches Europe-wide. They're two EPs and an album – 2012’s burnt black atmosphere of Agelessness and Lack – down. Their new EP, Ever-Crushed at Pecket’s Well, recorded in isolation apart from each other and producer Tom Dring’s company, is their most assured yet. A constant aim of theirs is to “write the angriest, saddest, most emotional songs we can,” but whereas in the past that meant pushing the sum of each part to its most wrought conclusion, with Ever-Crushed… there is greater dynamism at play.

To Ruin a Fine Tenor Voice pulls away from its suffocating dense web of sound to allow Barr to wrap his violin vine-like around the remnant structure left behind; Careworn’s melancholic build-up offers little hint of the torrent it’s about to pour forth with. Listen and compare to much of the occasionally over spilling 2011 EP You, You’re Just Bone Structure, for instance, and it’s clear that they’ve learned the art of whispering to say the loudest things. “It partly comes down to what we’ve been listening to,” says bassist Mykle ‘Ollie’ Smith, “we listen to a lot of ambient and folk and with this record especially we tried to work the dynamics.”

“It also comes down to the change from blasting it all out and getting it out of your system to having those quieter moments to reflect on the sadder things; some situations call for you to be more pensive,” adds Devlin. Sadness, despair and finding the qualities to fight back define the themes We Came Out Like Tigers revolve around – or as Barr puts it “making sad music that had elements of hope in it, but then taking even more of the hope out of it” – but their targets are much more tightly hemmed in on their new release than on Agelessness and Lack, which took in variously: depression, cancer, antifascism, government oppression, organised religion and society as a prison.

Ever-Crushed at Pecket’s Well comes with a manifesto, and arrives with a sense that where once they committed to their convictions with relish, buoyed by initially finding a like-minded hardcore scene upon their conception in 2008, they’ve now seen too many bands within it fall away, go back on their words or compromise themselves. ‘We found disappointment at every turn,’ the manifesto reads. ‘We sang songs about changing the world because we believed we could, we played this music because we thought punk rock was a scene that would never allow fascists, sexists, homophobes and their apologists to be tolerated, but such ideas seemed to be little more than a token mention whilst people awkwardly tuned instruments.’

Barr says there was a naïvety to how they started out, “and we don’t want to lose that completely, because you need a bit of it to maintain hope in this world,” but admits, “I got into hardcore thinking that people played angry music because they were actually angry about things; we’ve been around a few years now and seen a lot of DIY bands go back on things they’ve said very quickly. I thought screaming was more than just a vocal technique, and that heavy guitars were more than just an aesthetic.”

Consequently, We Came Out Like Tigers have unearthed something altogether more inspired by old folk in its attitudes to what they’ve produced before. Where Agelessness and Lack finished with a live recording in the form of the violin-led, acoustic I Sing of Sorrow & Joy, so Ever-Crushed… continues and opens with an Irish choir. “That choir is really important”, says Devlin. “The lyrics are almost irrelevant, it’s the context that the people singing are working people living hard lives and trying to find a way to express themselves that’s so important.”

Their artwork and imagery deliberately depicts woodland scenes and countryside images, a reflection of their belief in the restorative powers of nature, but also a reclamation of the countryside and its heritage from being ideological cornerstones of austerity politics, Britain’s Green and Pleasant land having been turned into something more wholly nationalist. “There are bands in England too who are nationalist and talk about preserving British culture, which is just a thin veil for fascism”, says Barr. “I don’t want people like that to spoil the history of England for everyone else; there’s a big move to the right in English music at the moment and while preservation and respect for the past is important, for me it’s not tied into any nationalism or borders at all.”

Such a movement is perhaps part of the overall gentrification of music in this country – as the cash around it runs out so only the privileged can afford to do it, narrowing the spectrum of perspectives that inform Britain musically. See Mumford & Sons gross misappropriation of folk. “Where I grew up in Ireland there’s an international bluegrass festival and it’s so separate from what people understand as folk music today,” says Devlin. “It’s sad to see so many are using it at surface level for their own gain.”

That’s something We Came Out Like Tigers never look like doing; a band who won’t even pay for PR for that same reason of gentrification (“we’d hate to be in-part responsible for taking the press space of great artists who maybe can’t afford to pay for PR”). They do things their own way, with the greatest respect to the past but, crucially, with a fierce desire to push the lessons and traits of the heritage they’ve learned onwards. It is that which breaks static culture; it’s why the Liverpool three-piece are so vital. As Smith puts it towards the end of our chat “the world can’t stop making art; if it stops it means people have lost their platform for expression.”