An Honest Romance: PAWS revisit Youth Culture Forever

Phillip Taylor is in high spirits as we catch him preparing for a gig at Glasgow’s newly opened venue The Hug and Pint, and with good reason too. His Glasgow-based garage rock trio PAWS’ hearty second album Youth Culture Forever has just made the ten album shortlist for the 2015 Scottish Album of the Year, beating out names like Mogwai, Idlewild and The Twilight Sad in the process. Taylor had his own personal favourites ("The Withered Hand record is a really big one for me," he says), and sceptical as he is of the idea of music as a competition, he repeatedly states how flattered the band are to have been acknowledged at all. With that gratitude in mind, the PAWS songwriter generously chats with us about the backstory of the album, which might yet land his band's mitts on the prize on June 17th.

Youth Culture Forever started coming together in the transitory period between PAWS recording their ebullient debut album Cokefloat! in January 2012 and its release in September 2012 when Taylor was crashing in a tiny box of a flat in Glasgow during gaps in their relentless touring schedule. "It was ridiculous. It was like a test of how small a space a human being can occupy," he stresses. Around 70% of the album was written in that cupboard, he estimates, with the other 30% compiled in jams during sound-checks for gigs where already existing songs would be tightened up. The punk energy and passion the band honed while supporting bands like Fucked Up in the U.S. in early 2013 certainly translates to the album’s infectious whoa-oh-alongs like Tongues and Let’s All Let Go.

While the origin of Youth Culture Forever’s title is well known – taken from an Adventure Time episode Taylor watched with the band’s drummer Josh Swinney during a miserable period in which Taylor’s mother passed away and he broke up with his first real girlfriend – Taylor is more keen to emphasise the phrase’s new context and the sustaining quality of the pair’s friendship during that time. "Our whole relationship has been completely drenched in our mutual love of art and music and alternative culture like skateboarding or graffiti…" he underlines. "I think that’s where a lot of the idea of Youth Culture Forever comes from for me: thinking that if I’m lucky enough to live to 50 or 60 or 70 years old, I’ll always remember that period of my life where our youth culture that we all shared totally got me through all of that terrible shit."

Youth Culture Forever was eventually recorded in autumn 2013 at Fat Cat’s U.S. leader Adam Pierce’s home studio in the woods of upstate New York, with PAWS putting in 12 hour stints for 12 days. This was a more secluded recording process than that of Cokefloat!, which often saw the band socialising in East London in the evenings. Wanting to be more hands-on for this record, the band produced the album themselves with Jeremy Backofen (Ólöf Arnalds, We Were Promised Jetpacks) offering engineering support. It was a gem from Backofen that led to Taylor’s muffled vocals on the record after Taylor found himself uncomfortable with making clean takes. "We were using a tape reel machine and we had no idea what we were doing so Jeremy engineered the record," Taylor explains. "For the vocals, we weren’t happy with the way we were doing it and he pulled out this Talkboy thing. He turned it into a mic basically and we used that for pretty much every song. That tape’s probably still in the Talkboy so if you went to the studio now and picked up the Talkboy it would just be takes of my vocals singing anything. I really want to get that!"

"I’ll always remember that period of my life where our youth culture got me through all of that terrible shit" – Phillip Taylor

Cokefloat! was widely branded as a ‘lo-fi’ record, a label which frustrated PAWS. This is not a tag which should be applied to Youth Culture Forever, its new crispness typified by Taylor’s chiming guitars and Swinney’s exploding drums in album centrepiece An Honest Romance. Not content with simply brightening their existing sound, however, Taylor looked to expand by specifically writing songs with other instruments in mind. That expansion was realised with the acquisition of Isabel Castellvi, the cellist the band picked up when Pierce put an ad out via NYU’s music department and whose Lori Goldston impression colours YCF’s loud-quiet opener Erreur Humaine and the moping Alone. Taylor is laudatory about Castellvi’s influence on the album. "Isabel’s probably the best musician I’ve ever worked with, to be fair! She was incredible. I showed her the songs and she recorded all of the songs on first take. It was really nice to have that fourth member in the band for the first time ever, even if it was for the day. We said that the next time we go back to New York we’re going to try and see if she’ll play with us live and recreate it.’

We question Taylor about the last quarter of Youth Culture Forever, which eschews the peppiness before it for songs like Great Bear, a grungy, lumbering instrumental inspired by a black bear lurking at the house’s French door one evening while the band were watching The Deer Hunter, and the album closer War Cry, a bilious twelve-minute jam led by Ryan Drever’s walloping bassline. Great Bear was not intended to be on the record, with War Cry’s length due to the band wanting to use up as much of the tape as possible on their final day on the studio. The unanticipated menace in YCF’s final tracks hints at a potential future path for PAWS to follow.  

When finally asked if there is one moment that most satisfies him about Youth Culture Forever, Taylor’s answer is surprising. "Strangely enough, when I look at the sleeve, the liner notes on it, that freaks me out because we’re all from nothing," he offers, referring to a collage of photos of PAWS in Paris, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. "I think that record, hard as it was for me to get everything out of my system, all of that stuff is just the band’s friendship: the pictures of the three of us, all of the songs, singing them every night and playing them every night with my best friends. The whole of the record was made for that reason. It’s just like a triumph to our friendship." It’s clear from a statement like this that Taylor doesn’t mind whether the SAY Award ends up with PAWS next Wednesday or not. As Taylor tells us himself, he feels like they’ve already won.