The first thing you might want to know about the band is how to say its name.
Basically it’s chk chk chk — and you’ll want to know that because once you hear the band’s new album “Strange Weather” you’ll likely be addicted to the sound and want to tell others about it.
“Well, its basically three repetitive sounds of your choosing,” frontman Nic Offer said about what he calls the band. “I say it like [chk chk chk] and if you start Googling it, you’ll see that’s what fans call it as well.”
That fan base is plentiful thanks to the band’s 2007 album “Myth Takes.” The group’s new lineup has brought something of a new sensibility to its sound, Offer said.
“The last album moved more toward writing proper songs based on the groove and if we had a good groove that was enough,” Offer said. “The new songs are more exact and concise. We paid close attention to detail in the texture as well.”
Not that the band analyzed the creation of the album, choosing instead to take the songs as they came and fine-tune them as they went along recording them in a few locales including a club basement in Berlin and studios in Sacramento, Calif., and New York City.
The recording was a bit trickier than last time, Offer said, because a now-departed band member had offered engineering know-how to the band. For the first time, they found themselves without that core component but quickly acclimated to producer Eric Broucek. In fact, Offer said that the producer/engineer brought out a lot of new sounds in the vocals.
“The rest of us are not technical guys [but Eric] was really good at shaping the sounds,” he said. “He really pressed me to get a better take and a better take. I am really happy with how it came out.”
Yet can the band continue to perform with such a cohesive energy now that the lineup has changed? Quite definitely, Offer said.
“It’s not like everyone walked out. They left when [being in the band] didn’t make sense anymore,” he said. “It was never a question we’d continue and those [former band members] are glad we did, too.”
