L.A. – based Irish punks take new road on latest album
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By Emily Zemler
Special to amNewYork
While most bands successful enough to record a fourth full-length album do so in a fancy L.A. or New York studio with plenty of money, time and slavish attention, Flogging Molly (a band formed in L.A. by a group of ex-pats) took a different tack with their fourth album, “Float.” They recorded the album, which will be released in March, in less than a few weeks in the middle of the country in Ireland.
“We’d go in in the morning , put down a backing track, fix anything that needed to be fixed on it, do overdubs on it, do the vocals and literally finish a song a day,” frontman Dave King describes in his charming Irish brogue. “That was great because you weren’t trying to fix something else the same day. You knew what you had to do. It was a really good way of doing things because it really kept you focused on the song.”
The songs on “Float” which experiment with the group’s signature Irish punk style in new and varied ways, were written before and after a three-week stint on the Vans Warped Tour this past summer – and they are the culmination of a few specific goals the group had when sitting down to conceive them.
“There’s a hell of a lot of songs on the last album,” King says of the previous record “Within A Mile of Home,” which came out back in 2004. “It was very meandering and stuff like that,” he says. “This alum we felt it should be more… I don’t want to say direct, but we’ve learned from that album. We wanted to be a lot more solid and even have to slow songs, in a small span of time, do what might have taken us a long time before. They have to keep your attention the whole time.”
