Arms Aflame
“Isn’t it strange, that people have eyes that sit twitching for most of their lives…in front of our brains, isn’t it strange we’ve got pairs of eyes?”
America’s latest quirky upstart Arms has taken the USA by slow and steady surprise. Writing and recording songs in bedrooms over a few years, finally releasing Kids Aflame this year Arms is definitely one of the more successful one man bands. After hearing the above extract from his song Eyeball, you wonder about his fascination with multiple body parts. “I liked the idea of a solo project having the name of a plural body part. It is very physical and personal to you and then when you disembody it by naming a band after it, it takes this weird quality. I literally went through many different body parts, and Arms, I don’t know it just suited me”
"One man band" usually conjures up images of symbols strapped to overalls, harmonica’s hanging from the neck, and perhaps a guitar slung around the torso. Fortunately this is far from the case with Arms “I got my friend Sam to play Drums on most of the song, a couple of bass parts, a saxophone and the female vocals obviously weren’t me, everything else was. So that’s all the guitars, most of the bass, the keyboards and 99%of the vocals, harmonies, sound effects and the ukulele’s”.
The journey for Arms has been unique to say the least, and it is for this reason that he is well on his way to pop flavour of the year. Favouring the illusive fifth Beatle Billy Preston to win in a knock out fight amongst the group, Arms admits to a soft spot for the weirdo/unique musicians. “They are out there, but bands like Dirty Project and Deerhoof are actually really sane people who make weird music”.
Musically inspired and developed by studying English Literature at university Arms talks about its specific influence on his song writing “When I was younger I used to write songs that had this kind of seasonal quality, and actually about a quarter of kids aflame still has that kind of quality to it. But now the songs I write I have specific narratives, characters, stories and these self contained worlds”.
Other than the mini stories he writes his song writing style is fairly similar process to most artists “I usually fiddle around on the guitar until things start popping out. The singing is this kind of nonsense made up language that kind of have the same shape of the words that usually end up becoming a lyric”. Though Arms admits that in general song writing doesn’t actually come easy to him “It is a painful, difficult process and frustrating process for me. It is the thing I have to periodically have to remind myself that it’s I love. That moment when I finish the song and I can go ‘I still got it’ is what I am chasing”.
First albums are often hard enough to break through with, however Arms set himself a whole other level of challenge with playing majority of the instruments, singing most of the vocals and recording and mixing everything in various bedrooms over three years.
“I wrote song Shitty Little Disco on there a long time ago, and a year or so later I had signed to Melodic, and decided that I was going to be making an album. I wrote the song Kids Aflame and those were both sort of new direction for me, and there is a little African song Eyeball on there as well, so I kind of decided well I have to have these two poles, one end there is Whirring and Shitty Little Disco kind of shinny-pop songs. And on the other end there is Eyeball the forest-dwelling-freaky-folk song, and there is Kids Aflame which is kind of a mix of the two somehow. The other songs were written as a way of completing the package”.
The ideal outcome for getting his flavour of music out into the big music world is to provide a place where a soul can find comfort in the richness of the chords and the depths of the lyrics. “I grew up with music as a constant companion; I hold it so close to me. It was there when I have gone through tough times. I’m looking to make music that has the same musical characters and qualities of the things I have loved”.
The ‘flavour’ of his music is genuinely hard to pigeon hole “I don’t really know what sort of scene Arms really fits into which is sort of comforting, also mostly because I’m sort of waiting to see where the media places it”
