Smack My Botch Up
On the eve of the release of their new album Unfaithfully Yours, Edwin McFee catches up with Derry four-piece General Fiasco to hear about their label change, their new bandmate and how they beat that difficult second album syndrome.
Edwin McFee, 29 Aug 2012
On March 22, 2012, indie-rock quartet General Fiasco completed work on their second record Unfaithfully Yours. It was two years to the very day since they released their debut opus Buildings. Born of a sizeable amount of blood, sweat and tears, the LP comes out on July 30 and when we catch up with singer/bassist Owen Strathern, he tells us he can’t wait until it’s released into the wild.
“I’m very excited to get the second album out there,” says the frontman. “Making the record has been quite a long process for us. It was over a year ago since we first went in to lay down some of the tracks. We went away on tour for two to three week bursts, but all our focus has been on this album.”
A more, dare we say, mature beast than their debut, Unfaithfully Yours is the sound of a band who are happy in their own skin and also willing to take the odd musical risk or three. While Owen admits it took longer to make than expected, he feels the hard work was worth it in the end.
“Yeah, there was a little ‘difficult second album syndrome’ in there,” he confesses. “I guess when you’re making your second album you’re trying to do everything better. Because musical tastes change so quickly, you want to do things a little bit different as well. It takes a while before that settles and everyone agrees that what you’re doing is the right thing. We probably wrote 80-100 songs and actually had an album written before Stuart [Bell] joined the band. One of those songs ended up on an EP and the rest was scrapped. It took a long time for us to find out what we wanted to do, but there’s no point making an album you’re not completely happy with. It was definitely frustrating but we’ve now got the best record we could possibly have made.”
Part of this new, revitalised General Fiasco mindset can be attributed to the arrival of Bell in late 2010. The former Panama Kings, Queer Giraffes and Clone Quartet guitarist/keyboardist has added an extra dimension to their sound.
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