A pit of what you fancy

Surveying a fridge crammed with green-bottled Dutch lager, Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos has a question: where the fuck is all the Irish beer?
“I thought we were supposed to be in the land of great booze,” says the 23-year-old Bostonian, flagging his outrage by removing his trendy specs. “Shouldn’t there be a bunch of cool local brews in our rider?”

He seems rather nonplussed when it’s pointed out that Ireland’s best-selling beer is an ethereal concoction that goes by the name of Budweiser and that, redneck America aside, we’re the world’s most avid consumers per capita of Coors Lite.
“Woah dude – this is Ireland. I thought everyone drank Guinness.”
Like many Boston natives Angelakos would appear to nurse rather romanticised notions regarding the "old country". Unlike most, though, he’s actually channelled his passion for all things Gaelic into a woozy indie-pop gem. Sampling a long-forgotten vocal flourish from ‘70s trad singer/harpist Mary O’Hara – Angelakos is under the impression she’s a household name this side of the Atlantic – Passion Pit’s break-out hit, ‘Sleepyhead’ is a twinkling masterpiece, a casio-pop soufflé just the right side of twee.
“I don’t know what the words mean,” he says of the sample’s contorted ‘Gaelic’ lyrics (it’s called Irish, dude). “That’s not because I’m too lazy to translate them. I like not knowing what they mean. If I was to translate it, then I would be injecting her meaning into my meaning. What I did was completely destroy the song – I sped it up and cut it up in different ways, to the point where you can’t understand what she’s saying anyway.”
Search for “Passion Pit” on Google and chances are you’ll stumble upon an ‘80s porn movie starring teen skin-flick maven Traci Lords.
“It’s a really ambitious porn film,” jokes bassist Jeff Apruzzese. “In terms of plot, apparently it’s considered revolutionary.”
Spluttering on his beer, Angelakos interjects: “Ambitious? It was flat-out illegal – she was under age when she made it. It’s a pretty intense film. Allegedly. You can see clips of it on YouTube – just the talking parts. Although, I think if you look up Passion Pit on the internet, we’ve finally overtaken it.”
Should we conclude, then, that the frat-boyish outfit – their backstage banter is worthy of a Seth Rogen movie – are connoisseurs of leading-edge smut? Angelakos shakes his head.
“Actually I hadn’t even heard of the film until the band had been in existence for some time. ‘Passion Pit’ was what they used to call the drive-in theatres in American movies in the ‘50s. I didn’t really give too much attention to the name. It wasn’t a name for a band that was supposed to be treated as this really important thing.”
On their debut mini-album Chunk Of Change Passion Pit wax wacky at length. The sweetly sublime ‘Sleepyhead’ aside, it’s difficult to tell how much we’re supposed to accept at face value. Indeed, Angelakos is inclined to disavow the record, saying it’s unrepresentative of the band’s current direction – and of their forthcoming album proper, to be unleashed in June.
“People are taking Chunk Of Change really seriously – for us, it doesn’t really represent where we’re at. It was really light hearted. We were kind of joking around making it.”
Still, it’s difficult to dismiss Chunk Of Change as a throwaway pleasure – if only because of the charming circumstances in which it was created. Stumped for a birthday present for a girlfriend, Angelakos recorded a bunch of songs he’d had knocking around, laying them down in a single day at a studio in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, and then presenting them to her as a gift. We’re misting up, simply hearing him spin the tale.
“I thought it would be funnier than a real present. It wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously. She and I aren’t together any more. But we still think it’s hilarious.”
There’s a childlike sensibility to Angelakos’ song-writing – a point he is happy to belabour on the forthcoming longer-player, Manners, which features a contribution from a 56-piece Bronx children’s choir.
“I always wanted to have a children’s choir on a record. There’s something about the way children sing in unison, there’s that overdrive ‘cos they’re all in the same note. People have pointed out to me that Peter Bjorn and John also do it on their new record. But they applied it in a hip-hop style – we used it in a completely different way. There was also that Jay-Z song that sampled Annie. But that was straight from the musical. They had to pay a lot of money for that sample. It’s like, 50% of the song.”
Angelakos is a laid-back guy but he does go a little quiet when conversation turns to MGMT, the Brooklyn psychedelic pranksters to whom Passion Pit are often compared.
“It’s based entirely on the attention we’re getting, how our careers have worked out. I can see the parallels there. We use synths, we’re young – we got picked up quickly. To me, MGMT sound like Yes. I was listening to the record and I was like ‘wow’, these guys sound nothing like us. They’ve got trippy guitars. They’re very ‘70s. And they’re horrible live.” He pauses and adopts a deadpan expression.
“So maybe we’ve that in common – ha!”.

Manners is released in June. Passion Pit play the Academy, Dublin