Come Back To What You Know: Embrace Return To Their Roots
Tuesday, 22 April 2014
Written by Huw Baines
“I don’t know if you’ve seen the YouTube clips of those apes that they let out. I think they were kept in this cage for 25 years or something. They’re scared. One of them sort of puts his foot out on to the grass, from the concrete of the cage that they’ve been in, and then he runs back in. One of them goes out and they all look at him thinking: ‘Is he going to be safe?’ And then all the rest of them walk out. They’re all overjoyed and can’t believe they’re free. It’s been a bit like that.”
Danny McNamara has more reason than most to feel like he’s being reintroduced to the wild. His band, Embrace, have been absent for eight years after walking away from a music scene they were losing track of, even as their fifth album, ‘This New Day’, pushed them to new levels of commercial success. Their new, self-titled record is expected on April 28 and can justifiably be termed a labour of love. The way McNamara sees it, the 10 songs that make up its tracklisting are the result of “40 man years” of effort.
“We got a bit disillusioned with it,” he said. “We were never more successful as a band, we’d only just been beaten to #1 with Nature’s Law, which had been our biggest hit, and we were playing arenas and stuff. We just didn’t really recognise ourselves anymore.
“I think we felt like our last album had been rushed, a little bit. The record company could hear that there were big songs on it, big singles, and wanted to capitalise on the success of the fourth album. We got swept up in all that and what started as a really good, exciting album when we were working on it in Spain with Youth soon turned into something we were less excited about. But, you know, true to their word, the record company, it was a big success.
“As the months went on we were still finding our favourites songs were from the first album and the fourth album. No-one wants that. Even though the crowds were really liking the new stuff, because it was exciting and energetic, we just felt it was lacking depth, a little bit of the soul that I think characterises our best work. So, we felt like the machine was taking over a little bit and we needed to get away, put the brakes on.”
Around five years ago, McNamara’s younger brother, Richard, the band’s lead guitarist, provided the shove that was needed to get them back in action. That shove came in the form of Refugees, the album’s lead single, and Thief On My Island, its closing track. In the intervening years, the challenge has been to match that standard a further eight times.
One of Richard’s later songs, Self Attack Mechanism, spurred McNamara to document his experience with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the first time back in 2012, while Embrace channelled some of their earliest influences as the process took a turn into electronic territory.
“It’s sort of been a natural, organic process really,” McNamara said. “If anything we’ve gone back to the influences we had before we were signed. Bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, the Cure, early U2, the Smiths. The electronic stuff, all the songs were built from that. It wasn’t an afterthought. We’ve never been ones to follow what’s going on now.
“One of my favourite acts at the moment is SBTRKT. I love that stuff and it’s the sort of stuff that I play when I’m listening on my own or whatever, but I think we’re always very wary. We didn’t want to make a dubstep album for instance. We’ve always just ploughed our own furrow and I think that’s probably one of the reasons why we’re still around and people still care about us.”
As well as providing the songwriting impetus, Richard also stepped up as the band sought to self-produce a record for the first time. Taking cues from their time spent recording with Youth, Ken Nelson and others, the younger McNamara quickly grew into the role.
“We had to learn how to do that,” McNamara said. “When we did our first album we didn’t have a clue how to do all that stuff, but we worked with some of the best people in the business. Richard’s become really formidable at that now. He’s really good at getting great performances out of the band. He doesn’t settle for second best, let’s put it that way.
“He can hear when something’s not right and he seems to instinctively know how to put things right. At the beginning of the process, because he’s never produced one of our records before and because I’m the older brother - I’m usually more in control of things than he is - there was a little bit of ‘how’s this going to work?’ Basically, my little brother being the boss.
“But it has really worked and I gave him enough rope. He’s done a fantastic job, far better than what we would have done without him. He’s basically written most of the album, played a lot of it and produced it. In a lot of ways it’s his baby. I’m really proud of him.”
Embrace’s live return came at the tail-end of last year with the latest in a long series of secret shows, this one played in almost total darkness at a disused mill in Bradford, before a low-key run of gigs across Scotland.
“We’ve always done stuff like that, except back when we started the internet wasn’t such a big part of it,” McNamara said. “So, people never found out about it. They literally were a secret. We once broke into the Big Brother house and did a gig there and no-one knew about it except for the fans who came. I don’t like to say more than that about it, except if you do want to be involved just go on secretgig.com and follow the trail.”
Immediately following the album’s release, Embrace will turn their attention to a UK tour that includes two nights at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire and shows in Liverpool, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle. Are they ready for it?
“We’d better be, most of them are sold out,” McNamara laughed. “We put them on sale on the Friday and I was fairly nervous because they’re big places. And, before I got up the London one had sold out. By the end of the day half of the tour had sold out. It was like: ‘What the fuck?’
“I suppose I’m worried now about scalp ticketing, I really fucking hate that. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and London have all sold out. We just didn’t expect that people would have missed us so much. Maybe we just need to fucking wake up to it. People seem to have long memories. It’s a really good feeling after working so hard on something.”
Embrace Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri May 09 2014 - LIVERPOOL O2 Academy Liverpool
Sat May 10 2014 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Academy Birmingham
Sun May 11 2014 - NOTTINGHAM Rock City
Tue May 13 2014 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol
Wed May 14 2014 - LEEDS O2 Academy Leeds
Fri May 16 2014 - GLASGOW O2 Academy Glasgow
Sat May 17 2014 - MANCHESTER Academy
Sun May 18 2014 - NEWCASTLE O2 Academy Newcastle
Tue May 20 2014 - LONDON O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
Wed May 21 2014 - LONDON O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
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