Antarctigo Vespucci Rides Again: Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock Get The Band Back Together

Photo: Andy De Santis

I know Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock are friends. You know Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock are friends. But do Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock know that Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock are friends? “Hey,” Farren says from the stage at Bristol’s Exchange. “If you’re excited for Jeff Rosenstock, let me hear you say...‘CHRIS FARREN!’” When Rosenstock’s guitar packs up mid-set, his attempts to borrow Farren’s are met with silence until a member of his band suggests Tweeting him. Yeah, that’d probably do it, Jeff nods.

They’re joking, of course. Chris Farren and Jeff Rosenstock are friends. Upstairs at the venue a couple of hours earlier, between racks of vinyl at Specialist Subject’s neatly appointed record shop, they talk about the new album from their band Antarctigo Vespucci in an overlapping stream of one-liners, self-deprecation and music nerd asides. They do what they can to disabuse us of the notion that they’ve crafted a near perfect modern power-pop album, but that’s precisely what they’ve done.  

‘Love In The Time Of E-Mail’ is their second LP under the Antarctigo Vespucci banner, following up 2015’s ‘Leavin’ La Vida Loca’. “We always come up with the name of the record while we’re doing the record before,” Rosenstock says. “It’s like a little push.” “It’s such an unpoetic title that it really makes me laugh,” Farren adds. The truth that inspired it is sad. The name is funny. So it goes. “It’s just how we deal with all sad things at this point,” Rosenstock says. “Chris cracked a joke. I think it’s funny. It feels so anachronistic, fucking email?”

If something’s both sad and funny, generally it’s also grist for the mill. That intersection is pop music’s sweet spot, and the record bears that out. It feels like an accurate representation of what Farren and Rosenstock’s styles have in common and also of the differences that allow them to bring new things out in each other’s writing. Something that they mention more than once is that they refuse to be precious about their ideas. When Farren brings a stack of skeleton songs to the table they’ll get to pulling them apart and rebuilding them, spending a day interrogating each for any secrets they’re yet to spill.

“I don't go into it thinking anything other than, 'How can this song fucking kick ass and how can it be interesting?’ and ‘How could this record feel like a full and worthwhile thing to listen to?’” Rosenstock says. “Especially at a time when people just don't fucking give a shit about rock and roll. We both feel this way. I think that anything that's good is a testament to Chris's writing and his ability to make instantly classic melodies and songs that feel open enough that me and him could go and fucking screw around with them. We'll just kind of work with anything.”

Back in 2014 they didn’t yet have this creative shorthand down. The early Antarctigo Vespucci writing sessions in Rosenstock’s Brooklyn apartment were nothing other than something he thought would be nice. It’s in that cramped space that they became pals for real, having orbited one another while on the road, and put some open water between what went before them and what was next.

When their first EP, ‘Soulmate Stuff’, was released, both were best known for bands that were dead or dying. Farren fronted Fake Problems and Rosenstock was behind Bomb The Music Industry!, with their solo ventures still a few months away from finding their feet. The temptation is to see Antarctigo Vespucci as a vehicle that helped to sever ties with the old in order to set them on their way, but neither sees it like that. “It never felt like we were starting a band,” Farren says. “We were just making a record.”  

“There’s never been an imperative need to make any of the records, you know?” Rosenstock continues. “The first one was nothing more than I thought it would be fun to do something with Chris, and he felt the same. It wasn’t trying to find the next thing. We were working on stuff together and were like ‘Oh shit, this is kinda cool. We like this.’”

‘Love In The Time Of E-Mail’ was a more complicated process, if only because they have less time on their hands. The last three years have been home to Farren’s ‘Can’t Die’ and a triple threat from Rosenstock in the form of ‘We Cool?’, ‘Worry’ and ‘Post-’. Both have toured consistently, while Jeff has also turned producer for the Smith Street Band, Laura Stevenson and Alkaline Trio’s Dan Andriano, among others. Their drummer, Benny Horowitz, has been back on the road with the Gaslight Anthem, along with starting new projects like Mercy Union. Getting the band back together required planning.

“It’s not like we’re only in contact with each other when we decide to make a record. We are pretty much constantly in contact with each other because we’re friends,” Farren says. “Unfortunately,” Rosenstock smirks. They spent a couple of weeks at work, left things alone for a few months, reconvened for a few more weeks, left things alone again, and then tidied things up over the course of a final week. Throughout Rosenstock fought his impulse to rush release what they had completed in each block. Instead the LP is getting the treatment from Polyvinyl and Big Scary Monsters, and there are a handful of shows in diary.

“Maybe this is my fault, but the second we’re done with it I’m like, ‘Let’s get this out.’ That changed with this one,” he says. “With ‘Leavin’ La Vida Loca’ we didn’t tour on it, we didn’t do all that much. And we both really like that record. It was important not to just take that first chunk of songs that we did in the first two weeks and just put that out as an EP. Like ‘OK, fuck, it’s cool. We did the next thing.’ We were aware of trying to give it a chance, and treating it with the amount of love we put into it after it’s come out.”

And there’s a lot of love in it. Several songs here are good enough to last 12 rounds with the best from the pair’s respective back catalogues, while the meticulous nature of the process is plain. In Breathless on DVD you can see the hours they spent listening to Madonna’s Like A Prayer, picking apart its percussive nature, while its cavalcade of synths pop and whirr, dragging the song away from its beginnings as a folk-punk demo. “Then we did the classic Antarctigo Vespucci move, which is if it’s too poppy at some point just put a whole bunch of fuzz on it,” Rosenstock says.

The finishing touches often come from a lyric sheet that skewers pop’s obsession with the bittersweet, taking cues from the sad/funny title that was affixed before any of the songs were a reality. There are several pointed questions dotted throughout that invite us to mull things over in real time; they’re a prompt for us to engage with the songs beyond the fact that they’re hooky as hell.

As the LP’s lead single White Noise explodes into its addictively overblown middle eight Farren and Rosenstock yell in tandem: “When you really know me, and I mean really know me, will you want to know me anymore?” On Breathless, they channel Jean-Paul Belmondo: “Am I unhappy because I’m not free? Or not free because I’m unhappy? I wanted to see you to see if I still wanted to see you, but that’s not fair.”

“We’ll talk about it a lot,” Farren says. “To make the songs be what they’re supposed to be about. I’ll write a lot of songs and there’ll be a line that sounds cool and I’ll be like, ‘That doesn’t have anything to do with that, but whatever.’ But we always focus in and make sure everything is true to what it’s supposed to be.”

Rosenstock takes the baton: “It’s the push and pull of making sure it’s as honest and truthful as possible while also trying to be vague enough that...”

Chris jumps back in for a second: “...you’re not putting people you love on blast.”

“Or making sure it’s something that could be relatable to someone who’s not exactly you at that time,” Rosenstock continues. “And also not putting people you love on blast.”

'Love In The Time Of E-Mail' is out on October 26 through Polyvinyl and Big Scary Monsters.

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