Off The Grid

Listening to Teeth & Tongue's latest album, Grids, you could compile a list of probable vocal influences on singer-songwriter Jess Cornelius that'd include the ilk of PJ Harvey, Debbie Harry, certainly Kate Bush and a lot of Tanya Donelly. But ask Cornelius who her biggest vocal influences were and the answer's not as linear as you'd think. “I always wanted to sound like David Bowie,” she laughs, “but I don't think I ever quite got there. He was a big influence, but it's people you wouldn't expect: I listened to a lot of Lou Reed, but you'd never hear that in my vocal delivery. And a lot of Nina Simone and Billie Holliday – it's weird, 'cause [these influences] never really came through I don't think in the way I sing. But they were certainly influences.”

Grids is a different monster to Teeth & Tongue's previous album, 2011's Tambourine, which carried more of a warts-and-all approach to recording. However Cornelius maintains that they adopted a pretty similar approach for the new album: “It was the same kind of slow track-laid process that I'd used for Tambourine and I swore I'd never do again.” Certainly, the continued use of synthetic drum sounds helps create a kind of pulsing bubble within each song. This combined with the overarching alternation of confident flourishes and delicate whispers throughout the tracklisting allows for convoluted but satisfying degustation.

On Grids, Cornelius worked closely with producer AJ Bradford to build the songs from the bones up. The tunes were worked and reworked and reworked to the polished consistency you'll find on the finished product.

“I do feel like some of the songs that I write tend to be different from other [artist's] songs,” she says. “I think because it's not four or five people going into the studio or a rehearsal room and arranging the songs... There's a lot of variation there and I think that the reason it's a lot more tied together has a lot to do with AJ and his production approach. We did talk about trying to create some kind of consistency, so I think we were quite aware of that when we were working.”

This lends itself to the question of difficulties in adapting the songs in the live environment. The boldness of much of the new material is an exciting prospect in a club or festival setting, but how to free it from the recording process? Cornelius has found the key to releasing the songs is getting as much of the music as possible flowing out of human beings. “Last year we were performing with actual drum machines onstage,,” she says. “But now we've got a new drummer, James Harvey, who is playing all the sounds from the album, so we get to use all the drum machine sounds, but he's playing them live. We're off the grid now, we can play in real time.”