Poisonous Birds: Preparing For Flight

It remains encouraging that, through a year of challenge and confusion, music has remained steadfast. The world may have to hold its breath a little while longer before the halcyons of live music returns but the timeless virtues of ingenuity and passion behind the studio doors are not something music has been deprived of throughout these turbulent times. Bristol-based trio, POISONOUS BIRDS, have always done well to uphold these values across their short but industrious lifespan by pushing envelopes and breaking the boundaries of modern rock with aid of an unforeseeable musical vision.

From the traditionally ‘heavy’ tendencies of 2017’s Gentle Earth EP to the otherworldly, synthesised palettes that would follow a year later on Big Water, fronting visionary Tom Ridley has steered valiantly towards the great unknown for the band’s latest EP We Can Never Not Be All Of Us.

What comes as most striking – before having even glanced at the tracklist – are the vibrant slashes that coat the record’s cover art and it’s accompanying title. The name We Can Never Not Be All Of Us, a title that Ridley describes as “pleasingly clunky” was taken from Justin Vernor (BON IVER) when he featured on the Song Exploder podcast explaining how the track Holyfields tells of racial tensions on the border between Texas and Mexico with recent events across the pond giving the phrase a new lease of life. “I just found that statement powerful,” Ridley explains. “It does say quite succinctly like no matter how much we may try to be divided or politicised we are stuck with each other, and we kind of sink or swim together. The Black Lives Matter quite rightly gained the spotlight again and whilst this was originally about something on the other side of the world, suddenly it resonates here in Bristol where people I know are pulling down the statue you know?” 

A poignant message, reinforced by eye-grabbing visuals that have marked the EP’s release campaign. All of which being the product of Ridley and his palette knife, each teaser track has been translated into violent canvases of reds and blues that Ridley humbly displays over Zoom. Ridley’s fondness for the visual arts, and his method of creating it, neatly translates to his songwriting approach. “In a way, it’s a similar sense to how I make music which is like: set general mood, maybe that’s a beat or a sound or whatever and then, in quite an abstract way, sort of throw stuff at the canvas, as it were, and then go ‘oh that’s a little bit much’ and edit it a bit it. I actually find external stimuli from other art forms a bit more inspiring. It can sound a bit pompous, and that’s not really my intention, but if I go to look at an art gallery or watch a film, there are some interesting ideas presented, but they haven’t been soundtracked yet; they’re not music. I can then respond to that with an original interpretation of it whereas if I find if I listen to music, I’ll just create another song that sounds like that, in which case that’s kind of derivative.”

So without an inspirational landmark to anchor from, with Ridley stating, “there is no band I’m trying to be like,” POISONOUS BIRDS can often be a tricky band to wrap words around. We Can Never… represents a sound far-flung from the acoustics of three-years past but one that remains as unapologetically dense – this time through a jungle of synth notes and grooves that harness both violence and beauty. The decision to adopt the synthesiser as a primary weapon was both a conscious and a simple one; it was simply a matter of preference.

“I found electric guitars, and broadly the band format of guitar, bass, drums, vocals, to be quite a limited palette especially in terms of frequency content. You’ve got bass down here and then guitars up here, maybe not much in between, and then you’ve got clean, distorted, reverb-y and that’s sort of your lot. Maybe that’s a simplification again, but as soon as you bring in electronics and waveforms into the mix, you can kind of synthesise anything you want and that can be really harsh if you want it to be. Or, equally, like 30 hertz if you want which you could never make on an acoustic instrument. I’ve just found that palette to be really inspiring and you can kind of craft these worlds that I always struggled to do quite so well in acoustic instruments.” 

Ridley speaks of admiration for art, of all mediums, produced through a single visionary lens, an idea that renders nicely into POISONOUS BIRDS‘ creative process. “It’s the stimulus from the people around me that I react to,” Ridley says, “people just feed me stuff and I say ‘hey Jack I need a guitar part for that can you come up with some ideas?’ or ‘hey Finn this bit needs a little something so do your thing’. I trust them to do their thing, but it does all come back to me through my brain and through my computer.”

The result – something heard especially through the new EP’s innate fluidity – is something more organic than your average brick and mortar construction. Ridley explains, “I try to not make anything that sounds like just flat layers on a piece of paper I hope it’s sort of a pulsating mass which sounds quite disgusting! This EP process was quite a high-velocity one and like I said just kind of ‘brain to page’ so there definitely wasn’t much room for perfectionism. It just kind of is what it is.”

With another successful EP under wraps, Ridley, and by extension POISONOUS BIRDS, looks to the future. Writing an album is a daunting yet exciting prospect, one Ridley assures us is “on my to-do list” but until then POISONOUS BIRDS is strapped in with PHOXJAW on a trip around the country. “I’m super excited to be taking this new stuff on the road! I’m so excited that I don’t really want to play any old songs. I’d love to just play that [the new EP] front to back. I think we’re definitely gonna like test PHOXJAW‘s audience a bit in February. Those who don’t know who we are probably won’t be expecting our show, certainly not once we’ve ended up at the back end of the set and they’ll be hoping it will be some pounding, visceral experience.”

For those of us already aware, however, of what POISONOUS BIRDS is – and the nature of their bubbling potential – August 14th is a day to look forward to. In a world where certainty is hard to come by, having that release date set in stone is a comforting prospect, yet, even this comes with its own dubiety. Ridley admits that in an ideal world We Can Never… would be the band’s breakthrough album but states, “whilst people are slowly warming up to us, we’re an awfully long way from mass appreciation and that may never come. It’s just music that I hope people enjoy and that I hope something interesting can be taken form; it needn’t be any grander or ambitious than that.” These are humble goals, but with such a buzz around these birds beginning to build, it’s a challenge to not imagine the band take flight to something even greater. 

We Can Never Not Be All Of Us is out now via self-release.

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