The Duke Spirit
Dec 5, 2011
The Duke Spirit have spent the past eight months whipping their new tunes into fighting shape. "We put our songs on a diet, got them lean, mean and hungry sounding," singer Liela Moss says of the dozen stripped-down tracks on the band's new album, Bruiser. "It feels like a different band -- well we are a different group on this record". Bruiser marks a renaissance for all the Dukes: "We still think of ourselves as a rock & roll band, but the emphasis is totally on the roll this time around," guitarist Toby Butler says.
The seven-year-old U.K. outfit -- Liela Moss, bassist-turned-guitarist Toby Butler, guitarist Luke Ford, and drummer Olly Betts -- decided to record their third album as a quartet after guitarist Dan Higgins exited, asking new bassist Marc Sallis to join the squad more recently. The result: supreme focus and a scaled-down sound that cuts to the heart of The Duke Spirit more precisely than ever.
"This album feels sharper than before, more articulate," Moss adds. We can get our teeth into it without having to wipe the fuzz off first." Translation: After two albums of opaque lyrics and increasingly dense sounds, The Duke Spirit have carved new space into the sonic swathes of their earlier work. Pushing aside some of the layers of noise to reveal a new heart - a new clarity.
The Duke Spirit was born when Moss met Butler and Ford at Art College in a town best known for its horse racing and Brian Jones's grave. Descending on London, they moved into a house with no furniture and wrote what she calls "twee songs," then burned their acoustic guitars and modeled themselves on Spiritualized, The Saints, Patti Smith, and Sonic Youth. Serendipitously, Betts wandered into a friend of theirs in a shop and mentioned he was seeking a band, right at the crucial point. Together, the band clicked into a ferocious and beloved live act; Moss is known for her microphone hurling, hip-shaking tambourine with mean harmonica, and all-around otherworldly vigor. Bruiser started to take shape last winter, when The Duke Spirit came off two years of touring behind their acclaimed sophomore release, Neptune, and hunkered down in their new London studio space for the first time ever to sketch out tracks on their own turf.
Neptune released in 2008 on Shangri-La Music included the singles "Lassoo" featured in the game Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits for North America and the UK, and "Send a Little Love Token" on the main setlist for Guitar Hero 5. In February 2009, the band released a 10-track compilation CD featuring three songs never released in the US ("Masca", "Souvenir", and "Do What You Love") as well as a cover of Alex Chilton's "Baby Doll."
The band's third studio album, Bruiser, is available now through iTunes with the physical CD arriving on January 17th, 2012.
