English Teacher Give the 101 on Balancing Rage and Restraint: CoSign
The post English Teacher Give the 101 on Balancing Rage and Restraint: CoSign appeared first on Consequence.
Once a month, Consequence proudly highlights an artist who’s poised for the big time with our CoSign accolade. For April 2024, that title goes to the Leeds quartet English Teacher and their remarkable debut album This Could Be Texas.
When the chorus of “The Worlds Biggest Paving Slab” hits, English Teacher do not sound like a meager four piece rock band hailing from Leeds, UK. They sound humongous, like a monolith, impossible to place or pin down, completely fluent in their own sonic language.
English Teacher’s debut album, This Could Be Texas, is full of moments where the group segues into something almost shocking followed by a section of unfettered beauty and elegance. Across 13 tracks, English Teacher span from fiery, intricate post-punk to majestic, sweeping folk.
It’s intentional that their music falls all over the map. The group — comprised of vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Lily Fontaine, guitarist Lewis Whiting, bassist Nicholas Eden, and drummer Douglas Frost — pride themselves on their disparate taste backgrounds. “We joke that there are very, very few bands that we all agree on,” Whiting tells me over a video call before running through a list of the band’s individual influences: Alex Turner, Pulp, Stereolab, The Smiths, Caroline Polachek, and Fontaines D.C., to name a few.
Despite their varied musical backgrounds, however, one thing is abundantly clear when listening to English Teacher: These folks can play. “Nearly Daffodils” is an odyssey that features a couple full-band explosions, rapid-fire drumming, and surreal lyrics that make the concept of inevitable change feel like a revelation. “I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying” is a riveting, hypnotic number that strikes the balance between curdled rage and apathy. The grandiose “Sideboob” is hauntingly gorgeous, and ends with the lyrics “And as the sun sets on your sideboob/ So I fall for you.” These songs live by their arrangements; the pushing and pulling between widescreen and intimate is something each member can instinctually pull off.
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Balance is a huge aspect to English Teacher’s process, and both Whiting and Fontaine feel it’s intuitive. Whiting recalls joining the band years ago after befriending Fontaine at university in Leeds, and according to the guitarist, it just “clicked.” “There was a bit of a name change, a rearranging of Lily’s previous band… I had an idea of what kind of music Lily’s other bands were into at the time, especially with the peak of the South London ‘Windmill’ wave of bands, which was inspiring for all of us.”
Things snowballed into an official recording project, and they soon found themselves roped into the burgeoning experimental rock scene that was taking hold of England alongside Black Country, New Road, Squid, and Black Midi. But rather than aim down a specific set of sonic rules that would dictate what an English Teacher song would be, Whiting remembers the band claiming indifference: “I remember coming away from the practices and being quite excited that there wasn’t a ‘manifesto,'” he says.
“I remember us writing the [Polyawkward] EP a couple of months later, and questioning whether we could do a song — if it was the right vibe. And Lily just said, ‘What even is an English Teacher song? Whatever it is, it’s just what it is.’ I found that exciting, and it’s something we’ve tried to cling onto as best as we can.”
Rather than lean too heavily into harsher sounds or full punk meltdowns, English Teacher add just enough sweetness and grace. “Range was something we really wanted to try to get in the album as much as possible — really small moments followed by very loud ones,” Whiting says. “The writing process is chaotic, and striking the balance between those moments is less of a conscious thing and more of a push and pull…. it’s hard to describe, but it’s less conscious than I think we all realize.”
Fontaine agrees, citing an intuitive, stream-of-consciousness style that dominates her songwriting approach. In addition to playing multiple instruments in English Teacher and lending a compositional focus with the rest of the group, her lyrics are a significant aspect to their overall sound. There are lines on This Could Be Texas that are jarring and serene, absurd and grounded in reality — Fontaine seems to stumble upon these incredibly rich images that can be surreal and painfully direct, predominately exploring the grey area between those two styles.
“Writing is instinctual for me in that I have to do it, lest I go insane,” Fontaine tells Consequence. “The writing style I have is not forced but the words and their arrangement are deliberate and quite nerdily planned out. I just write what I’d like to read and most of my bookshelf and film shelf and art shelf are filled with surrealism, sci-fi and dystopia.” Many of the topics on This Could Be Texas live in those thematic territories, in addition references to Charlotte Brontë, William Wordsworth, and Shelly and Byron. There’s a serious reckoning with existence, from the deeply personal to the overtly political.
One of the most indelible songs arrives with “Not Everyone Gets to Go to Space,” a hilarious indictment of billionaires like Bezos and Branson taking space flights that also happens to teem with rage. “Plus, if everybody got to go to space/ How would space feel like a win?” Fontaine asks in the song, later arriving on the charged refrain “Who built the ships?/ And who’ll bring them back again?” The track ends not with an image or sound of defiance, but a defeated reminder: “Because if everybody got to go to space/ No one would ever want to clean.”
Appropriately, Fontaine was inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 when writing the song. “I was lying on the grass in the sunshine filled with pure rage at how much I could relate the way our government will cling to power for power’s-sake, to the novel,” Fontaine says. “I felt moved to write about it and wanted to employ the humor and the dystopia of Orwell to the track.” English Teacher may find an otherworldly majesty in their compositions and carefully-drawn structures, but as “Not Everyone Gets to Go to Space” suggests, these are four people who are very much earthbound.
The album’s title, derived from its sixth track, hammers home many of the themes that Fontaine and co. wanted to explore. Whiting recalls that the title came to him not in Texas, but in England, during the region’s historic heatwave in 2022. “We had just found out the news that we were going to be playing SXSW in Texas, and we were quite excited, as you can image,” Whiting says. “We were in a car park, and I just squinted and made a joke, like ‘this could be Texas,’ because it was so hot and all concrete. We all really like that phrase, and we kept it — it eventually became the title track, and that ended up being about the process of making an album.”
That first trip to America was a crucial endeavor for the band. In addition to playing SXSW and navigating their signing to Island Records, English Teacher were deep in the midst of writing This Could Be Texas — so several songs reference that period with an air of new prospects, new opportunities. “Unsurprisingly, the emotional impact of those experiences have woven themselves into the fabric of the album,” Fontaine explains. “Playing America for the first time felt like a huge career development because of pure distance. America represented significant career progression, and all the positives and negatives that come with that.”
Whiting agrees, referencing the double-edged sword of finding success in a far off land while also reckoning with what that land actually represents. “There’s a line Lily sings in ‘This Could Be Texas’ which I suppose nods to the current state of politics in the US: ‘And that town is in a state/ And that state is in a country/ And that country is in a bad state.'” There are other tracks that acknowledge social and class divides — the personal “Broken Biscuits” bemoans income inequality and the exorbitant cost of living heaved upon families, and “R&B” finds Fontaine resisting being pigeonholed as a black musician, asserting the idea that “Despite appearances I haven’t got the voice for R&B.”
“R&B,” as Whiting recalls, was actually the first track that English Teacher created together in their current iteration. Like lead single “The Worlds Biggest Paving Slab,” it feels like the consolidation of all their best musical impulses. “If I have stuff to write, then why don’t I just write it for me?” Fontaine asks rhetorically, a summation of what English Teacher actually do throughout This Could Be Texas. Each member shows an unmatched enthusiasm for playing — on the most spine-tingling scales and on the most cinematic, explosive segues. But together, even through the album’s occasionally dense, dystopian themes, they provide revelation after revelation.
English Teacher Give the 101 on Balancing Rage and Restraint: CoSign
Paolo Ragusa
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