Daniel Blumberg is only 23, yet has already released five debut albums – with Cajun Dance Party, Yuck, Daniel in the Lion's Den, Oupa and now Hebronix. Can't he stick to one thing?
Eight years ago, Daniel Blumberg fronted a band called Cajun Dance Party and looked like an escaped member of the Kooks. He was 15 at the time, so naturally his ambitions were going to change, his music taste would evolve and his dance moves would be restrained by a sudden bout of self-consciousness. He quit the band soon after the release of their Bernard Butler-produced debut, closing the door on his adolescence, before being reborn as the frontman of Pavement-praising slacker group Yuck. Their album was a surprise hit of 2011, receiving accolades across the board from Vice to Vogue; the Guardian compared its moments of pre-grunge guitar rock to Dinosaur Jr, Buffalo Tom and Sonic Youth. But Daniel Blumberg has never been one for people pleasing. So he upped and left. Again.
When we meet today at his house in north London, Blumberg comes across as sweetly neurotic, living more like a middle-aged eccentric in New York than a 23-year-old in Stoke Newington. He's the sort of person who has a half-smoked roll-up in one hand at all times, like a slightly grubby, cancerous extra digit, and to get into his kitchen you have to walk past his vintage Honda motorbike and about 15 coffee and cream-coloured Bisley filing cabinets crammed with every important document he's ever received. "I get quite obsessed with things," he says from behind his Deirdre Barlow glasses.
A quick scan of Blumberg's discography points towards an obsession with reinvention: after Cajun Dance Party split, he released a Japanese-only album through XL as Daniel in the Lion's Den, followed by Yuck's eponymous debut, then a brief solo jaunt making echo-laden indie as Oupa. At the moment, he's making music under the name Hebronix, and has just released his fifth debut album. Entitled Unreal, this collection of songs was recorded with Royal Trux founder Neil Hagerty (his first project since Bill Callahan's Woke on a Whaleheart in 2007). It finds Blumberg in a fragile and dreamlike state of mind, with swaths of Silver Jews and Cass McCombs running throughout. While it's different from his former band, Blumberg is quick to point out that it was label pressure rather than artistic differences that prompted him to leave Yuck.
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"I was so sick of everything after Yuck. We made this record, and the other guys did interviews towards the end, but I felt like it was just sapping my soul away. When you're just sitting in a van for the whole day and you speak to someone on the phone about an album you made eight months ago that you have no connection with, it feels ridiculous and horrible," Daniel begins. "It's a privilege for someone to be interested in your music and to have this opportunity, but it became the opposite of that."
While Yuck were signed to a major label in the UK (Mercury), their US label Fat Possum were "pretending" to be a major label as well, according to Blumberg, "They were saying 'we need to get the second album out so we can sell this many records', which is the opposite of what I want to hear. It's not an environment I wanted to make music in. So I didn't make music."
Blumberg shares his house with his actor girlfriend Stacy Martin, whom he met four years ago at London club night Madame Jojo's, back when she was a model. She was plucked out of the fashion world by Danish director Lars von Trier to feature in his new film Nymphomaniac ("I want to see it before it comes out because it's her being fucked for hours. It will be fucking weird," he says.)
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While her social group has extended to the movie world, Blumberg's been climbing ladders too; the American alt-rock inner circle have welcomed him in with open arms – aside from Hagerty breaking his six-year silence to "direct" and produce Hebronix, bands such as Low and Lambchop have taken him on the road.
These bands are not so much influences as the driving force behind Hebronix's aesthetic, convincing Blumberg to adapt his style from indie pop to lovelorn lo-fi. "When I was 17, I got really depressed and my friend introduced me to lots of amazing things. I heard Bill Callahan and I got into Neil Young and then I got into Lambchop and Smog. I thought, fuck, what have I done? [Cajun Dance Party] is so shit! That was the strongest feeling of embarrassment that I've ever had in my life. It's only just started to wear off."
Now signed to ATP, he says he's finally part of a label that understands his approach to music. Yet he's still a little dismissive when asked about his commitment to his Hebronix project. "I don't even know what project means," he says. "I just made a record. A project to me sounds like product, and in the past, the stuff that I've done, when it feels like a product I've changed the name. To make music purely to sell doesn't make sense. I find it really destructive. I'm quite allergic to that scenario."
He may sound stubborn at times, but Blumberg's quick to recognise he's in a position of privilege. He agrees that being signed to XL while in his teens and spending most of his adult life being in bands "probably hasn't been a good way to grow up", with self-analysis being another of his obsessions. But he also knows that his approach towards labels throughout the years has been somewhat difficult. "It's almost as if I'm spoiled and can't appreciate a position of the record label asking 'can you just make a record for us?' Some people would love to be in that situation."
There's sincerity in his voice, for sure, but you get the impression a fleeting moment of guilt is not quite enough to tie Blumberg down just yet.
by Harriet Gibsone via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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