The Chamber Strings strive to make soul with sophistication, pop with intelligence and rock that pays attention to carefully plotted craftsmanship without losing its in-the-moment passion. In their spare time, they plan to cure cancer, ensure world peace and bring a winning baseball team to Wrigley Field.
On the quintet’s second album, “Month of Sundays” (Bobsled), the first part of that ambitious mission statement is almost completely realized (the rest will have to wait — though if the Strings sell as many albums as Britney Spears, who knows?). The exquisitely deployed strings, horns and keyboards evoke a time when Phil Spector ballads and dusky Burt Bacharach orchestrations were the standards against which arrangers were judged. At the same time, there’s a conviction to singer-guitarist Kevin Junior’s bittersweet vocals that suggests he knows he doesn’t have to shout to be heard.
“Month of Sundays” is a lush album but not a grandiose or overblown one. At its core are 11 songs that demand attention from pop connoisseurs whose tastes span from Paul McCartney to Elliott Smith. If the Chamber Strings’ well-received 1999 debut, “Gospel Morning,” was the blueprint, “Month of Sundays” is the finished mansion of sound. It finds Junior and his fellow Strings — guitarist Tim Fowler, drummer Anthony Illarde, multi-instrumentalist Carolyn Englemann, bassist Jason Walker — expanding on the debut’s promise to craft a melancholy song cycle about love, death, lost opportunities and the search “for things I had to find.”
Suffusing the album is the loss of Junior’s close friend, Epic Soundtracks, the drummer for British indie-rockers the Swell Maps whose solo career — devoted to music of a particularly personal and gorgeously fragile vision — is one of the last decade’s most criminally overlooked. His recent passing is undoubtedly an inspiration for the gorgeous elegy “Our Dead Friends.” It was Junior’s collaborations with Soundtracks in England during the late ’90s that began fixing the identity of Chamber Strings, says the singer, who previously had led the glam-rocking Mystery Girls and Rosehips.
The Chamber Strings will headline March 2 at Metro in a performance that will feature a 13-piece lineup, including a string quartet and horns. In between rehearsals, Junior spoke about the self-imposed standards that made “Month of Sundays” what it is.
With all the orchestrations on “Month of Sundays,” was there ever a feeling like it was getting out of hand?
I didn’t want to be big just to be big. I think everything on there is there for a reason: to embellish or complement the songs. If you can’t play the song with just an acoustic guitar, then you’ve got nothing. Otherwise you’re just filling up tracks, you’re fumbling around with sound to make up for the fact that there is no real song there. I notice now that any band that throws in a few harmonies gets compared to [The Beach Boys’] “Pet Sounds.” That’s just jive. “Pet Sounds” is the greatest record ever made, but it’s based on great songwriting. So are Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions albums or the first album by the Pretenders or a lot of Big Star’s music. I don’t see much of a difference in them, because they’re all based on songwriting and soul. It’s not about how nice and polished your harmonies and melodies are. Big Star also was really gritty and had a raw backbone. That’s what I want to accomplish. It’s like putting some flowers in a rusty tin can. I think, “What would it have been like if McCartney sang for the Stones?” To me, that would have been such a beautiful combination.
You’re citing a lot of ’60s and ’70s records as inspiration. Why?
It’s hard to tell if something that has come out in the last five years will hold up, though Beck’s “Mutations” sounds like it’s got staying power. Over the last 10 years, I’m sure I could find 100 really good records. But I bet I could find that many from just 1972.
What makes those older songs hold up?
A great song has conviction and truth. It doesn’t rely on some kind of new technology or sound or trend. I want to like things that are new. I certainly don’t want to be called retro. I feel like we’re doing something that’s new, although it’s borrowed from the old. What I can’t see is using technology just to sound “new.” There are so many records now where you hear what could have been a straight song with piano, guitar and drums, but they had to put in some kind of Stereolab bleeps and bloops, or a turntable scratch or someone rapping or a drum loop, and you can tell instantly they wouldn’t have written that before all those things became popular. That’s where they take away from the song itself and end up dating themselves.
———-
Hear Greg Kot on “Sound Opinions” at 10 p.m. every Tuesday on WXRT (93.1 FM)
