Ducktails

Ahem. Sorry, couldn’t quite help myself there. While many of us have fond memories of the animated antics of Donald Duck and friends, the musical variety of Ducktails are all set to carve a nostalgic niche of their own. With a fifth album, St. Catherine, due out this Friday, Matt Mondanile – also the guitarist in Real Estate – has seen the shape of his music twist and turn quite considerably since his then-solo project’s 2009 debut. From unencumbered lo-fi recordings to the crisp sound we hear today, Mondanile is painting across a huge canvas, inspired less by changing audience attitudes than his own musical curiosities.

“My sound changing doesn’t necessarily have much to do with my fan base changing at all. It has more to do with just getting older, experiencing more music and learning what you want out of a recording. For example, I really wanted this record to sound a little more…”

Mondanile trails away. These pauses become a hallmark of our conversation, although talk never slides into awkwardness or boredom; rather, he takes time to properly examine his thoughts and motivations.

“…Maybe to sound more impressively clear, while having the quality of the song and the arrangements be more complex and engaging for the listener. Something that makes you focus to what’s going on, to focus on lyrics. I like to be relatable to an audience, that was important to me. But in a way, having a raw sound or a produced sound, there are many grey areas in there. I’ve been wanting to keep things pretty simple and concise and clear. Even if I’m making a pretty abstract song, the meaning should all be there somewhere for the listener. If I can listen to my music over and over again in my car, then I know that I like it, I know what I’m doing is fun.
I do that a lot of times with Duck – it’s almost like a test I need to pass.”

While Ducktails’ earlier releases are in no ways cryptic or obtuse, there is certainly a greater accessibility to St. Catherine. It is the kind of release that is sure to satisfy his established fans and pick up a swathe of new listeners, yet Mondanile is still resigned to people misinterpreting or criticising just what he is trying to say.

“On my last record I have this song, ‘Under Cover’, and people thought it sounded like Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’. And I was like, ‘What?’ The comments on the YouTube video are people saying all of this about it being so close to Daft Punk, and that really came out of nowhere for me. Some people have weird ideas about lyrics. They think lyrics reference something that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the song at all. It always surprises me. Looking at [social media] can bum you out, so you have to be mentally prepared. But then I feel like, whenever I see something mean, even as basic as ‘This sucks’ or ‘Why would you call your band Ducktails?’, I’ll look at some super famous person’s Twitter or something and see the stuff people are saying about them.”

“If you’re extremely famous, or even just more famous than me, which a lot of musicians are,” he laughs, “you get a lot more hate mail, and a lot more judgement from the audience. When you’re a certain small size, which is where I like to be, it’s almost always positive stuff, because the people writing about you are people who went out searching for you to begin with. They’re excited to hear you.”

One of the pitfalls you come up against when trying to explain a musician’s sound is deciding on the approach. You could try the comparison angle – “Ducktails is a kind of The Mountain Goats meets… The Moody Blues meets… Belle & Sebastian” – which really gets you nowhere. But assigning genres is also tricky, with Mondanile’s style being heralded as horizontal West Coast (what?), hypnagogic pop, and straight-up psychedelic. Yet squabbling over labels may well be symptomatic of a deeper disconnect.

“I don’t like genre names,” says Mondanile. “They’re kind of useless, though I get that things need to be called something. I think whatever I do might be hard to classify. It’s a lot of different things. It’s not necessarily easy to name. I like the idea that people think my music is pop, since there’s so many different kinds, it’s meaningless. It’s just being covered in different kinds of – shit, I don’t know, layers of mist. Really, it might just be an excuse not to discuss the lyrics or engage with what the song is really about, and just focus on the production instead.

“I think a lot of the times people talk to me about the production and about being a certain genre… maybe in the past, songs have been more lyrically abstract and not as easy to talk about, but each song here has a meaning and says something, and most people don’t seem to want to talk about what the song is about, if there’s a point to anything. I think it’s hard to discuss the actual themes somehow.”

“That said,” he laughs, “I think ‘hypnagogic pop’ sounds pretty cool, right?”