(ONLINE ONLY) Penpushers - The Lyric Age

Sitting with the four core members of Penpushers (MCs Lifeboy and Obsolete, and DJs / producers The Brain and Dr Hands Zharkov), in the luxury confines of Edinburgh New Town watering hole Amicus Apple, it's almost difficult to connect the laughing, joking individuals sitting before me to their literate, skilled, moody counterparts on record. This is made even more difficult by the fact that this reporter went to the same high school as the two DJs / producers of the crew. Sitting with them and shooting the breeze is something of a mindwarp. They are the same modest, humble, not very serious guys I remember from all those years ago, and I have to keep reminding myself that between them, they have produced some of the finest hip-hop / leftfield music made by non-Londoners to ever grace the more discerning record shop shelves of Europe and the world.

Penpushers' first LP 'Last Vestige of Holism' was a cult classic, selling well locally and abroad. The following trio of mini-LPs (of which only two have so far seen the light of day) consolidated their following, and garnered them a large amount of critical success in the international press. Penpushers are big news – not only have they studiously avoided being tagged as 'hip-hop,' and thus suffering the withering contempt afforded to regional hip-hop by major and indie labels alike, they have also managed the considerable feat of escaping the 'regional' tag altogether. Although much of their music is dark, brooding and reflective, and evokes a particularly Scottish mood of discontent and dystopia, they are judged critically on purely musical terms.

This unique position can only help when it comes to their new LP, 'Poltergeeks.' Where the 'Our Golden Age of Invention' EPs innovated sonically and lyrically, blurring the boundaries of indie, electro and hip-hop, 'Poltergeeks' takes you on intricate narrative journeys. Classical allusions to Yeats and greek myths abound, taking the listener to the logical conclusion of the journey begun on their seminal song Art Died in a Setup (from 'Void Engineers'). Sonically and lyrically, 'Poltergeeks' has almost nothing in common with the nascent hip-hop of 'Last Vestige…', skilled though that album was. Confident and assured, 'Polergeeks' is the sound of a band who have given up trying to classify their music, and have instead honed their songwriting to a pinnacle of excellence. The addition of singer Jane Gilbert (last heard on Livesciences' debut) adds another layer of beauty and eloquence to songs like Hero Today, Gone Tomorrow, potentially opening up Penpushers to a new, slightly more mainstream audience. And this would be no bad thing – technically three albums deep, it would be edifying to see the band attract a larger following.

"'Last Vestige of Holism' was our first album," explains MC Lifeboy, describing the road that led to 'Poltergeeks.' "Then we released two mini-LPs. 'Poltergeeks' is a full-length album, so I'd say it's three all together. Technically there will be four things out – we are still going to release the last part of 'Our Golden Age Of Invention'," he insists.

I ask how much things have changed since their first LP: "It's changed completely, you know… the ways we do stuff now…" says scratch technician Dr Hands Zharkov.

"That was what it was about," agrees Lifeboy. "Going through the transformation. The first album was just rushed, there wasn't much thought put into it. It did alright, but we definitely flew into a new era when we decided to do three mini LPs, thinking that would be easier to do. The idea was to do the three mini-LPs and a big one at the end. The third part of 'Our Golden Age…' is still coming, but we found out it was a bit of a task. We bit off a bit more than we could chew."

I ask if 'Poltergeeks' represents a move away from computer-based production to a more live sound: "Most of it is still production," replies Lifeboy. "The Brain does play bass and guitar on some tracks, and keys. On this album we've gone very electronic on everybody," he insists, and indeed there are many lush electronic textues to be found on 'Poltergeeks,' echoing the electro-led sound of label-mates Eaters.

Lifeboy continues: "I'm enjoying the electronic directions we are taking, because it sounds different again. Obviously having Jane Gilbert on vocals really took us off on a tangent, doing stuff we wouldn't have done before. This album's a lot more song-oriented. It was a collective thing, we all came together."

Was there a conscious effort to be very literary in approach to the lyrics? "It's the only way I know how," says Lifeboy. "I've changed over the years as well, been in various musical ventures. At first I was a really militant b-boy…"

"I've watched Lifeboy and Obsolete writing for years," The Brain chips in. "What they're saying may have changed, but the way they go about it hasn't changed at all. They still write the same way."

Obsolete agrees: "It's the content of our conversations, yes, but it's also writing with Lifeboy – he sets out a theme for me, and whoever else we are collaborating with at the time to write to, and usually we come up with really similar things because we're on the same vibe."

"Definitely on this album, Jane and I worked quite closely together - all the time really," explains Lifeboy. "That's why tracks like Hero Today, Gone Tomorrow and Breathe Deeply are so…" aptly, Lifeboy struggles to find a term to encapsulate the elegiac, timeless beauty of these songs.

"I remember writing the chorus for that and thinking, "'Fucking hell!'" he remembers. "The first person I phoned was Jane. We worked out the songs beforehand and then worked closely with the ideas. For us, Poltergeeks, the last track on the album, that was a very collaborative effort too. The songs are deep and meaningful. We've always had tunes where we just were like Zen Masters, like 'Ohhhm' and met each other on a higher plane, but with 'Poltergeeks' a lot more real feelings went into it, rather than just taking you off on another bizarre journey, which was kind of our trademark on tunes like Ugly Tree, from 'Last Vsetige…'. Everybody's afraid of the future, but not that many people admit it, and we explore those themes."

The Brain has another theory about why Penpushers sound is so unique: "The reason our tunes sound like they do is that we are not really genre-conscious like other bands. We might record some airy-fairy guitar one day and something hard and dark the next, we just record what we want to, maybe drum and bass. A lot of hip-hop bands will be in the studio, someone will come up with a beat, and everyone will be like 'Oh that's not hip-hop, can't do that, that's too weird…' We don't do that, we just do whatever, and don't worry about genres. Stick us wherever."

I make the point that in Scotland, a lot of bands don't want to seem to want to categorise themselves as hip-hop – if anything, it is a term they try and avoid.

"We're not so much advertising ourselves as a non-genre band," The Brain corrects me. "It's just that we don't like to have descriptions applied to the music."

"As soon as you pigeonhole us, we're fucked," says Lifeboy. "Simple as that. Record stores have Genre X labels, and once they've stuck you in there, that's where you stay."

"A lot of people who comment on the album, some are really into it all, but some only like the heavier stuff," continues The Brain. "Some people just like the lighter stuff."

"No-one's in the same mood all the time," says Dr. Hands, which is a very good point. Penpushers are a band that demonstrate this pefctly. Tracks come from different lyrical perspectives – exploratory, dystopian, or with classical allusions; meanwhile the beats alternate between spliffed-out calm, euphoria, and creeping, electronic paranoia. Punpushers run the gamut of emotions – perhaps this is why they don't fit into hip-hop, which many rappers and music fans see as being about presenting a uniform 'front' or image. Penpushers refuse to conform to this cliché, even going so far as to eschew 'hip-hop' as a term for the music they make.

Although traditionally they have favoured the dark side over the light in their music, there is a lot more humour on 'Poltergeeks' than on previous albums: "We put a few skits on just to lighten it up," says The Brain. In a way, this describes my journalistic dilemma perfectly – how to make sense of a band who can come out with something as dark as Forever Miscellaneous & Misunderstood, or a line like: "There's profits to be made from selling other people's problems," (from Acropolis, on 'Last Vestige…'), and yet be light-hearted and self-deprecating in person.

"The funny thing is that if you know us, we're just a bunch of fucking idiots anyway," laughs Lifeboy. "In a way the skits are the more realistic things on the album. When The Brain and I are in the studio and it's late, then anything can happen."

"We use all our intelligence on the tunes and then we don't have any more left," agrees Brian, completely deadpan. "All the intelligence is on the record. The rest of the time we're a bunch of complete mongos who laugh and make things like Broken Man. That tune was just about ten of us back at mine, drunk at half six in the morning, microphone on the ceiling, just, you know… going about it."

For all their critical success, like many underground / indie artists, Penpushers all hold down gruelling jobs as well, serving the city as sound engineers, chefs, and other vital cogs in the machine. I ask about their dayjobs

"Or nightjobs!" replies The Brain, a sound engineer at Cabaret Voltaire. "We would all love to be making 20 grand a year each from doing the band, putting all our time into it. That would be amazing. I'm actually at work now. I ran away from work to do this interview!"

I put it to Lifeboy that Penpushers are one of the only bands around at the moment who actually sound 'Scottish' in a definable way – less so because of their accents, or any local namechecking; more because the moods and atmospheres they create are evocative of Scottish landscapes, particularly the less-explored realms of the Scottish cityscape. I ask if this is intentional – to capture a mood or a feeling that sums up your experience rather than 'keeping it real' by repping what street you grew up on, where you get pissed, or how many people you battered or shagged.

"That's what we are about," agrees Lifeboy emphatically. "We could go ahead and write that tune that all the B-Boys are going to like, and walk around with our jeans hanging off our arses and all of that shit, but for me it's not fulfilling. You have to dig a little bit deeper. We may not be the kind of band you could always dance to in a club: you could just stand there and just be like, 'Fucking hell that's a bit heavy…' We try and create more of a texture and a mood. The whole of 'Poltergeeks' is a mood, from beginning to end."

Lighteing the tone again, The Brain agrees that the Penpushers' sound is somewhat dictated by atmospheric conditions: "If we all moved to Hawaii we would make a soft rock album or a funky house album, I'd be singing…"

Despite their wish to avoid genre classification, scratching is still a major part of the Penpushers sound. I ask The Brain how this came to be: "Me and Hands Zharkov grew up scratching. We were both into old-school hip-hop, buying the old 12"s, we both used to play out and do a lot of turntablism, entered the DMC a few times. Although we're not as active on that side of things, it's still there, still part of the band, especially live. There are more cuts and more scratching in the live set. We just get carried away, and start cutting over the MCs, 'cos they're shite…"

Lifeboy and Obsolete refuse to take the bait on that one, so I return for one final time to the problematic question of Scottish hip-hop. "UK hip-hop is all London," says The Brain, echoing statements made by FBC, Braintax, New Flesh's Part 2, and many other so-called 'regional' MCs and producers. "That's where the business is, where the money is, where all the people are, and so the A&Rs just go around signing anyone who says 'Safe or 'Innit'. We get put in the hip-hop section, but we are not trying to make it as a hip-hop band. We're just… a band. We sell hardly any records in the UK, but we sell loads in Europe. In Germany you will not find us in the hip-hop section of the music store. We are in electronica, or leftfield, or rock & pop. Even rock & pop suits us better than hip-hop."

So which annoys you more, I ask tentatively. Being categorised as hip-hop artists yourselves, or Scottish hip-hop being ignored summarily, because it's not from London? "To be honest," says The Brain, "I don't think any of us really think about it. We don't pay it any attention."

"We use it as a formula," concedes Lifeboy. "That's what hip-hop is now to us, a production template. Occasionally we make a tune and we're like: 'Oh ya fucker, that's got a real hip-hop feel,' but I don't think we would have got this far if all our albums had sounded the same. I prefer artists who develop and experiment, rather than artists who think their audience are a bunch of fucking idiots who are going to buy the same old shit off of them year in, year out."

It's a good point, and well-made. Penpushers have managed the tricky task of vaulting the genre boundaries into Pure Art territory with aplomb, and 'Poltergeeks' is another fine testament to their hard-to-classify genius. Go buy a copy now, and give the Penpushers their due – they're far too good a band to be slept on in their home country. That isn't a guilt trip either – you will find their work stands up to the best the US and London has to offer. Their back catalogue is also on sale at the moment for a reduced price (reviews are available online at www.skinnymag.co.uk), so now is the time to redress the balance. You won't be disappointed, unless you're one of the "fucking idiots" Lifeboy is referring to – in which case, the 50 Cent albums are in the back. Go purchase.