An open mouth presides over Maximo Park’s fateful second album like some sort of capricious god, guiding the music according to its desires. Singing, talking, kissing, drinking; ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is a record riddled with what the band like to call ‘urges.’ ‘You’ve lived your life with your mouth wide open,’ fall Paul Smith’s lyrics to punctuate each energetic beat; just as the LP is peopled by appetitive beings, ‘open’ is also a word they like to describe their new sound. Stand by to be startled by a record that is achingly human and seething with sensation.

‘My favourite word?’ Paul wonders when we’re settled with drinks, ‘Vernacular.’ I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect example of the frontman’s love of language; better still, the intimate attachment he has to his Geordie accent. To understand a band whose roots remain firmly planted in their native soil – Paul treats me to a potted history of coal and ships as we first head for the waterfront - it is only fitting that we make the mission from London up to Newcastle. ‘This record was like the first time round,’ says guitarist Duncan Lloyd, ‘because we all live very closely, me and Tom used to live in a flat together, Lukas was downstairs, Paul down the road, Archis was around the corner...’ Maximo Park are a band for whom people, place and identity cohere meaningfully; lines like ‘Standing By The Monument, just waiting for the rain,’ ring with especial resonance in local ears. While ‘The lines of transport make their way through towns,’ in Paul’s lyrical imagination – the LP is alive with earthly activity – this Monday morning the trains are buggered. Quelle surprise! Keyboardist Lukas Wooller is travelling with us after a romantic weekend with his city dwelling girlfriend. His excitement diffuses our annoyance at each gloomy, penetrating announcement from the train company: ‘Electrelane have agreed to support us on our tour, I’m so pleased, we never thought they’d agree to it!’

We give up lurking about the departure boards to find a greasy spoon – no hard task in deepest Kings Cross. Lukas’ morning treat is a Danish pastry washed down with a cup of tea. We talk about his hot new haircut, free bars and football, but after listening to ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ on loop the previous night there’s only so long I can last; ‘Yeah, (‘Books From Boxes’) was one of those tunes that just worked. Once we played it the whole way through for the first time we were like, ‘We might just have something there!’ And indeed they do. Trademark Maximo melody, sliding chords and a sturdy drum section distil the poignant story of a lover’s departure – ‘scattered Polaroids and sprinkled words’ are the fragile remains of a relationship gone wrong. ‘We’ve all got someone to look after this Valentine’s Day,’ Paul smiles when we finally link up with the rest of the band at Newcastle station. ‘Not me!’ bassist Archis Tiku corrects, nodding at my estimation that he is ‘safe, sane and single.’ Not that the phrase could ever be applied to Maximo Park’s music, impassioned and unhinged as it is. Paul’s consistently personal lyrics transfer so well because of their fixation with human relationships. ‘You don’t have to deny your urge,’ is how he opens ‘Your Urge,’ a piano-led call to indulgence where intricate keys alternately collect desire and disappointment. ‘What are your urges?’ I have to ask. ‘Relationships,’ is his ready reply, which drummer Tom English simplifies as, ‘Just the people around you.’

And where there are people there is love, lust, loss and language. ‘You’ve been with me a year to the day / Three hundred and sixty, watching me decay,’ is how this spirited second album begins. ‘It’s the best way that I could think of opening the record,’ Paul asserts. ‘It felt like a statement...Let’s talk about time and you’re gonna listen to this record hopefully in its entirety or whatever, as a piece, we intend it to be as such. A story is hinted at.’ The record ricochets between pleasure and pain as it spins, just as the site of every song is either a flourishing or a fading relationship; for better or worse, ‘It’s kind of a celebration of us as human beings.’ But where does the balance lie here between love and lust? The question raises a collective belly laugh from the band – ‘Ah, well that’s the thing,’ explains the frontman, ‘There’s more active lust! There’s a love that’s been lost and a lust that unfortunately gets in the way...It’s not wrong to feel like that – I’m pretty sure that the majority of people have lusty thoughts!’ While ‘A Certain Trigger’ was the subject of Maximo Park’s first LP, here emotions are mapped onto specific entities: ‘the lock of hair that won’t sit still’; ‘the weight upon your kiss.’ Subject and object, self and other are all around locked in complex union. Equally, Paul’s lyrics embed themselves well within euphoric melodies and rousing rhythms; like Lukas states, ‘It’s the passion, that’s why we do what we do on stage, because they’re passionate songs and we’re a passionate band.’ Live, Paul twists and writhes with it, the microphone is his imaginary cane as he breaks into a dance. To his side Lukas almost convulses over his keyboard, while the others are all jiving to the same crazed beat. Tom agrees: ‘With some other bands, it’s just devoid of passion or it’s trying to be too knowing or...’ Paul picks up the drummer’s thread, ‘It’s not part of themselves like this music is us.’

By extension, the LP itself is like an incurable romantic, a scarred, hopeful, soldiering lover that just keeps coming back for more – chuckles meet Paul’s prophetic ‘The next night you’re back involved, the wolf is there!’ Unbridled desire certainly rumbles through the record, but ‘lusty’ moments are tempered by earnest attempts to make partnerships last. Therein lies another of Paul’s fetishes: language, both its potential and its impossibility as a tool to unite two people. Healthy relationships are awash with words – ‘Every night we’ve got so much to say,’ – while splintering occurs just as language falls away; ‘You have to leave, I appreciate that / But I hate it when conversation slips out of our grasp.’ Paul is a lyricist at once fascinated and frustrated by language; we have poignant poetry from a man who tells me that ‘words are as meaningless as anything else.’ The spoken word antics of ‘Acrobat’ on the first record here morph into fragments of speech and instructions to ‘communicate your needs’ and ‘prepare your vocabulary.’ Further, literary figures abound: the ‘chapter’ of a relationship, the ‘sheets’ lovers lie between or use to etch their yearning, the ‘paper trail’ that encodes a lifetime and links a couple, the books that bring people together – ‘We’ll meet in Russian literature,’ - the unread books that are evidence of romantic distraction, the books one of a pair packs away at the end of a liaison. (For your information, the last one Paul read was ‘Tender Is The Night,’ by F Scott Fitzgerald, and now he’s moving onto a copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ that he’s owned since he was 17.) And you can bet that all of this –‘It’s not a very linear narrative,’ - is collected in Paul’s iconic red leather book of lyrics. ‘That’s me unfortunately. I lost one of them in this very building and that was one of the traumas of our time!’ One comment from a fan on the Maximo Park website is ‘I live my life by your lyrics.’ Unperturbed, the band joke about turning this into a ‘social experiment – like eating McDonalds all of the time, let’s start it on hamsters first!’ Jokes aside, the very clarity of Paul’s vocal delivery – ‘It’s better,’ the singer assures me – make the lyrics centre-stage, but silence is vital, too.

‘It’s the gaps between words that really intrigue me,’ he insists on the album’s opening track; ‘It’s the gasps, and the sighs that say more / About what’s inside you.’ In the real world those gaps are given up to body language; in this recorded world it is of course music that serves for expression. As Paul explains, ‘On this record there are more spaces when I’m not singing. There are more spaces when a mood is created. I love the way that in the middle of ‘Karaoke Plays’ it goes down to these two guitars and you can hear this music just drifting off of the big chorus, ebbing away and you’re just left with this skeletal pattern on the guitar.’ It’s fitting that Paul uses a bodily metaphor; the bodies dominating this earthly album are sentient, hypersensitive, so that ‘an inkling in your pores’ is enough to manipulate fate. ‘Heavy’ and ‘raw’ are signifiers the band feel best approximate this new sound, a quality imported partly thanks to their producer here, Gil Norton, who is known for his work with The Pixies and Foo Fighters. Influence-wise, there’s an agreement among the band members that ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is something like the lovechild of The Smashing Pumpkins (for their muscular arrangements and dark, brooding melodies) and The Smiths (for that band’s frank and tortured lyrics). The piano is imbued with fresh significance: ‘It’s just pure,’ explains the nimble fingered Lukas, ‘If what you’re doing is from your urge, even if it’s just basic riffs, the piano gives it that richness. It’s a straight and natural acoustic instrument.’ A pure piano singing with undiluted emotion. ‘All of us in the band are looking to broaden our musical horizons,’ explains Paul, ‘we all wanted to do something different.’ Everything from a line in a song to a single guitar phrase has been built to ‘infiltrate people...stir them a little rather than have them blankly going through and consuming things.’ For Maximo Park, it seems like music is the one thing in life for us to cling to: the ultimate earthly pleasure. Music to crystallise unions that can get extinguished in the outside world, music to alleviate pain, music to speak when words fail, music to be savoured rather than swallowed like everything else, music to immortalise love.

And so it is that energised, uplifting music gets married to songs about suffering and feelings unrequited. According to Duncan, ‘We like different levels. Instead of having a very melancholy lyric let’s have a nice minor chord, a strong emotion with different music underneath it...Abstraction like that brings in new meanings.’ With the first LP Maximo Park, under the guidance of producer Paul Epworth, used more studio trickery to distinguish their sound - Tom remembers ‘putting mics in the air conditioning unit or in the yard’ – but this time the music is unadulterated, more human. Paul remembers worrying about their new producer, ‘Will he get the subtlety?’ This is a ‘subtlety’ that registers immediately within the senses; passion rules and the cerebral world of reason and language gets left behind. The singer goes on: ‘It’s kind of what Maximo Park is for...To get some energy out there and something that really shakes people up in a way, rather than just relying on words and some sort of downbeat mood.’ The energy pulsates between piano, guitar and drums, not only owing to their intricate parts but to their collective tempo.

However, gone is the insistent ‘fidget’ rhythm of ‘A Certain Trigger,’ what the band call the music’s ‘di di di di di’ or ‘catchier’ quality. Now, ‘It doesn’t feel like you have to put your foot on the pedal all of the time.’ On a record that takes ‘Our Earthly Pleasures,’ as its subject, time itself is of course a crucial theme in terms of style as well as substance. Faster rhythms and urgent arrangements abound because Maximo Park are dealing with transient lives and loves, feelings that are fleeting. Tom laughs, ‘We’ve been messing around with time, squeezing a lot into a small space of time and finishing it very quickly!’ Paul’s impression relates back to the concerns and pressures of his lyrical characters: ‘That’s the economy of our song writing, they don’t waste a second because time is precious, and it’s the same with each word.’ But the tempo does vary to act like the petulant will of a lover, urging a particular date to arrive – ‘In fortnight’s time / You will be mine,’ - lingering upon those brief, defining moments and even racing back to a rosier past; ‘I touched the place where your hair had been.’ Although Paul’s lifestyle advice is ‘Don’t try to accelerate and don’t try to reverse!’ the record moves along these contradictory lines; our natural instincts are uneven and our earthly pleasures can elude us – ‘The human heart is on offer for a limited spell.’

Conversely, Maximo Park have longevity. The tiny waterfront pub we’re sat in is the first venue they ever played several years back. Some other young hopefuls setting up their equipment for a gig later that night notice the local heroes and come over for handshakes. Before their second LP release, the Newcastle quintet are already planning a third album – ‘We’ve got plenty of albums to make, I think next time it’ll be a bit different.’ Lukas mentions the possibilities he’s been considering, with Paul concluding, ‘That’s the beauty of it really, we’ve all got ideas and they’ll all just click together.’ On a similar level, ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is a dynamic record, the sound of ‘two bodies in motion,’ and a mosaic of human feeling. The lovers in ‘Karaoke Plays,’ are typical, coming together and falling apart just how waves form and break; ‘The North Sea crashes through your dreams.’ Paul stands by his oft quoted remark that the band do ‘metaphysical pop’; ‘It tries to grasp subjects which are ungraspable. Because that’s what we do as people and that’s what this band is about – working something out that we can’t understand.’ Killer riffs, exquisite melodies and provocative lyrics aside, that’s the prime reason Maximo Park are so compelling as a band. They are a bunch of genuine, fallible blokes who are, like Paul says, ‘kind of out on a limb. There’s no real irony about what we do.’ In an age of cynical media manoeuvres and fad-fuelled recordings, we can look North Eastwards for a band who will always be real. With Maximo Park we can recognise the sound of our own rapture and misery, and according to the frontman, we ‘can go right, this guy isn’t messing around, this is what he sees.’ This is guitar music as catharsis; perplexing emotional states made ‘touchable,’ to use Paul’s word, so that we can move to them and move on. ‘I think there’s something to be said for dancing as much as there is for silence. They are obviously at other ends of the spectrum, but you can have a moment of elucidation that occurs within you at both of these points.’

Dance, romance, reflect, remember, communicate; ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is an impassioned call to live to the fullest, most bittersweet limit. Like the opening tune’s ‘Girls Who Play Guitars,’ – ‘We clearly get turned on by them, constantly!’ - Maximo Park’s message is that we need to be open to the world despite our fear or pain; we need to be alive with all of our imperfections intact. Whether or not you still need convincing about this twisted Earth we inhabit, as you experience the majesty of these twelve tracks, you’ll truly rejoice that ‘life is worth living.’ Viva Maximo!

WORDS: LUCY WILSON
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID RYLE