Midlake
Front man Tim Smith infuses Fleetwood Mac’s subtle grooves and Crosby, Stills and Nash’s harmonies with 19th-century simplicity
By Jim Keller
Published: August 28th, 2006 | 2:35pm
Tim Smith has a lot to share with the world, and his band, Midlake, may be just the thing to get people to turn off American Idol and turn up Rachmaninoff. The band’s sophomore album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, acts as a medley that takes listeners back to simpler times — where water was pumped from a well and nary a person had heard of television. With flute, bassoon, and keyboard melodies, Midlake escapes the customary guitar-bass-drum formula, which has garnered the band praise in the U.K. before attacking here at home. Though the band’s melodies and progressive nature recall Fleetwood Mac and it employs a multilayered approach similar to the Flaming Lips or Grandaddy, Midlake ultimately cultivates fresh ideas by employing a strong influence of refined poetry, art, and classical music.
“Lots of arts and crafts and a special community, it’s not so dead as some suburbs over here would be.” This is how Smith describes the small town of Denton, Texas, that Midlake has thrived in since the band’s inception in 2000. The town is home to two universities — the University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University. The former fosters a music program that draws students from all over the world and an art school where a lot of students pick up instruments to start bands, which consequently is where Midlake began in 2000. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Smith and his band molded something meaningful that appeals to the masses in this creative environment.
This year, the quintet got its break playing with the Flaming Lips, a band the members of Midlake adore, at SXSW. “[The Flaming Lips’] manager works at the company that worked on our album here in the States. They were gonna play SXSW and thought it would be nice if we played after them,” Smith said. “They went the whole nine yards: confetti, balloons, everything — we were a bit overwhelmed. You just had to laugh, because there’s no way to top that.” The band managed to win the crowd over despite the Lips’ prodigious performance; and during the festival, the two bands developed a camaraderie that culminated in Smith playing one of his songs with Lips’ front man Wayne Coyne. “One night it was 1 or 2 a.m., I was backstage fooling around on piano, and Wayne comes up and starts singing “Some of Them Were Superstitious,” from our first album. It was crazy.”
So what is it that makes Midlake so enticing? It could be the charm Smith exudes while he humbly answers questions or the way he mildly channels Radiohead’s Thom Yorke during a show, but my money is on Smith’s natural approach. “I guess I should be writing songs about what’s going on today, but I could care less. More of my world comes from the 19th century where there was more kindness, respect to others, and morals. I enjoy the sound of a flute over a German bass-beat.”
Smith painted 19th-century ideas all over The Trials of Van Occupanther and proved that simplicity can be both delightful and relaxing. “I take my cues from poetry, classical music, and art — those are the things that inspire me rather than the dumb TV-generation thing that’s going on. Everything is so Xtreme, it’s awful.” Nineteenth-century views and ideas, the new counterculture in the 20th century, who knew?
Issue #35
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