Denton, Texas group Midlake have returned with an album that takes the band in a completely different direction – while they’re previous record Banman and Cork was good, The Trials of Van Occupanther this one takes Midlake to another level, and adjusts their sound just so. It draws the best out of the band, from the Fleetwood Mac-like pop of “Roscoe” to the powerful emotions of “Young Bride”

“It’s quite a bit different,” agrees frontman Tim Smith. “We just started listening to different kinds of music, and that will do it,” he says of the change in the band’s sound. Described as deliberately accidental, Midlake discovered the sound of The Trials of Van Occupanther after completing the group’s first album, and he found his taste in music altering, as he gravitated towards the music of the 1970s. “I got into Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell, and Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull,” he confirms. “I started collecting all these albums that I hadn’t checked out before. I brought the records around to the other guys and they started to love the music as well and it just came out in the songwriting. That was the first step, and I wasn’t striving to do any copying but it came out because that’s what I was listening to; we didn’t sit around and say we wanted to have a `70s throwback sound.”

In some respects, it’s quite a thematic release, detailing the trials and tribulations of a small town. Album opener “Roscoe” immediately sets it in 1891, while “Van Occupanther” details the life of the town’s scientist, who is made fun of by the townsfolk and stays by himself. “That was all there was to his story, and that particular song. The others songs were characters, and other people, so in that was it wasn’t like it was a concept all about Van Occupanther.”

The stories of the characters and the music itself came together almost simultaneously, Smith explains. “I might start out with a lyric, like the first line of a song like “Stonecutters made them…” and it just sort of grew from there,” he says, using the opening line of the album as an example. “When I start songs I try to have some kind of point with songs, but I wasn’t really sure with “Roscoe” and I just sort of let it be what it’s going to be, and when I find out at the end it’s along the same lines as the rest of the songs in that kind of escapism.”

Other songwriting experiments included Smith messing around on the piano, discovering ‘something nice’, and framing lyrics over it, trying to come up with a nice little line that says something, and that can cast a scene. “I do try to write from images in my head – each is a snapshot, and I don’t have a complete story in my head but I do have a picture to go by.”

A song like “Young Bride” can also seem instensely personal, but he says defining how much of The Trials of Van Occupanther relates back to real life and how much relates to the characters is hard to say. “I don’t think very much of the songs happened to me in that way,” he comments, “but the emotions in the characters come through in the stories, and there’s emotions in trying to move people and I can identify with the messages, and the escapism, and wanting to get away from the world.”

In total, Midlake spent around a year recording The Trials of Van Occupanther. Some of the songs were written in the midst of this – “Roscoe” for instance, which came together after five songs had already been recorded – and it ended up being quite a gruelling circumstance, with the band doing it all themselves. “We all had day jobs and we’d come home, have dinner with the wife, and then go to the Midlake house and record at night and do it again every day,” he says. “We didn’t have an engineer telling us how to get a good recorded sound, and we’re not that experienced at it. It was a real learning process to learn how to hear the sonic spectrum. We’d record everything and if it just didn’t feel right by the end of it and being perfectionists we wanted to get it right, and it took a long time.”

In some ways, the experience sounds like it bears some resemblance to that of Bob Dylan and the Band at Big Pink – set up, let it roll, and see what happens. “It may sound more glamorous than it actually was!” Smith exclaims. “I’m always intrigued by that sort of thing, experimenting and loving the music, and we believed in it and knew it could be good but it’s very tough. We’re not the sort of band who plays everything first – we get in there and everybody knows what we’re doing just based off the little four-track version I’ve done myself, and then we start recording drums, a scratch bass pass, and then the piano. We were doing a lot of overdubbing.”

Ultimately, he sees the experience of recording the next album as not being too far different to that of The Trials of Van Occupanther. “We recorded the first two albums at the Midlake house where we all used to live, and since then three of us have got married and moved. My wife and I just moved back into Denton and got a house for cheap, and I think it’s going to be suitable for recording – higher ceilings, and nice wood floors, and a good recording atmosphere.”

It sounds like the perfect place to make another acoustically-based record, following in similar steps to The Trials of Van Occupanther, utilising a strong organic brew from which to build, much as the group did in the expansion of their sound from debut to sophomore effort. “We went into Van Occupanther thinking it would be a warmer-sounding recording, and I think we knew from the first two songs I had written – “We Gathered in the Spring” and “Chasing After Deer”. We were planning on using more keyboards, and we had programs that we’d worked on, but we’d lay down drums, bass, piano and acoustic guitar and every time we’d go to the keyboards it just wouldn’t feel right, and it would make it sound colder. So by necessity we decided against a less keyboard-orientated thing.”

Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther is out now, with the band touring for the Meredith Music Festival in December. Solo dates are expected / demanded.