Adventure Team is a multinational lo-fi indie rock three-piece with members from Germany, England and Argentina. Jonathan, Ian and Juan recorded their sophomore album, In Giraffe, which was out via Glasgow indie label Heavenly Creature Records on the 26th of April, over the course of three days in a remote farmhouse just north of Bordeaux. The band, initially brought together amidst Berlin’s underground DIY scene, tucked away in the middle of French countryside, recording a perfect package of intricate power pop fuzz. “There is one song that was written as a blatant Dinosaur Jr. rip-off…Sucker from Outer Space…as a reaction to getting constantly compared to them!” says Jonathan. In Giraffe is jangly and catchy, intricate and loud, made by a group of friends making music they love, in the middle of nowhere in France. The title, which is taken from the track Indigo, is a direct reference to Marshall Rosenberg’s theory that giraffes speak the language of empathetic connection. “A friend turned me on to Marshall around the time I was writing the record. It’s a plea for overcoming our differences with each other.”.

What They Say: “Juan and I came up with Spinning during the first time we ever played together, having just met each other shortly before. I’d just recently brought my four-track to our practice space and we were kind of just fooling around with some musical ideas while we were having a few beers. When it got time to record vocals, Juan famously scribbled his makeshift lyrics onto the side of an empty beer can with a sharpie. The finished song on the album doesn’t veer too far from the original version we put down on tape that night. Sometimes you get things right at the first try“.

“Winegum was originally inspired by a rather old comic by my Belgian illustrator friend Val Gallardo, featuring this strong girl character with superhuman capabilities and her best (girl-)friend’s adventures together. I think I was exploring these utopian ideas about relationships. Kind of ambiguous, somewhere on the spectrum between platonic and polyamorous, and queer in a post-gender kind-of-way. Love with a capital “L”. It’s a bit of an ode to secure attachment, kind of like The Neighbors by Jonathan Richman, somewhat of a counter-position to current singularising discourses among younger people about polyamory and probably relationships in general—relationships as fully commodified service transactions; no strings attached, no mutual trust. Musically, I think I originally wanted it to
sound like The Vaselines, which would have maybe fit the lyrics better in hindsight…“

“I started writing Indigo a good while back, when there were a lot of articles about
“the millennial generation” as a group, the same way we’re seeing them now about
“gen z”. Just older generations complaining about the young folks, basically, like
they have inevitably since the dawn of womankind. All those disparaging attributions somehow seemed like a negative image to our frequent being categorised as “slacker rock” at the time, while, as it’s actual reality for most members of our generation, we were all struggling to make ends meet in this capitalist-realist neolib hellscape. The third verse of the song features the lines “It’s time we bury the jackal, it’s time we speak giraffe”, which, long after the initial conception of the song, served as donors for the album title, referencing Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication approach. Despite the somewhat serious
initial inspiration, I feel there is a lot of humour and ironic distance in the lyrics. I hope the finished song conveys an air of desperate hopefulness and the overall happy-sounding music and the exuberant free-form freakout ending should serve as encouragement to follow your own calling while the world is collapsing around you and find naked joy in living. (Disclaimer: Unless someone’s dropping bombs on your head maybe or you’re homeless and starving… that shit needs to stop.) I’ve also been working on a video for the song, featuring a fresh-faced member of the just-emerging young generation who has become very dear to me over the last two years. Hopefully it’ll be ready for release sometime in October.“

“When I was a teenager, Nirvana were my initiation to more recent subcultural music. I started absorbing everything I could find about them through magazines, books, television, related artists and, a bit later, the internet. This way, I inevitably also learned about riot grrrl eventually and I remember poring over scans of old issues of Tobi Vail’s Jigsaw zine in my room in front of my CRT computer screen. I related to what I read there more than I did to most “boy’s” music and culture, having been an outcast among my own assumed gender from early childhood on.Riot grrrl already seemed very far away in the past back then, although the last Bikini Kill release had only come out maybe two or three years before. I feel like there was a really drastic cultural shift from 90s underground culture and its dubious mainstream accessibility to the subcultural void of the very early 2000s, especially for a teenager landlocked somewhere between the western hills in Germany. The lyrical narrative of Bummed Out is a bit of an idealised retelling of those days, through the eyes of a young, female protagonist, whom I christened Juliana, after Juliana Hatfield and her song Nirvana —a favourite of mine— in which discovering the band temporarily distracts her or the song’s protagonist from her previous suicidal ideation. My own young, isolated protagonist meanwhile finds hope for the future in her riot grrrl fandom and dreams of hitting it off and starting her own scene with “a wicked girl, just like [her] who’s always late for
school””

Their Mixtape:

The Cords – Bo’s New Haircut

The Cords are our Heavenly Creature label mates, the two young Scottish sisters Eva (guitar & vocals) and Grace (drums & vocals) Tedeschi, who just released their first, meanwhile sold out cassingle, the other month. We’ve yet to catch them live, but they came down to our show in Glasgow in June and we had a brief chat before our set. They were really lovely and we seem to share a lot of the same taste in music. They are featured on our mixtape as sort of late-born proponents of the C86 sound that we all love so much, as well as the more gentle side of riot grrrl, as exemplified by bands like Rose Melberg’s Tiger Trap or Tobi Vail’s Spider and the Webs.

The Pastels – Exploration Team

The alert reader may notice that the title Exploration Team bears a certain resemblance to the name of our band. Far from a coincidence, as The Pastels have been a major influence for me for about the past 15-odd years, musically and otherwise in ethos, as represented by their own loosely mutualist concept of Pastelism. I remember the exact day I was listening to Mobile Safari circa 2014 and Exploration Team came on, with its direct, affecting lyrics about friendship and sharing life; and the feeling of kinship and encouragement regarding my yet unfulfilled idea of what a band should be. The only reason we aren’t called Exploration Team is because I thought at the time that Adventure Team sounded a bit snappier.

Neil Young – Tonight’s The Night

“Bruce Berry was a working man, he used to love that Econoline […] […] […] van.” — On our way to recording In Giraffe in France, towards the end of our first day of driving, a few miles past the French border, as the sun was setting on our countryside road, we rolled down the windows and I put on Tonight’s The Night on the car stereo. We listened the whole record though and Ian and myself ended up having a glorious as well as hilarious, album-spanning sing-along session. That night was the night indeed.

Harry Nilsson – One

I recently got heavily into Harry Nilsson again, after an earlier, passing infatuation many years back. I could have easily chosen almost any song from Pandemonium Shadow Show, Aerial Ballet, Harry, Nilsson Schmilsson or Son of a Schmilsson, but ultimately, my choice fell on One. Not only because of the fact that One is a gorgeously written and rather remarkably arranged song, lyrically abstracting (or rather dissociating) from personal loss, in favour of philosophical musings on solipsism, but more so because Aimee Mann’s version of the song was featured on the soundtrack of P.T. Anderson’s 1999 drama Magnolia, which my partner and I must have watched at least 50 times; every day after school, in a former life as
disaffected teenagers.

Slipper – Miracles Love

I first met Rachel and Sean from Slipper when we played together with their Glasgow band Spinning Coin in Berlin. Their car had gotten towed thanks to some dodgy parking advice and I remember going around Neukölln and Kreuzberg in my old Xantia with the promoter, scanning the sidewalks for a life sign from them. Despite all the earlier commotion, the show miraculously went down well in the end and we wound up hanging out together after, at the temporarily vacant, rather posh flat they had been assigned for the night. A year or so later, when Rachel’s UK visa fell through and Sean and her relocated to Berlin, my partner and I
randomly bumped into the two of them outside Loophole (RIP) one night, shortly after which we started to hang out regularly. Slipper is their new-ish project, with whom they’ve however already put out three albums meanwhile. It’s the two of them and Jakub, who lives in Warsaw. Slipper played with us when we released In Giraffe a few months back and just the other week, when they put out their new album A Tiny Rose Made Out Of Clay, we returned the favour and played with them, alongside our mutual friends Matching Outfits, with whom they’re about to go on tour in Germany in September. Miracles Love is one of Sean’s songs and a rather contemplative one at that, I quite like its almost spiralling chord progression, which the 6/8-feel only accentuates further. When they played the song live at their release show, I joined Slipper on stage on lead guitar.

Big Star – Kanga Roo

Alex Chilton was off to a good start as a teenage superstar singing with The Box Tops, from there it all went downhill. That’s the common narrative, as with so many alleged “fallen heroes” and I hate it. It doesn’t hold up to the complexity of real life —your whole life can appear like shit to an outsider and even yourself but then suddenly there is that one singular day that’ll refuel your appetite for living, that itself can and most likely will appear like just another common day to anyone else from the outside. Daisies through concrete, living life joyously, with a bleeding heart, a mortal wound. That is not to say material conditions don’t matter, the opposite is true. I’m living life with a bleeding heart and Alex Chilton’s voice on “Kanga Roo” off their ill-fated but otherwise absolutely brilliant third album (titled either “Third” or “Sister Lovers”, depending on your copy) conveys precisely what it feels like to be
in love and suffering. All Big Star is worthy of your listening attention: I’m in total awe of the style, detail and gut-piercing sound of Alex’ guitar playing on their second album Radio City. Check out Chris Bell’s posthumously released solo album I Am The Cosmos, too. It’s really good.

Dinosaur Jr. – Just Like Heaven

We get compared to Dinosaur Jr. a lot. A while ago, I was on my way to my previous job working with disabled kids and young adults, riding my bike across the Tempelhofer Feld, when the first few lines and the melody to Sucker From Outer Space from our new album In Giraffe suddenly came to me out of nowhere. As I rode along, the rest of the words started to materialise, one phrase after another. Out of pure spite, I decided there and then to crawl into that pigeonhole all the way up until I’d touch the back wall and cook up a song as Dinosaur Jr-like as I possibly could. Which is total bullshit. You can write in character as much as you like but the finished song is always going to be just as personal and uniquely
yourself as anything else you may have written with a more confessional intent. It’s impossible to escape yourself. All three of us love Dinosaur Jr.; Juan’s partial to Green Mind while Ian’s and mine favourite album is You’re Living All Over Me. My only gripe lies with the frequent comparisons, it’s none of Lou, Murph or J’s fault. Lazy reviewers took their successful reunion as an opportunity to rewrite or streamline history and throw most of the rest of the post-hardcore US underground of the 80s and 90s under the bus. For every Dinosaur Jr., we need to remember 50 Team Dreschs. What I love most about Dinosaur Jr. is the intense vulnerability in J Mascis’ voice. What I like most about J Mascis’ guitar playing is the intense emotional expressiveness of (not only) his solos. Both those elements are evident in Dinosaur Jr.’s cover of The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, which acts as the closer of You’re Living All Over Me.

Stephen – Spins You Round

Stephen were a band that David Kilgour (famously of Flying Nun Records flagship band The Clean) started when The Clean had broken up sometime in the late 80s. Some of the jangly pop gems compiled on their only full-length release Radar Of Small Dogs, which was unearthed again and re-released on vinyl only a couple of years ago, are earlier, full-band versions of songs that would eventually end up on David Kilgour’s first solo album Here Come The Cars. I’ve been obsessed with Here Come The Cars and its follow-up Sugar Mouth since I first heard both records ages ago. In both records, I identified a way of making beautiful guitar-based pop music that I intuitively related to, totally unmolested by any contemporary fads and in total disregard of the notion that as artists, we should strive to be relevant except to ourselves. As Simon Frith said: “[S]uccessful pop music is music which
defines its own aesthetic standard.” It could be my false romantic idea and being fed up with city life, but it seems that one’s own aesthetic standards are defined more readily within communities that are relatively cast-off from the epicentres of the pop and art world rather than in our bleak modern capitalist-realist metropolises, with their unified modes of expression, directed by fashion and funding incentives. But I don’t want to be too negative—“out in the arid plane, we’ll share a modern love under suburban rain.” When Juan and I first met, it only took us a few minutes to figure out that we’re both obsessed with the same aforementioned David Kilgour records and we decided to give playing together a shot. Music still has that unique power of connecting people.

The Album:

“In hindsight, it’s crazy to think that Ian, Juan and I had only been playing together for a little over half a year at the time we recorded In Giraffe. Last year in May, we all drove down from Berlin to France in my car, to set up a bunch of gear in an old farmhouse roughly an hour north from Bordeaux. My good friend Jaike Stambach basically sent off his mum to visit relatives in the UK so we could make an album together at her place. We did a few test recordings on the night of our arrival, we then went on to track guitar, bass and drum parts for all songs together live over the course of the following two days. Another two days were spent recording instrumental overdubs and finally vocals, while Jaike simultaneously knocked up some first rough mixes as we went along. The next day we already started again on our two-day drive back home. Roughly a month later, when Jaike was visiting in Berlin, he came over to my place one afternoon and we went over the mixes in their then-current state together. By the end of June, Jaike was finishing mixing and we made an appointment with Peter Deimel at Blackbox to have the album mastered. Around that same time, my friend Jack Mellin (from Mary Column, L, Simone Antigone, Spinning Coin, Sacred Paws, Smack Wizards, …) passed me Dep Downey’s contact. I’d had a first brief but very cordial encounter with Dep in Glasgow at a Spinning Coin show a few years ago, just a few days before the pandemic broke out. Dep co-runs the famous Glasgow record shop Monorail Music, along with The Pastels’ Stephen McRobbie. I sent Dep a link to the just-
mastered In Giraffe and the story goes that he played the album in the shop just as his colleague Lauren Thompson was turning up for her shift. The way she told me about it, she walked straight up to Dep to ask him who it was that was playing, after having already shazamed the album on her way in just before. Moments later, I had a message from Lauren telling me that she would love to put out the album on her label Heavenly Creature Records.
Meanwhile, the album has been out for a handful of months and we’ve been playing around a bunch, most noteworthily in Scotland, back in June. More so than ever before, Adventure Team feels like a real band and I think all three of us enjoy spending time together as friends, also outside of playing together, as we often do. While we still got to play quite a few shows, we originally had much more ambitious plans for touring the album that, despite a lot of effort having been put in, sadly didn’t work out in the end. All three of us are dying to hit the road and I personally cannot wait to go back to Scotland too, we met an incredibly amount of fantastic people when we played there in June.” (Jonathan)

In Giraffe is out now on Heavenly Creatures Records. Look HERE for more information on Adventure Team.