Archive: a class of its own

Classified in their early days with English trip hop, Archive keeps on going through a series of transformations, defying musical categorisation. With the addition of rock elements and electronic beats, the London group’s recent With Us Until You’re Dead confirms once more that Archive is in a class of its own.

In the 1990s Great Britain experienced an unprecedented upheaval, the epicentre of which was located around Bristol, where the likes of Massive Attack and Portishead brought the tremors of a new genre to the ears of the world: trip hop. A genre that involved a constant toing and froing between dub, rock, soul, and electro, against a background of wicked, intoxicating hip-hop rhythms. Archive, who were also leading lights of this mutating movement, soon came to be seen as “instable” as, behind their mellow, hybrid orchestrated sound, the band kept regularly tearing itself apart. There were constant changes of personnel. Different singers took turns at the mike. Some saw it as a kind of
habit, others as a veritable trade mark.

For Darius Keeler, founder member and the project’s principal composer, “Archive was never a group; it was more of a collective dedicated to music. The voices change, but the frame of mind and the feeling stay. We don’t operate with guests, like Massive Attack does. With us, the singers, male and female, are integrated into the project and take part in its implementation. Changing singer doesn’t necessarily mean reinventing yourself. I see it more as a progression.” Or the shortest way towards progressive rock? “Pigeonholing a group and trying to put it into a slot is always dangerous,” says Pollard Berrier, guitarist, programmer, and kingpin of Archive since 2004. “Lots of journalists were in a hurry to apply the trip-hop and progressive-rock labels to us. I can’t understand that urge to classify things systematically. Especially when we have always preferred an eclectic approach and experimentation to a particular style.” It has to be admitted that Archive has always skilfully threaded its way between genres. On its latest album, the British outfit combines silky arrangements, electronic idioms, and electric strings in a powerful whirlwind with four voices, two female and two male.

Chaos theory
This time, Archive has set out to celebrate love. With them, however, this romantic purpose immediately takes a dramatic turn, with all the new numbers dealing with heartbreak (e.g. “Conflict”, “Violently”, and “Damage”). “Singing ‘All You Need Is Love’ is not really our style,” says Berrier with a laugh. “We deal more with factors that are an inseparable part of a relationship, sometimes things that are difficult to handle. You can’t reduce love to something that is all beautiful, all rosy. We’re not living in Toytown. Loving someone necessarily involves contradictory emotions.” This conception, intense and serious, is reflected in the album title, which contains the ideas of both love and death. “With us until you’re dead is also a way of looking at the repercussions of our actions over time. I think that’s beyond our control. The consequences of an act committed at one moment of our lives go far beyond our time in the world. That’s a rather personal way of looking at the title,” Berrier stresses. “To my mind, that’s what makes it an interesting title: it is open to various interpretations.” A bit like Archive itself, a band that is hard to pin down and a project with multiple aspects to it. One to watch with curiosity and fascination.

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