NEIL FRANCES Honor '80s-'90s House Music and the Morning After on 'It's All a Bit Fuzzy' – American Songwriter
by June 8, 2024
Before the bleary-eyed and blurred night comes back into focus the morning after a rave-fueled night, NEIL FRANCES has already stepped in. The Los Angeles electronic duo knows that ecstatic, synth-drenched feeling too well and captures its decadent and forbidden haze on their second album It’s All a Bit Fuzzy.
See-sawing between propulsive and euphoric beats, NEIL FRANCES, made up of Southern California native Marc Gilfry and Australian-born Jordan Feller, shifts through every phase of an all-night dance party from the slinky groove of the title track and rhapsodic “Some Kind of Static” through the hyped “Energy,” featuring the Chicago R&B dance duo Drama. More comes to the surface throughout It’s All A Bit Fuzzy, which also pays homage to ‘80s and ’90s electronic house music.
Produced by the Feller and Gilfry, and following the duo’s 2022 debut There Is No NEIL FRANCES and EP Took A While from 2018, some of the circuitry of It’s All a Bit Fuzzy was also inspired by their performance at the Portola Music Festival in San Francisco in 2022. “We noticed that the tempos for songs were just getting faster and faster,” Feller tells American Songwriter. “The DJs were playing 135, 140 BPM (beats per minute) still-accessible house, techno stuff, and we thought ‘This is cool. We should try to do something at that tempo,’ because we’ve always had, apart from a couple of songs, this 120 BPM threshold.”
The influence of Portola is apparent on the funked-up “Gimme,” a hyper dance track cast from the movement of the pulsating crowd they witnessed at the festival. With “Gimme,” the duo wanted a song that would recreate that Portola energy each night, and it took them nearly a year to complete it.
“I ebbed and flowed on the tempo of this song over the course of 12 months with the production of the vocals and getting live drums,” adds Feller. “It’s always a varied scope. Sometimes they [songs] come fast. Sometimes they come slow.”
Feller adds, “There’s a lot of stuff going on and touches, and when we play it live, it’s one of the only songs that pretty much uses every single piece of equipment—except for a bass guitar.”
Peppered in It’s All A Bit Fuzzy are their handful of collaborators, including rapper PawPaw Rod, featured on the penultimate “High” and producer dreamcastmoe on “She’s Just That Type of Girl,” along with St. Panther, who joins NEIL FRANCES on the soulful ”Head Straight” and “Let’s Break It Down.” Everything dances around the slicker synth beats of “Standing My Ground,” another rewind to morning-after. “It’s like the tide going out,” said Gilfry of the track in a previous statement. “This beautiful, fantastical experience is suddenly brought down to the reality of what space you’re in and the people you’re with.” The rave comes to a close with the ’90s house-infused “Let’s Break It Down” and jazzed-up close of “Bye Bye Bye.”
Within eight years, the duo have come a long way toward It’s All a Bit Fuzzy. Both started working together in 2016 with the intent to produce other artists and after their demos gained some traction, along with their 2017 singles, including “Back to What I Know” and “Dumb Love,” they went fully in with Took A While and their debut four years later.
Strewn along their custom blur of R&B, funk, soul, hip-hop, and more within 10 tracks, It’s All a Bit Fuzzy was more of a free-for-all-produced rave with everything down to their distorted cover designed by artist Angela Bacher, which helped direct some of the lyrics.
“We reverse-engineered a couple of songs because we decided we wanted the album title to be ‘It’s All a Bit Fuzzy’ after seeing the artwork,” says Gilfry, who first stumbled upon Bacher’s work on Instagram. “I was just kind of captivated immediately,” shares Gilfry. “It was something visually unique that I hadn’t seen before. Then the idea of ‘It’s All a Bit Fuzzy’ came from looking at that art.”
Giflry adds “There’s something kind of cute, but also a little bit sinister about it. Being on drugs in the club can also be cute and sinister—and fuzzy.”
For Feller, writing hasn’t changed much from when he and Gilfry started eight years ago. “We’re always just trying to figure out a groove,” says Feller. “I think back then, there were always these happy accidents.” Their first single “Dumb Love” was one of those “accidents” and came out of a session between their bass player and Gilfry before NEIL FRANCES was ever official.
“Comparing songs to how we used to make them back in the day, either Marc has an idea or a skeleton on his computer, or I have one on mine and we come together—first take, best take, first vibe, best vibe. Then I put a microphone in front of Marc and we see what comes out and sprinkle the finishing touches as we go in the spaces.”
Giflry adds, “The first take is something we try to do every time because Jordan will come to me with a fairly fleshed out, nearly finished instrumental and ask me to sing on it. That first impression is really important, just flowing with the music as it’s unfolding in front of you. It does something unique in your brain, something you often can’t repeat, so we always try to capture that.”
It’s All a Bit Fuzzy is what the duo imagines as the perfect club scene. “It’s what we’d want any club atmosphere to have, an inviting, open, and fun experience,” says Gilfry. “It’s so important to have those places and moments in your life where you feel like you can let go and feel something real and not feel out of place or judged.” He laughs, “I guess that’s our ‘brand.’ That’s what we want people to feel at the shows.”
He continues “When we first started writing together, we said that we wanted to build a tent big enough for everyone. I think of music as a reason to come together and to unite more than divide, so that’s the goal.”
Now set to hit the festival circuit again in 2024, with performances at Coachella in April and Bonnaroo in June, along with a series of additional shows, Feller are Gilfry are also ready to make dents in the next NEIL FRANCES release.
“I’ve already got a big idea,” says Feller. “I’m inspired to go down the rabbit hole again.”
Photo: Victoria Smith / Courtesy of Falcon Publicity
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