It isn’t hard to grasp the concept behind El Ten Eleven’s new Adam Hauck-directed video for “The Sycophants Are Coming! The Sycophants Are Coming!” — after a few years of slogging through the surf, the Los Angeles duo is finally and justifiably making waves with their fourth album “It’s Still Like a Secret.”
“Things have been going really well — we had some sold-out shows on the last tour,” says Kristian Dunn, who masterminds the twosome’s instrumental post-rock with Tim Fogarty. “We’re still small, but we’re starting to get bigger, and it feels like we’re coming out of the morass and reaching the top of the hill.”
- ||| Download: “Indian Winter”
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The follow-up to 2008′s very good “These Promises Are Being Videotaped,” the new album refines the duo’s propulsive compositions — El Ten Eleven’s lyric-less excursions can be background music if you want, but Dunn’s guitar, carried as it is by Fogarty’s rhythms, speaks a language of its own. Besides, there are the whimsical song titles: “Tomorrow Is an Excuse for Today,” “Ian Mackaye Was Right” and “Marriage Is the New Going Steady” among them.
It’s cinematic music that isn’t necessarily visually inspired, Dunn says: “You’d think that’s the way my mind works, but to me that’s kind of a cart before the horse thing. Most of the time there’s no intention for our music to be a soundtrack for anything. The songs are usually about somebody or something, or they just come out when Tim and I are jamming in a room.”
Will El Ten Eleven ever make music with vocals? “We’re open to it,” Dunn says. “No one ever seems to have the guts to do it.”
||| Stream: “It’s Still Like a Secret” at the duo’s Bandcamp page.
||| Previously: “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They’re Cool,” off 2008′s “These Promises Are Being Videotaped.”
||| Live: El Ten Eleven is scheduled to play an in-store at Origami Vinyl on Monday to celebrate the vinyl release of their album.
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