The Cassettes

Steampunk probably isn't something that you'd normally attribute a musical style to: the phrase is more regularly associated with a style of science fiction mixing Victorian-era settings with futuristic technological elements. Those bands who have put a claim on the label in the past have tended to be influenced heavily by gothic or industrial music.

Washington DC based band The Cassettes have a very different take on the label, fusing country and blues with vaudevillian aesthetics. It's a product of the fact that their interpretation of steampunk tends to be more focused on the ideals of the genre, explains guitarist and vocalist Shelby Cinca. "We agree with some of the ideas of steampunk, which I connect with the Slow City Movement - slower, homemade things," he says. "It has a very DIY thing to it. I feel like it also has a connection to roots music, but at the same time I never felt that we were country enough to be Americana: there's no guys sitting on the train tracks, drinking cheap beer. Since we're from DC, and there's the whole punk scene here which is very close to our hearts, it just felt like we were more steampunk than alt-country or anything else that people might put us in. I guess the punk could be a turn-off of a term, though, but coming from DC, I just always see punk more in terms of Fugazi, and doing it yourself. It's not a genre, it's more a way of doing something."

The decision to place a focus on the band's aesthetics came about suddenly, while the group was preparing to support British Sea Power, although Cinca has been working as a graphic designer for some years. "We thought, 'we shouldn't just be in jeans and t-shirts - we should be doing something more, cause what we're trying to do is make escapist adventure music'," Cinca recalls. "So when we opened for them, we decided we would dress up and focus our set and build it in a certain manner, so at that moment we realised what we were going to do and everyone's role became more clear."

That's a theme that Cinca tends to return to a number of times. The band has grown from a project he started "to experiment" musically, into an entirely collaborative four piece, something that Cinca says is far more obvious on their newly recorded third album than it is on previous releases. It's also "darker" and has "a couple of instrumentals that sound almost like Goblin, the Italian band." That's a good thing, incidentally.

As it happens, however, we've only just received their second album - ''Neath The Pale Moon' - down here in Australia. "I guess that's how it works, in the music world anyway!" Cinca grins. "Things get licensed, and it takes time for things to come out, but that's okay. The only really weird thing might be if we play down there we might have to play some more of the ''Neath The Pale Moon' stuff, when we've been playing a lot of newer material."

It's been going down well, he adds, though they're returning to their earlier output for a gig coming up in the next few weeks. "We've - oddly enough - got a show that we're doing for NASA, for Yuri Gagarin's anniversary as the first man in space. They wrote us out of the blue and said they're big Cassettes fans, so we're doing the Yuri party in April at the Space Flight Centre in Maryland. Totally great, but very weird! I think we might have to play longer, and we'll probably do some older stuff - we have a song called Past The Sun which we put out on a split 7", so that kinda fits with the whole space theme. The woman there is going to give us access to their video archives, so we're going to use some of their footage in our projections, because we've been doing a lot of that lately."

In fact, the band has been working with film so much lately that they have their own projectionist, a sign that their stage show is getting more and more "grandiose".

"If we had the budget," Cinca muses excitedly, "who knows! We'd have an actual hot air balloon behind us or something. I actually wanted masts, but maybe I shouldn't say that. Arcade Fire or someone who has the money will take the idea. I just really want ship masts on either side of the stage - big old masts."

"We'll see," he adds with a laugh. "Maybe in Australia. Maybe the record will get big enough that we can afford masts."

Alistair Wallis

''Neath The Pale Moon' is out now on Rogue Records through Inertia.