My Latest Novel interview: Rewrite stuff

And My Latest Novel are far from your average indie band. They first popped their heads above the parapets with their delightfully strange debut album, Wolves, in 2006. Released on Bella Union, the well-respected indie label run by former Cocteau Twins members Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie, the album was a brash and complex affair, mixing sprawling indie noise with folk tendencies, throwing violin, xylophones and oddball percussion into the usual guitar-bass-drums equation with an abandon that was impressive, even if their obvious potential remained a little unfulfilled.

Most noticeable about the racket they made were the vocals. Not only were they lacing four-part harmonies together, they were also tripping the ear up with overlapping melodies and vocal lines, and everyone was singing in an unabashed Scottish brogue, something still relatively unusual at the time.

Favourable comparisons were made with the leftfield epic rock of Canada's Arcade Fire, and rightly so, although My Latest Novel had enough of their own personality to ensure that their sound is utterly distinctive.

Since Wolves came out, a whole raft of similar-sounding bands have emerged on the Scottish indie scene, from Frightened Rabbit to the ramshackle folk-pop of Edinburgh's Broken Records, and from the flights of Beefheartian fantasy of The Phantom Band to the rampaging noise of The Twilight Sad. (You could, if you wanted to, call it a movement – see below). My Latest Novel, though, don't hold much truck with comparisons between themselves and their contemporaries.

"It's really hard to see similarities between your own band and someone else's," says violinist and vocalist Laura McFarlane.

"Just because we've got this perception of what we are, which is probably nothing like what anybody else thinks."

"The only thing we all have in common is singing in Scottish accents," says singer and bassist Chris Deveney. "Loads of bands recently have embraced the way they naturally sound – nobody's hiding behind an American accent anymore, and that can only be a good thing."

We're sitting in Mono in Glasgow with McFarlane, Deveney and his brother Gary, who also sings and plays guitar, the band line-up being completed by Ryan King (drums) and Paul McGeachy (vocals and guitar). The three band members present are visibly excited.

After a three-year absence, they're set to release their second album, Deaths and Entrances, and they have good reason to be enthusiastic about it. The new album is a big step up in ambition, musicianship and songwriting compared to Wolves, a more cohesive piece of music and an altogether bigger, fuller-sounding beast.

Much of that coherency, the band say, is down to the way the new songs were written. Secreted away for almost two years in a crumbling derelict pub in Greenock with no windows and a hole in the roof, My Latest Novel started again from scratch, completely reinventing how they went about things.

"We did it a weird way," says Chris. "We never just wrote one song, finished it and moved onto the next one, we actually wrote 11 or 12 songs at the same time, dipping into each one as we went along." "Because of that process, it would be hard for the new album to sound like just a disjointed collection of songs," agrees Laura.

"When we got the band together, the first thing we wanted to do was play a gig quickly, so we wrote the songs on Wolves in order to play live," says Gary. "This time round we had to write an album for a record label, and there are external factors, people looking in, there's a bit more pressure. The only way we could deal with that was to take time away, retreat within ourselves. If we'd followed up Wolves quickly, I don't think it would've worked at all."

"Sometimes we'd forget about the fact that we were even in a band," admits Chris. "We'd go to the room and we'd end up just talking about the songs, rather than even picking up our instruments, just spend three or four hours talking about a song, then go home. It was hard because for a long period of time, as we were collecting these songs, we were sitting on them and getting really excited, but we still didn't have an end product, just the ideas in our head."

From the title onwards, Deaths and Entrances is peppered with literary references. The title is borrowed from a Dylan Thomas poem, while there are songs that obliquely tap into books such as Alasdair Gray's Lanark , Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The band are reluctant to talk too much about this in an interview. "Even though there are a lot of literary references in this album, I kind of regard it as a far more personal album than the first one," says Chris. "I think there's a lot more of us in this record than the first album. We certainly spoke about the lyrics a lot more this time round."

"That was a big difference," says Laura. "We did spend a lot of time speaking about different lyrical ideas, agreeing or disagreeing before finally getting on with the song."

Unlike pretty much any other band you could name, all five members of My Latest Novel contribute equally to the songwriting process. "I actually find it quite weird that other people find it weird that all five of us write songs," Chris says, laughing.

"The fact that all five of us are creative and write songs is great," says Gary. "We're always pushing each other, pushing ourselves. Obviously you get a real buzz from playing live, but the five of us get an equally huge buzz from tidying up a chorus or getting the harmonies right in a song, it feels amazing."

The second album was eventually recorded in Chem 19, the studio run by the Chemikal Underground label, which just about everyone who's anyone in Scottish indie has visited at one time or another. Although admitting they love plenty of the other Scottish bands just now, My Latest Novel have always been keen to stand apart from the crowd. "We're probably really far removed from any scene," says Gary. "I mean, practising in Greenock is not part of a scene, is it?"

"None of us lives in Glasgow, so we're not really part of anything," says Laura.

"We do tend to ostracise ourselves a wee bit," chips in Chris.

"And I think we did that on purpose with this album," says Laura. "When we brought out the first album we were pigeonholed into that Glasgow scene thing. We didn't like that and strived pretty hard to get out of it."

Scene or no scene, My Latest Novel have created an album of intensity and vision, something that taps into decades of Scottish musical history but sounds remarkably original at the same time. You can tell by listening to Deaths and Entrances that they are obsessed about what they do, and determined to do it right at all costs.

"If we didn't have the band, I don't know what I'd do with my time," says Gary with a slightly scared laugh. "There would be a massive hole in our lives, we're constantly thinking about the band, all the time. It's the first thing I think about when I get up in the morning and the last thing I think about when I go to bed."

"I think we are a wee bit obsessive but that's a good thing," agrees Chris.

"You have to care," says Laura, finally. "If we didn't care about it, how could we expect anyone else to?"

• Deaths and Entrances is released on Monday on Bella Union.

On fire, inspired and at a venue near you

Like Radiohead's Ok Computer in the 1990s, Funeral, the 2004 debut album by Canada's Arcade Fire, has become something of a blueprint for ambition and seriousness of purpose in guitar pop in recent years.

An album that felt both epic and deeply personal, it tackled the biggest subject of them all, death, in a way that was not only life-affirming but somehow – thanks to frontman Win Butler's passionate singing, and his band's furious musicianship and rousing backing vocals – thrilling.

Literate and richly atmospheric, Funeral was also – with its simple, memorable tunes – unashamedly populist. Its mass singalongs were as at home soundtracking TV football footage as they were blaring out of students' bedroom speakers. No wonder U2 were conspicuously supportive, asking the band to support them on tour.

As influential as Funeral has been, no-one has quite managed to match it, even Arcade Fire themselves. Recently, though, an odd thing has happened. In Scotland there is a whole wave of bands whose epic aspirations and musical versatility have seen them dubbed "the Scottish Arcade Fire" – chief among them My Latest Novel, Broken Records, the Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit.

Three of these bands are releasing new albums in the next few months. The two I've heard – My Latest Novel's Deaths and Entrances, out on Monday, and Broken Records' Until the Earth Begins to Part, out in June – are both worthy successors to Funeral. The Twilight Sad's second album, due soon afterwards, could set the bar even higher, if the band's extraordinary debut album, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, is any indication.

It makes some sense that this would happen in Scotland, since Arcade Fire's sound, like that of so many Scottish bands, is rooted as much in folk as in the widescreen rock of Radiohead or U2. Arcade Fire's sound is shaped by instruments from strings to xylophones, accordions, mandolins and harps as much as guitars. Similarly, mandolins, accordions and string and brass arrangements are vital to My Latest Novel and Broken Records (both of their new albums begin in much the same way, with a wash of guitar effects followed by violins). There is also a long tradition of dark, atmospheric Scottish rock, from Mogwai to the Delgados.

The chances are, of course, that none of this new wave of bands will be very pleased that a music writer is not only lumping them together, but implying that they are following in the footsteps of another band entirely. Fair enough. All of the bands above have their own distinct identity. Broken Records are more upbeat than the morose, world-weary My Latest Novel. And the Twilight Sad certainly don't share Arcade Fire's folk sensibilities, the similiarities lying more in their melodies and dark lyrics – which, like the Arcade Fire's, deal with family, but in a way that is far more disturbing, hinting at child abuse.

Nevertheless, there is a noticeable pattern emerging in much of the rock music being made in Scotland at the moment. There is a wave of serious young people making broadly similar music that is lyrically introspective and bookish (Broken Records' album includes a song named after Eilert Lovborg, a character in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler; My Latest Novel's album was inspired by Alasdair Gray's Lanark) but also outward-looking – populist, rousing, often thrilling.

Why? Perhaps because we in the West live in increasingly anxious times, our whole way of life threatened by climate change and, more immediately, recession and terrorism. Perhaps we need music that reflects this – music that acknowledges the darkness but offers hope, that inspires you both to feel bigger and think bigger, to feel less small in the face of a frightening world.

Then again, if you believe the London media, 2009 is the year of shiny synthpop (Little Boots, La Roux et al), so perhaps it's just a case of Scots being grumpy and contrary. Either way, all of these bands deserve your attention.

ANDREW EATON