MIlo’s Planes | Full Interview

Bedroom recording was the easiest and cheapest option… that way we were able to bang out EPs every few months and could afford to give them away for free.

Brotherly two-piece turned power three-piece, Milo’s Planes, have a humble ethos and an even humbler online following — but their jam (and body) packed live shows are something to behold. I chat with these scrappy post-hardcore boys as their debut album hits the streets.

So ‘Aural Palate Cleaning Exercises’ is out this month, d’you want to fill everyone in on the name?

We do! The name’s lifted from the sample heard at the beginning of the album. We took the audio from Richard Pitt’s BBC Introducing show; it’s him talking about one of our songs — we really liked that phrase he used. Seeing as there are quite a few little radio samples dotted across the album we knew we wanted to use one of them in the title, and ‘Aural Palate Cleaning Exercises’ just seemed to work best.

You’ve had some good support from BBC introducing then? Are they and BCFM cool with you using the soundbites?

Yeah they’ve played a few of our tracks now, which is super boomba of them! Hm, yeah we hope they’re ok with us using the samples; it’s too late now if they’re not! [Laughs] No, in all seriousness we did message them to let them know, so hopefully they’re not going to come back at us with some major court action once this goes multi-mega-platinum!

It’s impressive that the whole process is run out of a bedroom, what drew you to working that way?

Well Harry and I [Joe] have always just recorded stuff ourselves in bedrooms. Drums through one mic, four tracks, etc; loads of rowdy garage stuff mainly. So when Milo’s Planes started, the two of us were practising at home and getting through a stupid amount of songs. Going for bedroom recording was the easiest and cheapest option, as that way we were able to bang out EPs every few months and could afford to give them away for free. The main challenge was finding a time when the house was empty enough to record the vocal tracks! I remember driving home from work on my lunch hour to record a song and then rushing back with no voice left. Other than that we love the process; we like the control & lack of time constraints. I always have a project on the go on my sixteen-track so to me it’s natural to be super busy with music. I don’t think it’s necessarily defining our sound though — the recordings are just the best we can do with the equipment we have; we’re not consciously trying to make ourselves sound lo-fi.

People hear a lot in you guys; garage, noise rock, all the way up to post-hardcore and guitar-lines that tease at early emo. How do you guys see it all?

We’re certainly big fans of all those things and there are elements from each in our music for sure… Not certain how we’d label ourselves genre-wise, that’s a tedious thing to do, but we’ve kind of gone from a garage or trashy punk thing to a more melodic post-hardcore-influenced thing. Among thousands of bands our three biggest influences are Wire, Fugazi & Lync.

We’ve kind of gone from a garage or trashy punk thing to a more melodic post-hardcore-influenced thing.

You went from brotherly two-piece to power three-piece last year, what brought that on?

Initially to fulfil our live shows, as on recordings, including the album, Joe was putting bass parts down and we weren’t able to replicate this live. But once Charlie started playing with us, the sound just instantly improved and enabled us to do a lot more musically.

A comic comes out with the album, who put that together?

[Laughing] Sort of! Joe asked his girlfriend, Rhianna [Me, You & Thomas] to draw us a silly little comic book so that we had something cool to send out with demos last year. We’d hoped to eventually print up a full comic and include it with the album, however it turns out we can’t actually afford to do stuff like that! So it can now be found in the liner notes on the album and is also free to view online.

Having gotten a full album under your belts this early on, I daren’t think what you’ve got in the pipeline for the rest of 2015?

We’re just about to go into an actual studio — not a bedroom — to record an EP and second album actually. Hopefully the EP will be out by the end of 2015; who knows when the second album will eventually surface. This first one was recorded in 2013 and we’re only just getting around to releasing it! Until then you can grab our debut online — we sincerely hope you enjoy it!

‘Aural Palate Cleaning Exercises’ is available on CD via Bandcamp now, along with some bonus goodies. Join Milo’s Planes in celebrating their first full-length on 3rd April at The Louisiana, with The Plainviews and more in tow.

Check out ‘Two Feet In A Crowd’ right here: