Max Blansjaar was born in Amsterdam, raised in Oxford, and recorded this début album in Brooklyn. He appeared on the Oxford scene in 2018, promoting shows in all-ages venues and performing his playfully sincere lo-fi indie pop songs. Since then he has released two EPs of laptop recordings on Beanie Tapes and become a fixture of the local scene, packing out pub back rooms and festival tents.
For his first full-length album, Max wanted to work with a producer to expand his sonic horizons. The shortlist of dream collaborators was quickly narrowed down to one: Katie Von Schleicher, whose self-produced 2020 album ‘Consummation’ was on repeat on Max’s iPod. KVS had started producing other bands alongside Market’s Nate Mendelsohn, and they felt like the perfect combination to help make magic from Max’s elaborate and musically intricate demos.
Max spent two weeks in KVS’ home studio in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, working with Katie, Nate, and friends who dropped in to lay down bass and drums. In ten intense days, they captured ‘False Comforts’: ten songs that feel somehow grounded in Brooklyn, Oxford, Amsterdam, or somewhere in between.
“I started writing the first ’False Comforts’ songs in early 2020. It felt like a lot of talk happening around me was generational—the news covered generational challenges, my friends professed generational anxieties over Web 2.0, table service, and global crises they did not cause, I gave in and read Spotify’s apocalyptic “Who is Gen Z, Really?” report in the search for self-knowledge—yet I struggled to ever identify with that category, which always struck me as more of a buzzphrase than as a genuine connection. At the same time, I was at the threshold of what was, for me, a new world: just finishing school, between two states of being, all the freedom in the universe suddenly feeling somehow like less freedom that I’d ever had before. I felt the need to assert myself, to make music that reflected where I actually fit into the world of rituals and allegiances that was unfolding around me. Or, at least, that reflected the powerlessness of not knowing my place.
I challenged myself to get straightforward. Stop chasing complexity and Follow Your Nose! Amongst others, I owe a debt of gratitude to The Velvet Underground and to Elephant 6 for teaching me the power of the harmonically simple, to Beck and to Cate Le Bon for lyrical inspiration, and to a couple of experimental music groups I started playing with that got me to be bolder in my choice of sounds. It all made sense, finally, partway through our two weeks of recording the album. I came across Brad Liening’s poetry collection ‘Are You There, God? It’s Me, Whitney Houston’ at a bookshop in Dumbo one day (one of the last copies out there, he’s since told me), and when I opened it, there was the line: “some explanations / last forever and never / answer a thing.“ Yahtzee! There doesn’t always have to be a solution or a resolution; it can be rewarding, even necessary, to linger in a snapshot of a feeling for a while. In that sense, I knew these songs would be ‘False Comforts.‘ They wouldn’t fix anything, they wouldn’t give me answers, they wouldn’t help, they were pointless, unproductive hideouts, explanations lasting forever. And I found a strange comfort in them for that. Maybe someone else will, too.“ – Max Blansjaar
THOUGHTS WORDS ACTION 