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The Xcerts - Making The Jump

The Xcerts - that bright, poppy band who like choruses, right? Wrong: new album 'Scatterbrain' is a dark masterpiece, so read on to find out how they're being helped by vampires...

It’s not an overstatement to say that, in this modern age, bands can live or die on the strength of their online support. Good thing, then, that The Xcerts have had some help from the undead…

“We’ve had Twilight fan clubs tweeting about our single!” says drummer Tom Heron, talking to Rock Sound in London. “If you type ‘The Xcerts’ into Twitter you can scroll pages and pages of retweets about us.”
I Scare Easy by The Xcerts
Capturing the hearts of a million tweeters in a few seconds is the easy part; going from wide-eyed upstarts to genuine UK rock contenders – that’s the tricky bit, especially considering their second full-length ‘Scatterbrain’ is ready to go just a year after their debut ‘In The Cold Wind We Smile’.

It’s a work rate other bands might not have been able to keep up with when faced with the huge amount of touring they did throughout 09. However, for these guys, the band really is all they’ve got.

“I think [releasing] yearly is pretty standard for a band like us,” says bassist Jordan Smith. “What else would we do, you know?”

“You have to keep the momentum going,” singer and guitarist Murray Macleod adds. “We had a couple of months off, but it worked out that personally we had things to write about that just slotted into the time we recorded. It worked out perfectly.”

While the ‘darker second album’ tag is hardly revolutionary, the things Macleod had to write about weren’t quite so commonplace: ‘Scatterbrain’’s subject matter is simultaneously ambiguous, sinister, haunting and angry – generally speaking, it’s a bit of a headfuck.

“The record’s loosely based around these two days that I experienced,” he muses cryptically. “We’ve lived a pretty strange way of living for young guys in a band – we’re in a bubble. So as soon as something bad happens outside that bubble it’s like, ‘What?!’” he says.

This is an excerpt from an article in Rock Sound issue 141. To read the rest of the article buy the magazine now from WHSmith and all good newsagents, or click here to buy it online from our eBay store.

Amy Bangs