The Pirate Signal revamps lineup… again

One thing’s certain about The Pirate Signal’s MC-producer Yonnas Abraham: Dude doesn’t give up easily. After rebounding from a fiasco that involved rebuilding the act’s lineup and sacrificing an album, he’s rolling out the third lineup of his act following DJ A-What’s departure. Along with it comes a major stylistic change: New DJ/electronic tinkerer Matt “Soup” Campbell and multi-instrumentalist Chez Strong blur the lines between traditional hip-hop and a live band.

That’s not to say the band’s next album, the fittingly titled You’re Always Leaving Me, snuggles up against the memories of Limp Bizkit and those other rap’n’roll abortions of the late ’90s, however. “I have no ambition to be a rock-rap group,” Abraham laughs. “I don’t want that. Just because people have fouled that up in the past or there’s a nasty taste in people’s mouths because of what people did in the past, it doesn’t mean it’s not a cool opportunity. Drum machines and electronic sounds are fucking dope! Why would you want to exclude that?”

The new-look Pirate Signal won’t drop its debut until next year, though it plans to precede it with a handful of 7-inch singles. Until then, Abraham is working the kinks out of a new lineup and enjoying a clean slate and the more collaborative setting the new lineup brings to the table. He has, after all, learned how to reconfigure the Signal with the comings and goings of other members.

“Maybe I have a tendency to wear people out,” he says. “It’s not necessarily by design. That’s not necessarily the way I wanted it. It’s a weird context for a group. Up until now, even though there were other people, I was always songwriting by myself. There was always another artist or duo in the group who were helping me facilitate my ambitions as opposed to pollenating their own ambitions into it.”