On Repeat His And Her Vanities Lunge away from quirky new-wave

An old press photo of His And Her Vanities shows the Madison band leaping into the air, arms flailing, faces grinning, and bassist Terrin Riemer and drummer Sara Quigle sporting obvious wigs. That matched up well with the Devo-inspired spazz-outs Riemer and husband Ricky crafted before recording the band's self-titled first album. But in the five years since 2004's A Thought Process came out, HHV has laid pretty low. Between gradual spurts of writing and the occasional show, the Riemers have been busy raising their kids and building up their Science Of Sound label (which has released albums by younger local bands like Sleeping In The Aviary and Pale Young Gentlemen) and a recording studio on their basement. They're not even headlining the CD-release show this Saturday at The Frequency for their new third album, The Mighty Lunge. What Lunge gives up in noisy guitar and synth squiggles, it replaces with sympathy and urgency. The second track, "Wait It Out," sums up not just the album's emotional pull, but also the overloaded, frustrating transitions of adult life: It goes for straight-up catharsis as Ricky Riemer's guitar chords scratch into Quigle's appropriately tossing-and-turning drums. Already working on more new songs and promising "no more of this five-year shit," the Riemers sat down with The A.V. Club.

"Wait It Out" by His & Her Vanities

The A.V. Club: These songs seem much more emotionally direct than your previous stuff. Why do you think that is?

Ricky Riemer: It wasn't deliberate. That's what we were feeling at the time, as cheesy as it sounds. We just kind of go back and forth with the angular, more noisy stuff, I guess. We still write stuff like that, too, but we just couldn't fit it on the record. These songs are more straightforward.

Terrin Riemer: I think we just got away from quirky for a while. I don't think they're straightforward, but we're definitely less quirky, at least this time around.

AVC: Did the process of having a family make it more serious?

TR: There's lots of personal stuff in there, but I think all the songs come from a place of frustration. A lot of times that's what we get stuck on for so long, is the lyrics. Our lyrics might not make sense to other people at all, but we don't want to have a song finished just to throw words in there and finish it. It has to make sense to us. That took a long time this time.

AVC: How has running the label affected how you approach your own music?

RR: From my standpoint, I think it makes it better. Just recording people, you get to see how they play—not that I'm stealing their ideas—and different songwriting process.

TR: It's interesting how different they are, especially Sleeping In The Aviary. Those guys are really collaborative. They bounce ideas off each other. Sometimes they get too many opinions just trying to run things past their friends, having people come over and record with them. We lock ourselves in this little cell. We don't share anything until it's completely done.

AVC: Yeah, up until now you've seemed a bit skittish about sharing new stuff.

RR: It's such a contrast between us and them, because they share everything. Which is cool. I wish I could do that. There's a benefit and a curse in having a studio, too. You can take as much time as you want. You can take too long, too

AVC: Did you find yourself revising and fussing over things a lot?

RR: "What It Is" and "Wake Up This Day" are basically the demo versions. We tried re-recording them, and the vibe changed. We always do this full-circle, loop thing. You do it, you question yourself, then you're like, "Ah, maybe we should redo it," then you come back to the beginning and it's okay.

TR: We don't do anything without a complete loop.

AVC: It seems like there's a lot about your first record that you've left behind.

RR: That record's kind of funny. That's when we first started. Terrin basically learned how to play bass on that record—

TR: While we were writing. He'd just be like, "Play something," so I'd start to play something.

RR: And I'd play drums and say, "Okay, that's gonna be a song." But the mistake was, we got really keyboard-happy. We were kind of new to the keyboards in our basement. But it is what it is.

AVC: Do you think your writing process is tighter now?

TR: I think it's just that we wrote all of these songs while completely sober. [Both laugh.]