Just before it begins its run as the opening act for the North American leg of the Police’s reunion tour, U.K. rock act Fiction Plane will this week unveil its second album, “Left Side of the Brain.” The Bieler Bros. release is the follow-up to 2003’s “Everything Will Never Be OK,” Fiction Plane’s lone release for MCA.
Since being dropped from Geffen last year, the band has “had tons of tunes swimming about without a home,” frontman Joe Sumner says. “When we scheduled this album we basically picked our favorite songs from the whole period. Then we took a month off and six brand new songs just plopped out of the sky, which now form the basis of the album. The single ‘Two Sisters’ was the first song which immediately felt like a hit single but which didn’t feel like any kind of sell-out. In a lot of ways this feels like a debut album from a new band.”
And while the 2005 EP “Bitter Forces and Lame Race Horses” featured more of a piano-oriented sound than the debut album, the new material returns to a guitar-driven approach. Sumner has also switched from guitar to bass following the departure of multi-instrumentalist Dan Brown last year.
“I’d say overall it’s more groove-oriented than our previous stuff,” Sumner says. “There’s very little in the way of overdubs and nothing we can’t pull off live. Musically we’ve lost a lot of fear. We’re moving through quite a few genres from song to song, sometimes even during the course of a song. We’re trying to make this epic album into an epic journey of epic proportions.”
