Fiction Plane Resumes Flight With New Album

U.K. rock act Fiction Plane will release its second album, “Left Side
of the Brain,” May 22 via Bieler Bros., just before it begins its run
as the opening act for the North American leg of the Police’s reunion
tour. The album 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 tells
Billboard.com. “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.”
Sumner and drummer Pete Wilhoit admit the band was in an
uncertain place at the end of last year, before the Police tour became
a reality (Sumner is Sting’s oldest son). “We didn’t know what was
going to happen with the band, and then the ‘gift’ was presented to
us,” Wilhoit says. “After we knew were going to play arenas and
stadiums, we wanted to make an album that would play well in those
venues. It’s a trio, but it’s never sounded bigger.” Beyond the single
“Two Sisters,” tracks include the stadium-ready opener “Anyone,” “It’s
a Lie” and “Death Machine.” Says Sumner, “I always tend to focus on the
bad stuff so there’s a healthy dose of alienation, war, death,
alcoholism, hypocrisy, vanity and misogyny going on.”