(l-r) Violet Clark, Charles Thompson (aka Frank Black/Black Francis), Jason Carter

Listen up, Citizens of Grand Duchy, it is the twelfth consecutive day of recording at Wavelength Studios in Salem, Oregon, where the Duchess and Duke — also known Violet Clark and her husband Charles Thompson — are hard at work finishing up rough cuts before the Duke has to become Frank Black with the Pixies in Australia. The Duke is in the studio’s anteroom, “working on some couplets,” and Violet is in the recording booth behind the glass, laying down a vocal track. Finishing up, she cranes her neck, flips the hair from her eyes and peers at producer and drummer Jason Carter, who is sitting behind the board. “How does it sound?” she asks, bluntly but not rudely. “Is the last la-la-la part too quiet?” Carter, whom Clark refers to as “the third member” of Grand Duchy, shakes his head and says it all sounds good to him. He cues up the track and they take another pass.

Still no sign of the Duke and his couplets (which, we eventually discover, have morphed into the focused intensity of writing a whole song), so Clark enters the studio proper, takes a leather swivel seat beside Carter and they cue up a selective sampling of the 15 new numbers capture so far for Grand Duchy’s follow up to their debut album—the criminally under-acknowledged Petit Fours. Through the crystalline loudness of the studio’s speakers, a heavy, chunky bass line weaves its way through some synthed-up trashcan percussion as Clark croons “Illiterate Lovers,” a story of sexed-up insomnia. The song, infinitely danceable, sounds like the greatest hit Berlin never recorded, but Clark is anxious to have the Duke spike it up a bit with some tasty guitar licks. Next up is the track “Where O Where is My John Frum,” previously titled “Spaghetti Western,” with Thompson taking lead vocals, giving the song his trademark high falsetto and strange narrative tweaks and turns. Whereas the first Grand Duchy album exhibited an experimental streak that bordered on the wildly eclectic, it’s clear from just these two songs that the upcoming CD, tentatively titled “Let The People Speak,” is bound by a coherence that Clark calls almost conceptual.

And nowhere is this conceptual cohesion and binding vision better exemplified than the titular track, a “jam” that the usually un-jammy Thompson, Clark and Carter subsequently have deconstructed and rebuilt and generally fucked with until it’s become an angular, ecstatic, surrealistic journey into some bizarre Lilliputian underworld (where they sing “Let the people speak! Let the people speak!”). Citizens of Grand Duchy who ate up “Petit Fours” likely will be surprised by the disarming treats on this new one, but they won’t be disappointed. Though it’s still cooking in the kitchen, metaphorically speaking, “Let The People Speak” sounds like a royal, four-course meal fit for a king but served to the citizens.

According to Clark, Grand Duchy was conceived from the get-go as an art experiment, a band capable of tangential growth and aesthetic evolution in the very process of creation. “The last one was a little more collaborative,” she says of the first album, though by that she means that she and Charles each contributed their own complete songs, rarely swapping lyrics or changing each other’s work beyond offering flourishes and artistic back up. This, she adds, may account for the much-noted and much-celebrated eclecticism of “Petit Fours.” On the flip side, “Let The People Speak” has come about in a completely different fashion. With her husband occupied with Pixies business, Clark grew antsy. “I was feeling super creative,” she says of wanting to work on another album. “I felt a certain urgency to get going.” And yet, despite her creative vitality, she experienced a sense of “ennui” and a lack of artistic romance, because her husband wasn’t directly involved. And then, with her masterminding everything in his absence, Charles “came back to this monster,” she says. That all changed during the past dozen days in the studio.

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