People in Planes

“The boys came along with pretty much a winning lottery ticket,” says Ian. “They were getting a lot of advice to take Gaz away from keys and put him up as a front man, but they didn’t want anybody new. They’d been together for six years and been through the hard times. I just came up one day, jammed out, and the rest as they say is history.”

Now People in Planes is poised to invade America, after a successful date at South by Southwest in Austin. The quintet has an unusually polished, confident sound that nonetheless stays true to an indie spirit, rooted in the explosion of UK creative world shaped by Radiohead. The good news is, the appetite of British listeners for adventurous rock is really taking hold here in the States, too, and People in Planes could rapidly become a household name.

Of course, it might not have turned out that way. There’s a British slang word for the alternative: “skint.” “That means broke,” Ian explains. And that’s exactly where a previous incarnation of the band wound up, after being dropped by EMI. Maybe that was a good thing: “The album was just drifting off . . .” says Gareth of the original quartet’s more immature selves.

Now they’ve grown up a bit, and the new album As Far as the Eye Can See got its fit, finish, and focus from Sam Williams, the producer who helped launch the successes of Supergrass and The Mystics. “Being in a studio with someone of that stature, you learn so much,” Gareth says. Williams saw that Gareth was overburdened playing three keyboards and a sampler while trying to be a lead singer, so he was the one who advised them to get a dedicated keyboardist and mold Gareth into a front man. “Since Ian’s been in the band, my singing has certainly improved,” says Gareth.

Now Ian is the man on keys, helming a Roland RD-600 (“I love it; it’s got a great effects unit built into it”), Hammond XK-1, and a MIDI-triggered Akai MPC1000. (“The Akai is great; you can trigger sounds whenever you need them and you’re not a slave to a click,” Ian says.)

The resulting band is full of ideas and smartly attuned to sound and rhythmic exploration, but writes tight songs all the same. “Indie-pop” is an almost unfair label, because most of the album isn’t pop: It’s rock with sharp editing. Trust us and get that resignation letter handy, just in case a band like this calls you.