Monica Topping
Radio Radio Radio

Denton, Texas, band Midlake has been at once compared to both Radiohead and Jethro Tull. Conversely, in the recording studio, Midlake is trying to emulate a tone similar to early ‘70s-era King Crimson, which bass player Paul Alexander says is the best recorded sound in rock history.

Midlake’s early days as a band are often referred to as Herbie Hancock-influenced “funk jazz explorations.” It makes sense that at the time, most of the members of the band were soon-to-be drop-outs from the jazz music program at the University of North Texas. Alexander met drummer McKenzie Smith in 1997 and the two threw around the idea of starting a band, before heading off in separate directions. By 1999, Alexander and Smith had reunited and pulled in the remaining founding members of what would become Midlake — Tim Smith on vocals, guitar, keyboard and woodwinds, Eric Pulido on guitar and Eric Nichelson on guitar.

Midlake’s jazz days ended with its various members either graduating (Tim Smith is the only member of the band who actually graduated from the UNT music program) or dropping out of school and staying in the area.

“There’s a lot of music school dropouts around, and they just don’t leave,” says Alexander. “It’s sort of like a mental hospital, this town. You can’t leave it, you know? You just get stuck here.”

The band’s first post-jazz influence was Radiohead, which is pointed out repeatedly in reviews of the Midlake’s first couple of albums — 2001’s “Milkmaid Grand Army” and 2004’s “Bamnan and Silvercork.”

Shortly after the release and touring for the second album, Midlake re-entered their recording studio to begin the recording process for “The Trials of Van Occupanther,” which came out in the summer of 2006. Because the band members were all simultaneously working day jobs, Alexander says that it took a year to finish that album, and while they knew it was the best material they could have put out at the time, none of the band members were as happy as they wanted to be with their work.

As they went into a year-and-a-half of touring for “Van Occupanther,” the band’s sights were already set on getting back into the studio to record an album they could be really proud of.

“In the fall of 2007, we stopped touring and immediately started recording ‘The Courage of Others,’” says Alexander. “And then we took an endless two years to make ‘The Courage of Others,’ which was much longer than we thought we’d take.”

The bass player says that the band members were, at that point, counting Midlake as their full-time job, but they worked a lot of hours, shooting for perfection — so much so that they scrapped an entire album’s worth of material before settling on the songs that would becoming “The Courage of Others,” which came out in early February of this year.

While “The Courage of Others” was in the works, Midlake also spent quite a bit of time backing solo artist John Grant, who has played in a band called The Czars, on his new album, which is due out in April. So in essence, over a two-year span, Midlake recorded three studio albums, two of which are seeing the light of day.

Midlake stayed off the road the entire time they were in the studio for “The Courage of Others,” so when they started touring again in January of this year, they had some cobwebs to dust off of their live performance. And as tight a quarters as a recording studio is, a tour van is even tighter.

“Being in a band is kind of like being married to four other dudes,” says Alexander, who just returned from Europe with his band a couple of weeks ago. “Everything you like and hate about somebody is like a revolving door. It’s a real challenge.”

“The touring is the fun part,” he adds. “It’s really hard on your body and sometimes hard on your friendships, but that’s the fun part. You’re going out and playing the shows — it’s work, but it’s quite enjoyable.”

Midlake is currently touring the West Coast, before heading back toward Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest music festival in a couple of weeks, then going back out to the Northeastern parts of the United States and back to Europe in April. In addition to the five-piece studio band that is Midlake, the touring band includes Max Townsley on electric guitar and Jesse Chandler on piano and flute.

Midlake will be in Arcata on Friday, March 5, at the HSU Depot with Matthew and the Arrogant Sea at 9 p.m. Tickets are $5 general admission and $2 for current HSU students with a student ID.

Scroll up and listen to “Acts of Man” from Midlake’s “The Courage of Others” on the Radio Radio Radio radio.