Henry Wagons: “It was good to have more hairy, loud men to aid the cause”

May 15, 2014 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

IT’S 11am and Henry Wagons is getting ready to start work, even though it’s his day off.

“I’m not very good at resting,” he says. “Even now, on the coast, in my bed, I’m still talking to you.”

It’s this work ethic, coupled with a laddish charm and penchant for ragged Americana that the self-styled benevolent dictator of Wagons has made the basis of the Victorian group’s sixth record, Acid Rain and Sugar Cane.

“It’s our first one in a few years and it was incredibly fun to make,” he says. “It took a long time, but I think all of us are happy with the final result. It was long, loud and pleasurable, and I think that comes across in the record. I’m a proud father and very excited for it to get out there.”

Despite the three-year period since the band’s last record, Rumble, Shake and Tumble, Wagons says getting back with the group was just like riding the proverbial bike.

“The main core of the group all went to high school together,” he says. “They’re the people I like playing with the most. It’s like being an amoeba floating around in the plasma, drifting away from the mothership, then locking into the bacterial network again and pumping out the virus and the disease like nobody’s business. Maybe that’s a strange analogy! With the solo record [2013’s Expecting Company?] I had to make every single decision and more or less play everything as well, so I was looking forward to creating a collaborative record again. This record is more collaborative than any we’ve done before; I really leant on the guys. It was good to have more hairy, loud men to aid the cause.”

A reassessment of their approach to recording led Wagons to work out how to allow the band to play to its strengths.

“I had a very particular aesthetic and way I wanted to record the album,” he says. “I wanted to really capture the live element that we’ve got together. Studio environments can make communication difficult when you’re all wearing headphones and listening to separate mixes between separate glass panels. All too often in the studio I’ll be in a vocal booth with an acoustic guitar, I’ll finish the song and there’ll be 30 seconds of total silence where we’re all glancing at each other through our respective vacuum chambers, wondering how it went and gesturing through mime. You’ll hear a crackly producer from three metres back going ‘that was good, maybe do it one more time!’ We’ll be like ‘what the fuck’s going on here?’ So to cut a long story short, I wanted to record in an environment where we’re all in the one room. I’d kind of been listening to the Bob Dylan and The Band record The Basement Tapes, where you can really hear that they’re all recording in one room, kind of shit-faced. It’s not so much the most high-fidelity recording, à la Sting or Pink Floyd. They were there to have a good time and the actual recording is almost an afterthought. I basically ended up recording it at a place I got on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, where I have basically loaded in all the vintage gear I’ve collected over the years and set up a studio space. It sounds live, because most of the songs we are all playing together in one room. My vocals come through a PA system in the same room as where the drums are, and it creates this space that I think you can hear in the record. Instead of some elaborate setup, where you’re recording the drums with 20 microphones, the ambience actually comes through the vocal microphone, which is placed six metres away. All the instruments bleed into each other as if we’re on the stage, and it’s a very exciting way to record. I don’t think the fidelity has suffered from it at all. We recorded with a whole bunch of gear I’ve acquired over the years, inspired by Elvis’s late ’70s stage setup in Vegas, so we’ve got a lot of fun old gear.”

Despite the familiarity felt within the band, outside help was enlisted from an esteemed source.

“We were able to take our time,” Wagons says. “We weren’t spending our record advance on studio time, where the clock is ticking every day. What it meant is that we could spend money on recording with people we respect. We had Mick Harvey, the former Bad Seed; he’s done amazing production work with PJ Harvey and did the Serge Gainsbourg stuff. So, instead of spending a thousand dollars a day on some hot-shit national studio or going into Sing Sing or whatever, we were able to bring in geniuses around us; these people we really revered. It took a long time to record, but at our own leisure we’d get together and have four-day getaways. I even had a baby in the middle of the recording process, so it basically came together across six months at our own pace. We were able to just press record when it was all ready to go. The record is quite a trip, quite a journey and the songs take unexpected twists and turns a lot of the time. We were enjoying ourselves too much; we didn’t want to just shit out a three-minute song each time. Mick Harvey’s production style is to join the band, essentially, so he’d be playing drums, keys or percussion on every single song on the record. We had all this money left over to pay to get it mixed at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles by the guy who did Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes, who have some of the most epic sounding records of recent times. I wanted a dose of that on our record, and he has made it sound incredibly full and incredibly live. It just wanted the average way of blowing your record advance; we were very considered and spent it in a way that made us have a whole lot of fun that translates onto the record. I’d do it again in the same way in a heartbeat.”

While every Wagons album release is an event in itself, the live Wagons experience is on another level.

“The album has a lot of horns and female backing vocals,” Wagons says. “For the big capital city shows, that’s going to be represented on-stage. We’re in the midst of rehearsing the new show as we speak. Because the songs are so live on the album, that energy is transferring well to the live stage. There are going to be a lot of really fun new elements to the show. As it is, I love to interact with the crowd and get amongst it, and this show is definitely going to be no different to that; it’s going to be very loud and very fun.”

ACID RAIN AND SUGAR CANE IS OUT MAY 16. WAGONS’ TOUR OF AUSTRALIA BEGINS IN ADELAIDE MAY 22.

Record review: Closure In Moscow – Pink Lemonade (2014, LP)

May 15, 2014June 19, 2014 / Paul McBride / 1 Comment

If there’s one genre of music in which it’s okay to get more than a little strange, it’s prog-rock. A style once maligned for being overblown and poser-ish, it’s since been rescued from the musical scrapheap by a troop of contemporary bands; one of the best of those being Melbourne quintet Closure In Moscow. Their second full-length album is an eleven-track collection of bizarre-in-a-good-way rock riffs, weird tangents, off-time rhythms and mystical lyrics that combine to make an album that doesn’t just take you on a journey, it makes you forget how to get home again. The band easily flit between metal, avant-garde, hard rock and even a bit of soul, as they do on just one song; the excellently-named ‘Neoprene Byzantine’. There are some serious musical chops contained within the band, particularly guitarists Mansur Zennelli and Michael Barrett, and singer Christopher de Zinque, whose voice is as versatile as they come. With song names like ‘Dinosaur Boss Battle’, ‘Mauerbauertraurigkeit’ and ‘The Church of the Technochrist’, you can guess the album doesn’t contain your average boy-meets-girl style lyrics, and just trying to guess exactly what is going on in each song is half the fun. Just when you think you’re getting it, they throw in ‘Happy Days’; a rockabilly-tinged number that is about as catchy as these guys are going to get. Finished off top-notch production from Tom Larkin, this is an album that needs to be heard, even if it takes a while to work out what you’re listening to. (Sabretusk)

Interview: Mark ‘E’ Everett of Eels

May 13, 2014April 23, 2015 / Paul McBride / 1 Comment

SINCE their formation in 1995, the members of genre-spanning Eels have been an ever-changing musical entity that has produced eleven albums of songs filled with themes of loss, love and introspection. The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett is the band’s latest release, and as their enigmatic leader – more often known simply as E – puts it, it’s their most revealing to date. I spoke to E to discover what inspired this period of intense reflection.

Congratulations on the new album. How does it feel knowing it’s in the public’s hands?

Well, I guess it’s a relief. Putting out any kind of album is a hard, vulnerable process, and this one is kind of doubly so as it’s so personal. I don’t recommend doing it.

Yet you’ve been doing it quite a bit in the last few years.

Well, not necessarily; we don’t always work in the typical way. We didn’t make five records in the last five years like it appears or how they’ve come out. There was a four-year gap between the Blinking Lights album and the Hombre Lobo album, and during that period we made the next three records, which all came out in a year. So it’s more like we’ve made five albums in nine years.

How long did you have the songs before recording?

About half of them were done before the last album we put out, Wonderful, Glorious. The other half were done after, so it’s all pretty recent, or about half is pretty recent.

Who did you work with on the album?

It’s the exact same group of guys that made Wonderful, Glorious, but you’d never guess it because it’s so different sounding. It’s just the band, you know? Me and the four guys who’ve been touring the world for several years now. Plus, an orchestra and some outside musicians, but even the orchestral arrangements were done by the guys in the band.

How do you stop your song-writing veering across the line between personal and self-indulgent?

I’m aware of the line. I think someone could take a cursory look or listen to it and go ‘this guy is so self-indulgent’ or whatever, but it’s the opposite to me. Why it’s such a hard record to put out is because I’m kind of throwing my dignity under the bus to make a point and so people can hopefully learn from my mistakes. I think that’s a worthwhile thing to do, but it’s not a comfortable thing to do. I believe it’s a lot more selfless than selfish.

What mistakes would you like people to learn from?

I think it’s plainly spelt out in the record on songs like ‘Agatha Chang’. I was in a situation that was a good situation for me, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t appreciate it and I blew it.

So, it’s purely about relationships.

In this case it’s about a relationship, yeah.

Do you take control of every aspect of the creative process, or are you happy to let other band members step in?

This might appear to be a solo type of record, because of the title and the photo on the front, but it’s very much a band record. About half the songs were co-written with guys in the band, they did the orchestral arrangements and they play on everything, so there’s a lot of collaborating going on.

So, Eels is a democracy, not a dictatorship.

No, it’s a dictatorship for sure! The buck has to stop somewhere and the buck stops here, but I’m smart enough to be open to everyone’s ideas and suggestions.

Are you happy for someone in the band to tell you if an idea you have isn’t any good?

Yeah, because that’s what I like about collaborating. You can get a lot of stuff out of someone else that you can’t get out of yourself, and that’s probably the most fun part; coming up with something that you never would have come up with by yourself.

Why was 2007 the right time to release your autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know?

I don’t know if it was the right time. It’s an odd time to write your life story when you’re 40. I used to experiment; no one asked me to do it. I wanted to see what it all added up to, and when I finished it I thought there might be something to offer the world here, and decided to put it out. It was such a nice feeling to do something as an experiment and have it be praised. I probably have more people come up to me in the street and say something about the book than the music at this point, you know?

Is it something you would do again?

Writing a book is very hard and lonely work and isn’t nearly as fun as making music. But if anyone who has read the book is interested in a sequel, the closest thing to it would this new album; the major update on what has happened since then.

The album has received almost universally good reviews so far. Do you read or care about reviews?

Well, it’s always nice if people get something out of it and appreciate your hard work, but I think the best thing to do is to brush it all off; it’s not something that really matters, I don’t think.

What are your touring plans?

Right now we’re about to go across America, then across Europe. We always intend to get [to Australia], but the last couple of times we haven’t because of scheduling conflicts. We’re trying to get there this year, and hopefully we will.

Do you see the release of a new album as solely a vehicle for touring?

I think of them as two different things. When you make a new album, the record company often wants you to go on tour. Touring has become the funnest part of my life; I look forward to it, and whether there was a record or not, I’d want to be doing it.

What will you be doing for the rest of the year after the tour?

That’s it; it’s a blank slate after the tour ends, but I don’t know when that’s going to end yet. I’m just pouring everything I’ve got into that, and there’s nothing in the works. I don’t know what will happen; maybe it’s time for a long nap.

THE CAUTIONARY TALES OF MARK OLIVER EVERETT BY EELS IS OUT NOW.

Live review: Arctic Monkeys + Pond – Brisbane Entertainment Centre – 7/5/14

May 9, 2014 / Paul McBride / 1 Comment

Alex, Alexxx, ALEXXXX! These words could just about sum up the Arctic Monkeys’ gig at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, such was the fervour reverberating around the arena for the band’s singer, Alex Turner. The 28 year-old has an oddly powerful hold over his audience – boy and girl alike – as he struts and poses throughout, and the result is the loudest screaming this reviewer has ever heard in the venue. More on that in a second.

The opening band for tonight is Perth’s always-excellent Pond. “Alex will be here soon; until then you’re stuck with us,” says frontman Nick Allbrook, but it’s a situation everyone’s happy with. Psychedelic rock rarely makes an appearance in a venue of this size, and it’s a great sight to behold to see the quintet brilliantly jam through their best-known tracks. They’re a band that can make a set seem like a perfectly ramshackle fuck-around while still being tight as hell, in only the best possible way.

With a backdrop of the huge glowing letters A and M and a retina-destroying light show, Arctic Monkeys arrive to deafening screams from every corner of what must be an almost sold-out venue. As they start with ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ and move through ‘Snap Out Of It’, ‘Arabella’ and ‘Brianstorm’, it’s clear the band are tour-tight and focussed, and all eyes are on Turner as he moves from one side of the stage to the other, soaking up the adulation, shaking his hips, and showing how far charisma can take someone who uses it cleverly.

The first big, big moment comes at the start of ‘Don’t Sit Down Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair’; a song that remains the band’s best, before Turner asks the audience “why do you only call me when you’re high, Brisbane?” Recent supports The Orwells claimed that every aspect of the band’s performance is mapped out, including ad-libs, and there is a feeling that that may be the case, but if it works this well it doesn’t really matter.

After an initial finisher of ‘505’ and despite sound problems in the encore during ‘R U Mine?’, which ended up being played twice, there was a very large group of satisfied people dispersing into the Brisbane night after this show.

Live review: The Jezabels + Gang of Youths – The Tivoli, Brisbane – 6/5/14

May 9, 2014 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

SYDNEY’S The Jezabels have been making headlines in the music press recently for two reasons: getting involved in a somewhat exaggerated spat with music critics on the subject of their work credentials and putting on great live shows. So, given that singer Hayley Mary was recently quoted as saying music writers need to “fucking get a real job”, it’s with mixed expectations that I pass through the doors of The Tivoli to catch their show.

Let’s get this straight from the off: this critic remains a big fan of the band and its music, despite the fact this would make me diabolically uncool in certain circles. The Jezabels continue to shrug off their detractors and make simple and great pop music, and they seem to be comfortable with the fact they’re pretty uncool at the same time. Which kind of makes them cool.

Tonight’s gig begins with the excellent Gang of Youths, who are much-improved performance-wise and song-wise since the last time they played this venue supporting Cloud Control in August. ‘Evangelists’ is a stand-out, and the only thing lacking for the band is more time to jam; these guys deserve to be big, and probably will be.

Nick Kaloper, Sam Lockwood and Heather Shannon take to the dimly lit stage of a now-packed house and receive a monumental cheer, before Mary herself strides on dressed in glittery black top and black pants and ups the volume several fold. The band begin in measured fashion with the title track and opening number of new album The Brink. Mary’s voice is what makes The Jezabels better than most similar pop bands; it soars, chills and soothes at different points and at the drop of a hat, while the rest of the band are clinically precise.

‘Endless Summer’ is next, and the audience is in Mary’s hands at this point, followed shortly after by ‘Time To Dance’, which a Jezabels audience doesn’t really do; it’s more of a stand-gawping kind of deal. Mary spins, shuffles and raises her left hand to the roof during the more majestic moments, and while the rest of the band stay fairly static, there’s enough to keep things interesting throughout ‘Look of Love’ and early track ‘Hurt Me’.

‘Beat to Beat’ is a mid-set highlight as Mary stretches her vocal range and gets out into the audience to high-five some fans at front-and-centre, with further big responses for ‘The End’ and ‘Disco Biscuit Love’.

So, what’s the somewhat confused lesson this critic learned from tonight’s gig? It’s this: fuck the critics. Nice work, Jezabels.

Shane Parsons of DZ Deathrays: “We can pretty much do what we feel like”

May 8, 2014April 30, 2015 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

THEIR debut album might have won the 2012 Aria Award for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album, but Brisbane thrash duo DZ Deathrays are expanding their sound on follow-up Black Rat.

“Our single ‘Northern Lights’ was one of the first songs we wrote,” explains singer-guitarist Shane Parsons. “It came together pretty quickly. We hadn’t put out a slow song in a long time, so we thought we’d do something that’s kind of like our ballad. We went over to England to do some shows with our other band Velociraptor and we used that time to jump in a studio and do that song over there. We wanted people to see that we could do other things; we’re not always going to be all loud guitars, cymbals and screaming. It’s the slowest song on the record by far; everything else is more upbeat and some songs are the heaviest we’ve done. It was like a bit of a curveball, I think; to see how people would react. We got a lot of good feedback, and we also got some people who were shirty as us for releasing a song that wasn’t exactly how the other songs sounded, which was interesting. But we can pretty much do what we feel like, and some people are going to like it and some aren’t.”

The duo of Parsons and drummer Simon Ridley have had a meteoric rise since their humble beginnings playing house parties, having toured relentlessly and played some of the biggest festivals in the UK and North America.

“We started playing a few of the new songs at SXSW, including the latest single, ‘Gina Works At Hearts’,” Parsons says. “We’ve played ‘Northern Lights’ for a bit, and another song called ‘Ocean Exploder’, which we’ve been playing since we toured with The Bronx about a year ago. It was our third year doing SXSW, and we did ten shows in four days. It was good to have that much to do, but at the same time it began to get a bit tough. We were playing a show at midday and then had a last show at one in the morning, and we were in town the whole time sitting in bars trying to stay sober but also stay a little bit drunk, you know? We played a couple of really great shows, but unless you’re a band that’s really high up on the buzz radar, you’ll play five shows and two will be good, I think. Maybe four out of ten were good for us this time. We only really saw the bands that were on before and after us, and even then I was too busy packing it. That was the worst thing probably; not being able to see other bands that I wanted to see. I had a couple of days off where I went to some showcases and saw a few bands. I went to the Laneway showcase and saw Royal Blood and a bunch of bands in one go, and the pressure was off, so it was good to just mosey around the festival. You go there for the experience, and we decided that we’ll do a lot of shows and push ourselves to the limit, and then we had a week off and went to San Francisco.”

Their upcoming headline tour of Australia will provide the perfect opportunity for fans to hear new material on home soil.

“It’s been great playing the new songs,” Parsons says. “We’ve been putting together the set-list for the Australian tour; being able to chop and change between the new songs is really fun. It’s not hard to reach an hour long set now, with two albums of material to choose from. It was a funny one because we really wanted to get something out last year. We had done a bit of touring at the beginning of last year and had the rest of the year off. We were a bit worried about being away for too long; especially from the UK and America. Then it just took time to actually get the songs together and get them to a level we were happy with for the album, and it’s really good to have it all sorted and ready to go. We did a few writing sessions where we went away into the countryside and came back with ten or twelve songs, and four of those would get re-written again and again. Even up until going into the studio there were a couple of songs about to be recorded that we hadn’t finished and were kind of half done or maybe didn’t work as well as some of the others. We just tried to write as much as possible and eliminate any dead weight. We wanted this album to be shorter in track numbers and a bit more punchy in terms of the songs grabbing you straight away, so we did focus on that a little bit more than on the first record.”

The growth in the band’s sound means an additional touring musician is needed, with a potential long-term opening for the right person.

“The new record has a whole bunch of extra guitars on there, and they’re the best bits,” Parsons says. “We can play the songs without them, but it doesn’t have the same impact as having them there. It’s just an evolutionary thing for the band, and if we could train somebody up on all the songs we would be happy to tour as a three-piece. We had a choice to have another person up there playing or having a backing track, and we’re always going to choose to have another person there. We had Cesira [Aitken] from The Jungle Giants play with us at SXSW. We’ve got a friend playing a few shows on the Australian tour, and Dion [Ford] from Palms – who are supporting us – is going to do all the rest. At the moment, we’re doing four songs they’re going to play on during the tour. I’ve got the guitar parts all tabbed out, so they just have to learn them, but it’s pretty easy stuff. In the future I guess we’ll see if somebody is willing to go full-time with us and tour everywhere. The only thing is it’s quite hard for somebody to go on tour with us, which means they can’t work at a job, which is hard when people have to pay rent and stuff. We’ll see how we go with it all; there are only a few songs which need an extra guitar, and the rest we play as a two-piece.”

BLACK RAT BY DZ DEATHRAYS IS OUT MAY 2ND. AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES:

Record review: Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots (2014, LP)

May 8, 2014May 20, 2014 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

Damon Albarn has always been an eclectically-minded soul, even if the gulf in public exposure between his most well-known work with Blur and his lesser recognised side projects and collaborations is as big as Britpop circa 1995. From producing Bobby Womack’s last record, to opera and a variety of Clash fantasies channelled through Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad & the Queen, the 46 year-old Englishman has dipped his toe in many a musical puddle since Blur’s 1991 debut. The most obvious absence from his glittering resume has been a solo record, and it’s a gap Everyday Robots fills with aplomb, although anyone hoping for the mock cockney goofiness of Blur’s heyday or the electro-pop of Gorillaz will be disappointed. Instead, this is an album of a more reflective and subtle nature, and one that explores Albarn’s love for African rhythms and Caribbean-flavoured melodies, carried off with the luxury of control and freedom not available to the majority of other recording artists. He begins by railing at the overuse of hand-held devices on the disjointed title track, before becoming entrenched in melancholy on ‘Hostiles’ and ‘Lonely Press Play’; the latter holding just enough of a hint of reggae rhythm to prevent it wallowing too deeply in the mire. ‘Mr. Tembo’ – written for an orphaned elephant he met in Tanzania – sees him enjoying himself in a much lighter fashion, as an infectious ukulele riff combines with Gospel harmonies to make the most playful track here. The seven-minute ‘You & Me’ could be a microcosm for the entire album; a story of regret and paranoia set to apathetic piano lines being uplifted with a steel drum mid-section that allows light to flow in through the gloom of Albarn’s lyrics. Elsewhere, the well-connected singer can’t resist a collaboration or two, as Brian Eno pops up to sing a lullaby-like verse on laid-back closer ‘Heavy Seas Of Love’ and Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes) provides eerie background vocals on ‘Selfish Giant’. It’s unclear why it took this long for Albarn to make a solo album, especially when he was recently quoted as saying he gave producer Richard Russell 60 songs for the record. In the end it doesn’t matter; this is the sound of a man making an album exactly the way he wants to, even if it does make you think he should have given it a stab a long time ago.

Russell Marsden of Band of Skulls: “It’s a tipping point now”

May 8, 2014April 30, 2015 / Paul McBride / 1 Comment

ENGLISH alt-rockers Band of Skulls are probably one of the hardest working bands in the business.

Since their 2009 debut Baby Darling Doll Face Honey, the trio of Russell Marsden, Emma Richardson and Matt Hayward have consistently won fans the old-fashioned way; by touring relentlessly and improving with each album. Singer-guitarist Marsden explains how their hard work is paying off with new record Himalayan.

“It’s an exciting time,” he says. “It’s a tipping point now. The fact now that we have three albums to choose from really makes a difference. Only having one record makes playing a show for more than forty minutes quite a challenge, so now that we have all these records to choose from makes our shows much stronger. We’ve had the record finished for a while and it’s kind of a relief to be able to share it with people. I think that’s probably the emotion that’s going through our minds right now. We’ve been playing the songs live, so we’ve got a little bit of a feeling about how people feel about the new songs, but now people can get the record, take it home and live with it, then come see us play. When we’ll be down in Australia, that will definitely be the case, so that’ll be exciting.”

The band’s second album, Sweet Sour, was released in 2012 and saw their songs evolve with a cleaner, harder sound. This time around, they weren’t willing to sit still either.

“We changed producers for this record,” Marsden says. “That was kind of a big shift. Nick Launay came in to do this one, and we made it in London, so this was the first time we didn’t record in the middle of nowhere. We went into the studio every day and worked on the songs, instead of being stuck somewhere on a farm. It really changed the dynamic of the recording session, and I think that comes out in the music; it was fun to do it every day and we really relished the challenge. Previously it was more intense, but this time we were doing a week together and a week apart. This time we definitely took the work away, then reconvened and kept the best ideas and trashed the rest. We all had to learn to accept that fact that your idea might not be the best idea. We’re quite good at it; we don’t come to blows but we might disagree now and then. Musically, I think the sound has come of age. We know what our sound is, but we also feel allowed to not just be a blues-rock band or just a heavy band, and our audience will allow us to continue to experiment in a few different directions. It’s more of a challenge to be able to play the new songs; we’ve written some that are quite tricky and are just at the edge of our ability. We challenge ourselves, and the first few times we play them live are seat-of-the-pants moments, but once you get over the first couple of times the confidence grows and it becomes more natural. Once we get our teeth into them, it’s really great. The record comes out soon and the songs know it; I think the songs are onto us. But there’s a certain buzz about playing tunes for the first time in front of people, and that’s part of the thrill which we’ve enjoyed so far. There are a couple of tracks we haven’t done yet too, so we’ve still got a couple of those moments left.”

Despite the obvious benefits of having new songs to play live, Marsden admits the expectations the band put on themselves to write the best songs possible is the driving force behind the band.

“We give ourselves our own pressure,” he says. “Outside pressure doesn’t even get a look in. We’re really proud of the two records we’ve made and we loved working with [producer] Ian Davenport on those records, but we set the bar higher this time. If a song isn’t as good as something you’ve done before, then it basically isn’t good enough. Recording is an amazing experience, although it’s not easy. There are a lot of long hours, and it can be relentless and the hours are gruelling. It can wear you down and drive you insane. It’s a bit like sitting an important exam, where the result is going to affect your life in the future, but seeing ideas that you have in your head realised is a thrill. When something comes out well in the recording, you can’t help but sneak a thought about how it’s going to sound playing it to people in the future.

An upcoming June tour of Australia is something Marsden is hoping the group can repeat in the near future.

“We’ve been a couple of times now and the audiences are fantastic and really knowledgeable,” he says. “Your festivals are really good as well; you get a lot of international acts coming over. The competition is stiff, and we know it’s not going to be an easy ride, but we’ll be playing some bigger venues for the first time and that’s really exciting. I wish we could come back to Australia more often, but it’s a long way and it costs a lot of money for bands to come over. Hopefully this won’t be the last trip on this record. If it goes as good as we hope, we can maybe come back and do some more cities as we only have three stops this time. Hopefully we can return not long afterwards.”

HIMALAYAN BY BAND OF SKULLS IS OUT NOW. THE BAND TOUR AUSTRALIA IN JUNE.

Record review: Jake Bugg – Messed Up Kids (2014, EP)

May 8, 2014 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

As if two albums in two years wasn’t enough, mop-topped sensation Jake Bugg is back with a new EP, and a puzzling little release it is. Based around the track ‘Messed Up Kids’, which already featured on the Shangri La album and was released as recently as November, this four song EP has the feel of either a single or a blatant cash-grab; it’s hard to tell which. The three other tracks – ‘A Change In The Air’, ‘Strange Creatures’, and ‘The Odds’ didn’t make it onto Shangri La, and are packaged here as extras or bonus tracks, but they didn’t make it onto the album for a reason. ‘Messed Up Kids’ is a simple and catchy little number, although it’s unfortunate that Bugg’s voice too often makes him sound like something that buzzes around your face and needs to be squashed – pun intended. After that, the quality drops away, and this release reveals itself to be the bag of leftovers it is. ‘A Change In The Air’ is a painful Byrds rip-off that could do with a lyrical re-write and Bugg doesn’t have the character in his voice to effectively pull off the blues number that ‘Strange Creatures’ tries to be. ‘The Odds’ adds a bit of stomp to proceedings to finish up, and while fans of the boy wonder will no doubt gobble this up, this release basically consists of a song that’s already been released and three B-sides that don’t add up to much. (Universal)

Taylor Hawkins: “It sounds like we don’t give a fuck”

May 6, 2014April 24, 2015 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

TAYLOR Hawkins might spend most of his time being drummer for one of the biggest rock bands in the world, but when the Foo Fighters take a rest, he doesn’t sit still.

The affable 42 year-old’s new side project is classic rock-influenced trio The Birds of Satan; whose self-titled album is unashamed in its straight-up approach to rock music.

“Wiley [Hodgden, bass/vocals] and Mick [Murphy, guitar] are a couple of buddies of mine,” Hawkins explains. “We play in a cover band called Chevy Metal; we play seventies and eighties rock from when we were kids. I just happened to be jamming with those guys and we always sound good together, and when it came to the time when I wanted to make a record, it felt good and I thought those guys could help me make the record really quickly. We did it and it was great. [The album] was really fun for me, and really easy to make, actually. It sounds like we don’t give a fuck, but sometimes that sounds good, you know what I mean? We did all the music in four days, and then we did the vocals over a two day period. Part of me really wanted to do it quickly, and I wanted it to sound like that. It’s not an [overly] produced record; I’ve done that with the Foo Fighters and I’ve done that with my own band, the Coattail Riders. I wanted to make a raw record. At the time when I was making this record, I was listening to a lot of people’s first records; records made by bands who didn’t have a lot of time. There’s something about that. I mean, listen to the first Black Sabbath record; that was recorded in two days. The first Led Zeppelin record was made in maybe a week or something. Van Halen’s first. All of those records were made in one day to a week. There’s something about that I really like. I like producing records, the layering process and everything, but that’s a whole other sort of trip, you know? There’s something about just getting in there and doing something quick that has a different energy; I like those type of records. Although part of the reason that we made the record so quickly as well was because I didn’t have a lot of time. ”

No classic rock album is complete without a moment of rock grandeur or extended virtuosity, and here it comes in the form of nine-minute opener ‘The Ballad of the Birds of Satan’.

“That took us half a day,” Hawkins says. “We wrote it and recorded it in half a day, and we did another song that day as well, so it happened fairly quickly. We all threw three or four ideas at each other, stuck it all together and it came out like that, which is totally bananas. We set out to make it that way; I wanted to have a track that goes a million places, has weird time signatures and is sort of a schizophrenic kind of song. It was absolutely what I had in mind. I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but I knew I wanted to do something like that.”

Despite the desire for a rawer sound and the tight time-frame involved, the well-connected California native was able to call on some outside help to finish the album off.

“Dave [Grohl] helped me finish writing a bunch of the songs,” he says. “He was a big part of the first song; the first riff was a guitar riff he had, which we put stuff together with. He was a big part of a song called ‘Wait Til Tomorrow’ and another called ‘Raspberries’. Those were the three he played on, if I’m not mistaken. Pat [Smear] came in at the very end on ‘Too Far Gone To See’ and played some guitar and things.”

With a debut album in the bag, Hawkins is keen to play the songs live, although in what form is yet to be decided.

“We’ve just sort of getting started doing that,” he says. “We played together the other day for a couple of hours, and I think we’ll start playing [the songs] in shows soon, which is exciting. I think that it can fall under the umbrella of other things. These are all songs that I basically have written or have written with other people. There are songs with The Coattail Riders that we could play with The Birds Of Satan. There’s no reason to be precious I don’t think; if we play a Coattail Riders song, it’s fine. I’m not trying to be disrespectful to that band, but I feel like The Birds Of Satan stuff could be played by a bunch of different bands, or by anything we’re doing at that time, you know what I mean? I could have made it with [The Coattail Riders], but it would have been very different. The Coattail Riders are really, really good players. This band are really good players too, but they’re good in a different way. This is the first record Wiley has ever even played on, so he’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth, but I like that energy. Mick is much more of a hard rock guitar player than anyone in The Coattail Riders, so it’s just a different feel. They could have made this record, but it just wouldn’t have been this record. It would have been another cool record for sure, and I probably would have liked it just as much, but it probably would have been very different. Either way, it was going to be made raw, and it probably would have been a lot cleaner with those guys. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know what I mean?”

THE BIRDS OF SATAN’S SELF-TITLED DEBUT ALBUM IS OUT NOW.

Interview: Craig Finn of The Hold Steady

May 2, 2014April 24, 2015 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

THERE’S A TRACK on the new Hold Steady album called ‘On With The Business’, and that’s exactly what singer-guitarist Craig Finn is getting. It’s been four years since Heaven Is Whenever saw the band’s music maturing and the then 38 year-old’s lyrics further enforcing his reputation as a rock and roll storyteller of the highest order. It’s easy to see why Finn’s lyrics are what they are, as he reels off names of writers you’ve never heard of.

The engaging and erudite Minneapolis-raised New York native is still telling stories with his literature-rich lyrics on new album Teeth Dreams, and since the departure of flamboyantly moustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay after 2008’s excellent Stay Positive, the band has taken on an extra guitarist. With a fatter, Thin Lizzy-esque dual guitar sound, The Hold Steady may have reached a new phase in their musical life cycle, but while Finn is happy to talk up his band’s new dynamic and approach to making music, he’s equally happy to chew the fat on a range of other subjects, from chasing girls as a youngster to Nirvana and the future of rock.

Congratulations on the new album. How does it feel to have it out there?

It feels really good, you know. This is the same as any album, but they take so long to get out; we recorded it in August and it was mixed in October. I’m just excited to be out here playing these songs for people. We went down and did SXSW and played seven times, but they were all these short showcases, and I’m excited to now be playing real shows to the real fans.

How did the new material go down at SXSW?

It went great and continues to go great. It’s always fun to have a new record out; you go and do a new song, and now that it’s out people jump up and sing the words, and you’re like “alright; these guys have got the record”. It feels really good.

Do you feel nervous playing songs live for the first time?

You get sort of nervous, but in some ways it’s also great because you have to pay attention a little more or be on autopilot a little less. In that sense it’s really nice; it’s kind of more of a challenge and you have to think about it, and that’s really cool. You’re maybe paying attention to different things than you are for the rest of the set, in a good way.

Why has it been four years since your last album?

We were going really hard, you know? We did five albums in seven years and toured extensively on each of them. Things were kind of fatiguing; the wheels were falling off the wagon, so to speak. I think everyone was a little tired, and creatively we weren’t in a very good place. We took a break and I made a solo record, which took some time, then we started trying to make this record. The one thing that’s different about this record is that [guitarist] Steve Selvidge joined for it. This is the first record we wrote and recorded with him, and now we have two guitar players. He had joined on the touring for the last record, but this is the first we had wrote and recorded with him. He lives in Memphis and the rest of us live in New York, so there was a bit of a geographic hurdle to get over when we started writing. It was a little formal at first, or a little forced, but we got over it eventually and wrote a ton of songs; maybe even over-writing. We had way more songs than we needed, but once our producer Nick Raskulinecz came in it happened quickly. He was like “you guys have plenty of songs for a record, let’s just go make this thing”.

What makes Steve Selvidge a good fit for The Hold Steady?

We had met him as a guitar player in an opening band years before; a band called The Bloodthirsty Lovers. Tad [Kubler, guitar] and Steve hit it off right away; they started playing guitar together and he seemed a good fit personality-wise, and then we found out that Tad and him were born on the exact same day. We thought if we were going to do a two-guitar line-up, then this was meant to be. It’s a push and pull thing between their guitars; the way they play back and forth and the way they play with each other. That’s come to define this album, and it’s a huge part of our sound now.

Do you enjoy recording or can it be a chore?

There are a lot of parts that don’t have a lot to do with me, you know? There’s a technical aspect to it, and then there are all the instruments that you aren’t playing. Depending on how you’re making the record, there can be a lot of downtime. I like making the records, but there are days which are pretty slow. I really like playing shows, so the record is a way to go out and introduce your songs to people and go out on tour again. I guess I like touring better than recording, although I love to see things fit together, and the creative moments are really fun.

What is it that appeals to you about writing about female characters in your lyrics?

For one I think so many stories we tell – whether it’s songs, books, movies or whatever – are about boy meets girl, so you need girls in there. Being of the opposite sex, there’s a mystery there for me, and I think in many books and movies the female is empowered with his mystery. Ultimately, being in a band whose audience is largely male, I need to find a way to make real women characters who you can really empathise with and that are very human. That becomes important for me.

Why do you think there are so few musicians doing the same thing?

In the big picture, I think for a lot of people lyrics are an afterthought. I’ve always been obsessed with characters in songs, and one of the things I’ve tried to do – rather than just introduce characters – is character development. Sometimes going back to these characters means I can flesh them out a bit more; that may be one of the ways that they might be a little more realised as humans.

In the song ‘On With The Business’ you mention “that American sadness”. Can you define what that is?

I got that from an interview that I read with David Foster Wallace. He’s a writer I’ve been obsessed with; I’ve read all his books and probably every interview he’s ever done. He talks about this particular American sadness, or the understanding that there’s a void inside us. There’s a realisation that no matter what we do, or what we try to fill it with – meaning drugs and alcohol or consumer goods, you know, stuff; there’s still sort of an emptiness. That song is about consumerism and about how these characters are doing whatever they can do to get ahead, and by that it means they just get more stuff. It’s the first time I’ve written about that kind of consumerism, and it made me think of the American sadness quote.

What plans do you have for touring, and can we expect an Australian trip at any point?

I’m hoping we can tour Australia either late 2014 or early 2015. We’ll be in the States for the [northern hemisphere] summer and hopefully get back to Europe in the fall; we have quite a bit of touring planned. I think we’ll probably come for your summer. Our winter, your summer would be ideal.

A couple of off-topic questions to finish up. There has been quite a resurgence in interest in Nirvana recently, surrounding the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. How much of an influence did Nirvana have in your life?

I was pretty entrenched in underground punk and hardcore music by the time Nirvana came into my life. I wasn’t an obsessive Nirvana fan; I certainly appreciated them, but I guess I was already kind of committed to that kind of thing. I have to admit that after Nirvana came out, it sort of became okay for certain girls to look at a guy like me; a more alternative guy or more weird guy. Kurt Cobain definitely helped my cause with a few girls.

Do you see them as being worthy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction so soon?

Absolutely. Even though I wasn’t obsessed with them at the time, the songs absolutely stand the test of time. He was a great, great singer and so many people held on to that and if you look at how many people he moved and the sea change they represented in the early ’90s, they are more than worthy.

The Arctic Monkeys recently claimed rock and roll has returned. How is it looking from your viewpoint?

It doesn’t seem to me to be at its most popular. I feel that younger people seem to like electronic music more, and hip hop is really big. I think the younger someone is, the less likely they are [to be] into rock and roll, but that said, I see die-hards every night we play. I don’t think it’s going anywhere and I don’t think it’s ever gone away. I think it’s always going to be here, but I don’t know if I believe if it’s ‘back’ or at a particularly strong point right now. I think probably in a couple of years a 22 year-old whiz kid will come out and capture the hearts and minds of young people, and that’s when rock and roll will have a resurgence on a commercial level. Right now I think it’s just holding steady; no pun intended.

TEETH DREAMS BY THE HOLD STEADY IS OUT NOW.

Dan Whitford of Cut Copy: “People have really embraced it”

May 1, 2014April 30, 2015 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

IT’S BEEN SOME TIME since Cut Copy played headline shows on home soil, but this is one electronic four-piece who haven’t been sitting still.

Producer, songwriter and vocalist Dan Whitford explains why the upcoming Australian shows are going to be special, and how the band has made new fans in some unexpected places.

“We went to Moscow for the first time,” he says. “We played to a room of 1500 people. It was the same in Lima, Peru; we went there a few weeks ago, and that was a voyage of discovery. But we’ve found that people know our music and we have a fanbase that is excited to see us, so we’ll try to make the effort to get in front of our fans. On one hand, we’ve seen more of the world for ourselves, and on the other we’ve expanded the places we can tour around the world. It’s grown from just doing Australian shows in the beginning to being able to play most places around the world, which is a pretty amazing thing. We were really surprised; I think it’s partly due to people listening on the Internet and that kind of thing. We weren’t aware of any radio play or anything in these places, but obviously people are managing to find our music by other means. When we went to Russia we were kind of amazed that people knew even our first record, which wasn’t our breakthrough and is a bit forgotten or obscure. We found a lot of people requesting songs from that record, and everyone knew all the words; it was quite amazing.”

The band’s latest album, Free Your Mind, was released in November, and it’s one Whitford is keen to introduce to Australian audiences.

“The last time we played in Australia was about three years ago, so we’ve totally revised our show,” he says. “We’ve got a new record out, so we’ll be performing a bunch of stuff from that, and we’ve just got a completely new lighting design, projections and visual stuff as well. Hopefully people will be excited to see something new. We’ve played festivals here in that time, but our last headline show was that long ago; I suppose because we took time to make the new record and this is the first time we’ve been able to book in some headline shows. I’m glad we’ve managed to get it happening again, because obviously we started out in Australia and tour pretty extensively all around the world these days. There are lot of opportunities for us everywhere, but we still love coming home and playing to our longer-serving fans and audiences that have been listening to us for a long time. Often when we play something new people will sort of sit there with a slightly stunned mullet look on their face. They’ll take it in, but not necessarily respond by dancing or anything. We’ve found with this new record that people have really embraced it from the beginning and have responded to the songs as if they have been listening to it for a long time, which is really good. What we look for in terms of a good show is to have people really moving and responding to what we’re doing, and it’s been really good off the bat for the new record.”

Having appeared at just about every major festival in the world, Cut Copy benefit from their music appealing to both dance and indie-rock fans.

“It’s always been a good thing,” Whitford says. “Because we’ve felt that we’ve been able to have a foot in both camps, so to speak. We don’t belong 100 percent to either; we’re strangely between worlds, and sometimes that really does work in our favour. At indie or guitar sort of festivals, playing dance music that’s a bit more energetic or upbeat can make a nice change for people, and at dance festivals where it’s mostly DJs playing, we can come out and play live music and have a more engaging show. Visually, that definitely excites people.”

The frantic pace of the touring cycle doesn’t look to let up for the Melbourne band, with a return to Australia slated for later in the year.

“We’ll be touring for most of the rest of the year,” Whitford says. “With our last record we ended up doing 180 shows in the year, but I don’t think we’re going to try to repeat that this time. Between now and the end of October or November we’ll be doing a bunch of northern hemisphere festivals, then hopefully play a bit more in Australia towards the end of the year if we’re lucky enough to get offered some festivals.”

CUT COPY PLAY:
THE METRO THEATRE, SYDNEY – MAY 8TH
170 RUSSELL, MELBOURNE – MAY 9TH
EATON’S HILL HOTEL, BRISBANE – MAY 10TH

FREE YOUR MIND IS OUT NOW.

Record review: Ball Park Music – Puddinghead (2014, LP)

April 17, 2014 / Paul McBride / 1 Comment

In some ways it seems that Brisbane indie-pop five-piece Ball Park Music have had a meteoric rise since their 2011 debut Happiness And Surrounding Suburbs. In reality the hard yards put in on tour up and down the country and a song-writing craft of a quality well above the average Australian pop bands plying their trade right now have put the band in the position they’re now in. This third album sees them moving increasingly away from the punchy, upbeat mood of their debut, as singer Sam Cromack’s lyrics explore darker topics, especially on ‘Everything Is Shit Except My Friendship With You’ and ‘Struggle Street’; the addition of organ and choral touches on the latter providing a particularly Gothic feel. Dark is contrasted with light at several other points, although hopefully Cromack is being sarcastic with his claim on third track ‘A Good Life Is The Best Revenge’, because we all know that’s not true. There are new sounds too; the first half of ‘Cocaine Lion’ could almost be called shoegaze, before breaking out into a resplendent pulse of ’90s alt-rock, while ‘Teenager Pie’ is a lazy, lounge-y track that ambles along at a hazy pace despite another set of dark lyrics. There’s an undeniable tail-off towards the end, with ‘Polly Screw My Head Back On’ and Girls From High School’ being a fairly dull finish, but Ball Park Music should probably dust off their formal gear and ready their acceptance speeches; this album is going to win awards. (Stop Start)

Record review: The Love Junkies – Flight Test (2014, EP)

April 17, 2014 / Paul McBride / Leave a comment

Perth trio The Love Junkies have been busy blowing eardrums up and down the country for the past couple of years with their sweat-drenched, everything-up-to-eleven live shows. Their 2013 debut album Maybelene was an impressively pulsating mix of grunge riffs, alt-rock face-melting and bluesy jams, and this five-track home-recorded EP continues in a similar vein – to a point. You’d be forgiven for thinking the band had gone soft with a mellow space-rock 90-second intro and the poppy opening minute of single ‘Chemical Motivation’, before the point in the song long-time fans have come to expect and love; when singer-guitarist Mitch McDonald lets rip with a throaty scream that would peel wallpaper and probably knock out a donkey at ten paces. ‘Storm Troopers’, penned by bassist Robbie Rumble, is an introspective shoegaze-y affair that never fully kicks into gear and ‘Gloria To My Dysphoria’ is a somewhat solemn, slow-burning psychedelic epic. Closer ‘Blowing On The Devil’s Strumpet’ gets closest to the vein-busting screamo found on Maybelene, and just when you think McDonald’s voice can’t hold out, he goes for another couple of verses. This is another fine release from one of Australia’s best and most promising young rock bands.

Record review: The Hold Steady – Teeth Dreams (2014, LP)

April 17, 2014 / Paul McBride / 1 Comment

It’s been four years since The Hold Steady’s last album; a long time between drinks for a band often called one of America’s hardest working. The departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay after 2008’s excellent Stay Positive left 2010’s Heaven Is Whenever sounding like a band re-grouping and consolidating their position rather than taking on a new lease of life. The breathing space Nicolay left has since been filled by the addition of former Lucero guitarist Steve Selvidge, resulting in a fatter twin lead guitar sound, but the flair and dynamism the moustachioed keyboardist took with him is still sorely missed on this sixth album from the New York via Minneapolis rockers. That being said, all the usual stories of booze-soaked lost souls “waking up with that American sadness” – as Craig Finn sings on ‘On With The Business’ – are present and correct, and the singer-guitarist’s lyrics provide more depth and ideas in a single verse than many contemporaries do on an entire album. The reason why Teeth Dreams won’t be remembered as a classic Hold Steady album is that each song melts into the one before and the one after with no real discernible difference in sound. There’s nothing of the standard of ‘Stuck Between Stations’ or ‘Sequestered In Memphis’, and even the attempt at an attention-grabbing, riff-laden opener ‘I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You’ wouldn’t qualify as a B-side on some of the quintet’s earlier work. Indeed, many long-time Hold Steady fans will be left with the nagging feeling that perhaps Nicolay left at exactly the right time.