According to Mr Tim Morrissey, head honcho of The John Steel Singers and recent tour mate (read: partner in debauchery), Deep Sea Arcade collectively possess “the largest penises in Australia”. Unfortunately (or otherwise), a Darlinghurst cafe didn't seem the best place to substantiate the claim, although Nic McKenzie, DSA’s frontman, probably wouldn't have minded too much. Possessor of a friendly face, a floppy fringe shading keen eyes, Nic is “absolutely rock bottom broke at the moment”. He has a tendency to erupt into an endearing cackle when something piques his fancy and dreams of “rolling down rolling hills” – preferably in New Zealand, a nation near the top of his ‘to visit’ hitlist.
DSA is the pop-rock baby of McKenzie and school friend and bass player Nick Weaver, the pair sharing music writing duties while the former arduously polishes the lyrics himself. Drawing on a shared love for groups such as The Smiths, The Kinks, and The Beatles as well as assorted nineties Brit-pop, the pair are certainly adept at effective hook construction. Theirs is a pop music of watery, reverb-soaked daydreams, its surface buoyancy undercut by lyrics with a tendency to dwell on the twisted longings of the unconscious.
“I spend a lot of time on lyrics,” says McKenzie, “I’m a perfectionist when it comes to that … I try and make them about something ambiguous so that you can bring your own experience to them. I think that that’s actually how you communicate with people, that’s how you make something an interesting piece of work to experience, not just a self-indulgent write-it-for-yourself … Often I write about stories and how I’m feeling as well … I certainly don’t just write about my experience, I bring my experience to what I’m writing about.”
Less interested in pouring his battered soul onto a tape recorder than lending slices of reality an edge that is slightly creepy, manic and grinning, McKenzie’s method seems to be working. Singles ‘Crouch End’, ‘Don’t Be Sorry’ and ‘Lonely In Your Arms’ have received widespread radio airplay, their wholesome musical vibe recalling for many the easy-going sound of sixties surf bands. McKenzie however is bemused by the comparison: “to be completely honest, I haven’t ever been a big fan of surf music. People say that surf music comes out in our sound, but I guess it’s just an accident. That’s the honest truth. I’m not aiming to write surf music. It just so happens that some of the songs have that vibe.”
Perhaps it’s just a by-product of the DSA Writing and Recording Standard Operating Procedure, in which McKenzie and Weaver immediately demo newly minted songs before re-tracking and mixing as necessary under the watchful eye of producer Simon Berkleman (of Philadelphia Grand Jury). Of utmost import is the desire to maintain the home-recorded quality of the demos, which will be showcased on the band’s forthcoming eight track mini-album, slated for release in March.
“For the mini-album we’re absolutely embracing DIY”, says McKenzie. “It feels like a good thing to do, having some way of bridging the singles that we’ve released but keeping that flavour and vibe. For the album [we’ll] step up the production quality, [but] it would be a shame not to release that kind of DIY home recorded thing as a whole entity as well … We wanted to capture that rawness. Demo-itis exists because you come up with a lyric, you record it and there’s a naturalness and a vibe that you just can’t recreate. That’s the thing that we want, we want to have a mini-album that is our own masterpiece and then license it and put it out.”
Indeed, McKenzie is committed to keeping DSA a truly indie band for as long as is practical, self-funding and licensing the band’s recordings to ensure any revenue returns to the group. “[It’s] off our own bat which feels good” he remarks. “It’s hard to do that with an album because it’s like twelve songs and you actually need to have a budget, but for a mini-album you can do it on a shoe-string budget.”
Not that remaining independent is by any means easy, all band members keeping their day jobs (McKenzie works as a freelance film editor, making the DSA video clips himself) to support their music. “For so many bands, that is a real struggle … That’s the shit thing about being in an indie band in Australia. I mean, we’re not out to make money, but it’s difficult, and not many people want to talk about it … the cost of it is never ending, you’re always having to pay some kind of overhead … It’s not about the money, it’s just about being able to keep on going. If you could break even for ever than that would be cool, but the reality is that it’s difficult even doing that.”
The main thing however is to focus on what’s important: the debauchery. Although DSA has toured extensively over the last eighteen months – supporting Cloud Control, Hungry Kids of Hungary and Blue Juice among others – McKenzie drools uncontrollably at the prospect of the band’s upcoming tour with Surf City, the Sydney show at Oxford Art Factory promising to be a unique experience.
“We’ve been working a lot on our live show, it’s become kind of a bit of an obsession for me… I saw Jinja Safari at Peat’s Ridge and was blown away by their live show. When I saw their show, it just felt like the energy never lagged. That’s something that I want, having a live show that never lags, is just full of flavour and has different atmospheric things … creating this sort of ambience that’s relentless that can be experienced from beginning to end. "That’s the thing that I’ve got in my head, that’s driving me, and making me want to do it."
First published in The Brag, Issue 397, January 31st 2011
Deep Sea Arcade are supporting Surf City at the Oxford Arts Factory this coming Friday the 11th.
Happy Happy Fun Times: Evil Bee!; Best Eerily Compelling Mind And Space Traversing Fictional Exploration of Consciousness Eva; Summer Cooling Drink of Yumness.
Showing posts with label John Steel Singers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Steel Singers. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Monday, December 6, 2010
Summer Sounds With A Bit Of Bite - John Steel Singers
It’s a quarter to eleven on an unseasonally hot October morning and the John Steel Singers are running late. A punishing schedule of press meetings arranged ahead of the release of their long-awaited debut Tangalooma have proved no match for delayed flights and Sydney’s traffic. The Surry Hills offices of their label Dew Process are pleasant enough though, and before long, trimly hirsute frontman Tim Morrissey and spectacularly afro-ed drummer Ross Chandler are ushered in - gratefully clutching cups of instant coffee and muttering about time zones and sleep deprivation. “I’ve been up since a quarter to five this morning,” murmurs Morrissey, “so I’m a little bit tired – we lose an hour cause of daylight savings.” Despite his lethargy Morrissey is all business, carefully sticking to talking points while Ross seems content to sit in the corner, offering occasional clarification. “I’m a very quiet person,” he explains simply.
Expectations have been percolating for the JSS for some time now. The band was formed close to five years ago by Brisbane natives Morrissey and fellow songwriter Scott Bromiley, the project being named in homage to Morrissey’s childhood toy horse, John Steel. “I wanted to start a band since about grade eight,” he says, eyes boring intently through his glasses. “I didn’t know how to play anything so I would just write songs in my head. I would meet people, and I was always trying to envisage them in my band, but it wasn’t until I was actually twenty years old that I met Scott… He ended up teaching me some guitar, and we ended up forming a band after that.”
From this seed the pair gradually expanded the line-up (currently stabilised at an even six), juggling personnel (“we’re like Spinal Tap with bass players”), incorporating brass (a move that was “never intentional”), cutting their teeth through some persistent touring up and down the east coast while developing their own idiosyncratic style with a pair of EPs and mini-album. And acclaim began to flow, the band taking out triple j’s Unearthed Artist of the Year award back in 2008, while garnering a reputation among punters for live sets brimming with youthful exuberance and prodigious quantities of hair.
It’s odd then that their debut long player Tangalooma, a collection of breezy pop songs buoyed by some creative arrangements and tempered with lyrical bite, has taken so long to emerge. “We’ve always taken a long time to do things,” says Morrissey. “We never did any really rough early demos, we just went into the studio after we’d saved up enough money to do it, and I think that was a little bit like the same thing with the album – we wanted to make sure we could do it the way we wanted to do it.” The album was actually mixed and mastered by October last year. After that, he says, the “music industry side of things” took over. “It has definitely been a year longer than we hoped,” he continues, “but that has its benefits as well – in that year we’ve been writing new songs, and the next album definitely won’t take as long as this one did.”
In order to get the right sound on the record, the band were fortunate in being able to call on the talents of Robert Forster; producer, critic, songwriter, and one of Morrissey’s musical idols. “The Fire and Flood benefit up in Brisbane was on, and we were playing and Robert was also on the bill,” he explains. Forster’s drummer Glen Thompson and bassist Adele Pickvance weren’t available, “so he actually asked us if we wanted to be his backing band. For people who are massive Go-Betweens fans, to [be] asked to play Go-Betweens songs as Robert Forster’s backing band, that opportunity doesn’t come around very often … [it] was bloody surreal,” Morrissey says. “We wanted to get a producer and Robert’s name came up, and we were like, ‘yeah! Let’s do it!’”
The result is one of the best Australian releases in a year that has seen no shortage of strong debuts. Morrissey claims inspiration from sources as diverse as David Byrne, Ray Davies and The Kinks and widely influential English post-punk group Wire. He also pays due respect to the morphing euphoria of post-rock pioneers Talk Talk, with the moody atmospherics of Spirit of Eden being an important shaping force for Tangalooma, particularly its closing track, ‘Sleep’. “I guess the album’s pretty densely layered so there’s parts you’re not necessarily aware of,” says Morrissey, “Nicholas [Vernhes] the engineer [who’s previously worked with Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Spoon] probably stripped away a lot of unnecessary stuff as well… Hopefully it sounds like John Steel Singers, and hopefully whether we flop or go well it’ll rest on us sounding like the John Steel Singers.”
While the JSS sound is generally bright and bouncy, lyrically Tangalooma delves into darker territory. Although it’s “definitely not a concept album”, Morrissey and Bromiley’s thoughtful and literate lyrics draw on a shared fascination with Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer winner The Denial of Death - exploring ideas of mortality, desire and the stories people tell themselves to stay sane in a material world. “Both Scott and I were getting to a time in our lives when we were experiencing similar anxieties about the nature of everything,” explains Morrissey. “You sort of have to lie, have a vital lie to keep yourself going as a human being … most functioning humans lie to themselves about certain things, but everyone does it and it’s vital to being human… I dunno, I’m not very good at explaining this out loud!”
Rather than buying into any of the solutions offered by the world of the gainfully employed, the John Steel Singers seem intent on becoming their own heroes (as the caped horses adorning the cover art of Tangalooma might suggest), throwing themselves into the musical lifestyle with total dedication. The forecast for their next year is a whirlwind of touring, writing and recording. “I worked out the other day that I’d only, in my twenty-seven years, worked about three or four months at most of full-time work in, like, jobs,” says Morrissey. “So, as long as I can avoid doing that for as long as possible, that would be excellent.”
Expectations have been percolating for the JSS for some time now. The band was formed close to five years ago by Brisbane natives Morrissey and fellow songwriter Scott Bromiley, the project being named in homage to Morrissey’s childhood toy horse, John Steel. “I wanted to start a band since about grade eight,” he says, eyes boring intently through his glasses. “I didn’t know how to play anything so I would just write songs in my head. I would meet people, and I was always trying to envisage them in my band, but it wasn’t until I was actually twenty years old that I met Scott… He ended up teaching me some guitar, and we ended up forming a band after that.”
From this seed the pair gradually expanded the line-up (currently stabilised at an even six), juggling personnel (“we’re like Spinal Tap with bass players”), incorporating brass (a move that was “never intentional”), cutting their teeth through some persistent touring up and down the east coast while developing their own idiosyncratic style with a pair of EPs and mini-album. And acclaim began to flow, the band taking out triple j’s Unearthed Artist of the Year award back in 2008, while garnering a reputation among punters for live sets brimming with youthful exuberance and prodigious quantities of hair.
It’s odd then that their debut long player Tangalooma, a collection of breezy pop songs buoyed by some creative arrangements and tempered with lyrical bite, has taken so long to emerge. “We’ve always taken a long time to do things,” says Morrissey. “We never did any really rough early demos, we just went into the studio after we’d saved up enough money to do it, and I think that was a little bit like the same thing with the album – we wanted to make sure we could do it the way we wanted to do it.” The album was actually mixed and mastered by October last year. After that, he says, the “music industry side of things” took over. “It has definitely been a year longer than we hoped,” he continues, “but that has its benefits as well – in that year we’ve been writing new songs, and the next album definitely won’t take as long as this one did.”
In order to get the right sound on the record, the band were fortunate in being able to call on the talents of Robert Forster; producer, critic, songwriter, and one of Morrissey’s musical idols. “The Fire and Flood benefit up in Brisbane was on, and we were playing and Robert was also on the bill,” he explains. Forster’s drummer Glen Thompson and bassist Adele Pickvance weren’t available, “so he actually asked us if we wanted to be his backing band. For people who are massive Go-Betweens fans, to [be] asked to play Go-Betweens songs as Robert Forster’s backing band, that opportunity doesn’t come around very often … [it] was bloody surreal,” Morrissey says. “We wanted to get a producer and Robert’s name came up, and we were like, ‘yeah! Let’s do it!’”
The result is one of the best Australian releases in a year that has seen no shortage of strong debuts. Morrissey claims inspiration from sources as diverse as David Byrne, Ray Davies and The Kinks and widely influential English post-punk group Wire. He also pays due respect to the morphing euphoria of post-rock pioneers Talk Talk, with the moody atmospherics of Spirit of Eden being an important shaping force for Tangalooma, particularly its closing track, ‘Sleep’. “I guess the album’s pretty densely layered so there’s parts you’re not necessarily aware of,” says Morrissey, “Nicholas [Vernhes] the engineer [who’s previously worked with Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Spoon] probably stripped away a lot of unnecessary stuff as well… Hopefully it sounds like John Steel Singers, and hopefully whether we flop or go well it’ll rest on us sounding like the John Steel Singers.”
While the JSS sound is generally bright and bouncy, lyrically Tangalooma delves into darker territory. Although it’s “definitely not a concept album”, Morrissey and Bromiley’s thoughtful and literate lyrics draw on a shared fascination with Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer winner The Denial of Death - exploring ideas of mortality, desire and the stories people tell themselves to stay sane in a material world. “Both Scott and I were getting to a time in our lives when we were experiencing similar anxieties about the nature of everything,” explains Morrissey. “You sort of have to lie, have a vital lie to keep yourself going as a human being … most functioning humans lie to themselves about certain things, but everyone does it and it’s vital to being human… I dunno, I’m not very good at explaining this out loud!”
Rather than buying into any of the solutions offered by the world of the gainfully employed, the John Steel Singers seem intent on becoming their own heroes (as the caped horses adorning the cover art of Tangalooma might suggest), throwing themselves into the musical lifestyle with total dedication. The forecast for their next year is a whirlwind of touring, writing and recording. “I worked out the other day that I’d only, in my twenty-seven years, worked about three or four months at most of full-time work in, like, jobs,” says Morrissey. “So, as long as I can avoid doing that for as long as possible, that would be excellent.”
First Published in The Brag, Iss. 390, December 6th 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Tame Impala, The John Steel Singers @ Enmore Theatre, Thursday October 14
Three years ago, the friend I brought along tonight saw Tame Impala play in a scunge ridden hole in the wall at Hoxton, to about fifty of London’s most in-the-know drop-outs. Oh how things have changed. The hordes were out in force tonight, Kevin Parker and Co. pulling an apparently sell-out crowd to the Enmore.
Brisbane’s The John Steel Singers have their live set nailed down at the moment, ripping through a medley of material from the soon-to-be-released debut that we’re all hanging out for. They didn’t get the crowd quite as revved up tonight as they have in the past, however; a lack of engagement with the audience, coupled with a certain sense of going-through-the-motions combined to prevent lift-off, in spite of the guest appearance by Tame Impala drummer Jay Watson (double kit action! woo!) for signature track ‘Rainbow Kraut’. Perhaps the band are saving it up for their album launch tour – or the crowd simply hadn’t had enough bevvies.
A half hour later and Perth’s Tame Impala amble onto stage, blowing straight through ‘It Is Not Meant To Be’ and ‘Solitude Is Bliss’. The band have a tendency to play their songs considerably slower live than the recorded versions – and these songs in particular – and the results are laid-back, verging on horizontal.
Fortunately, those unable to concentrate on anything else (hi, how’s it going) could simply sit back and pick out shapes (the ABC logo, love hearts and the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters were all observed) in the synchronised projections that accompanied the expansive, abstract jams that filled out bulk of the show. Although their cover of ‘Remember Me’ is beginning to reach its use-by date, it was great to hear ‘Glass Half Full Of Wine’ off the Tame Impala EP.
But if the JSS had difficulty engaging with this crowd, a spotlight-illumined Kevin Parker barely tried, a tight sense of scripted control emanating from his corner of the stage, accompanied by the odd monosyllabic grunt. An almost total lack of affect succeeded in keeping an entire theatre of fans at arm’s length – not that they seemed to realise. Tame Impala make admirable music. Bloody difficult to warm to, but.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 385, September 25th 2010
Brisbane’s The John Steel Singers have their live set nailed down at the moment, ripping through a medley of material from the soon-to-be-released debut that we’re all hanging out for. They didn’t get the crowd quite as revved up tonight as they have in the past, however; a lack of engagement with the audience, coupled with a certain sense of going-through-the-motions combined to prevent lift-off, in spite of the guest appearance by Tame Impala drummer Jay Watson (double kit action! woo!) for signature track ‘Rainbow Kraut’. Perhaps the band are saving it up for their album launch tour – or the crowd simply hadn’t had enough bevvies.
A half hour later and Perth’s Tame Impala amble onto stage, blowing straight through ‘It Is Not Meant To Be’ and ‘Solitude Is Bliss’. The band have a tendency to play their songs considerably slower live than the recorded versions – and these songs in particular – and the results are laid-back, verging on horizontal.
Fortunately, those unable to concentrate on anything else (hi, how’s it going) could simply sit back and pick out shapes (the ABC logo, love hearts and the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters were all observed) in the synchronised projections that accompanied the expansive, abstract jams that filled out bulk of the show. Although their cover of ‘Remember Me’ is beginning to reach its use-by date, it was great to hear ‘Glass Half Full Of Wine’ off the Tame Impala EP.
But if the JSS had difficulty engaging with this crowd, a spotlight-illumined Kevin Parker barely tried, a tight sense of scripted control emanating from his corner of the stage, accompanied by the odd monosyllabic grunt. An almost total lack of affect succeeded in keeping an entire theatre of fans at arm’s length – not that they seemed to realise. Tame Impala make admirable music. Bloody difficult to warm to, but.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 385, September 25th 2010
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