The sixth album from this Californian hard rock band solidifies its reputation for consistency. Though founding singer-guitarist Josh Homme is the only ongoing member, he has become known for attracting a rotating cast of accomplished players since the band’s self-titled debut in 1998.
This time he has re-enlisted master sticksman Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) to keep time, after first trialling this experiment for 2002’s Songs for the Deaf, widely regarded as QOTSA’s finest album. (It helped that the pair hooked up with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones in 2009, too, as Them Crooked Vultures.)
As expected, it’s an inspired decision, one that sets the tone for yet another compelling collection. Songs such as ‘If I Had a Tail’ and ‘Smooth Sailing’ swagger with a momentum that only Homme and his comrades can muster. First single ‘My God is the Sun’ is the weakest of these 10 tracks; the real gold is buried towards the back.
‘I Appear Missing’ and the closing, title track exceed five minutes and hark back to the expansive suites that featured on the band’s excellent second album, 2000’s Rated R. Homme has long since learned that rock music is all about contrasts: atmosphere is just as important as breakneck chord changes.
“One thing that is clear / It’s all downhill from here,” he sings in the album’s final lyric; he must be taking the piss because six hits and no misses is as remarkable a scorecard as you’ll find among bands of any genre.
There are bands with distinctive sounds, and then there’s Sigur Ros. These Icelandic gentlemen have produced seven albums, including Kveikur (pronounced ‘quaker’, meaning candlewick in the mother tongue); and with each successive release they further distance themselves from any other act, past or present.
Formed in 1994, Sigur Ros has long been associated with the post-rock genre that favours sprawling, intricate compositions eschewing traditional verse-chorus structures. Kveikur is the group’s strongest album yet. It’s certainly Sigur Ros’s most accessible collection. Nine tracks, 48 minutes in total; only the closer, ‘Var’ (Shelter), is forgettable: a wordless, aimless dead-end of sunken, delayed piano notes and sighing strings.
The other eight tracks are thrilling, powerful and inspiring. The nature of the cinematic sound, coupled with the band members’ Icelandic heritage, inevitably conjures mental images of snow-capped mountains and glaciers. Its winter release is ideal. Here, the former quintet is reduced to a three-piece for the first time. Jon Por Birgisson’s incomparable falsetto and bowed guitar playing practically defines this band; even his solo album, 2010’s Go, was virtually indistinguishable from the Sigur Ros catalogue.
Only Georg Holm (bass) and Orri Pall Dyrason (drums) accompany him here, yet you’d never guess that based on the complexity of the production. Layered strings, clattering percussion and soaring sampled effects run through these songs, as best exemplified on second single ‘Isjaki’ (Iceberg). This is excellent music, unlike anything else on earth. For the uninitiated, Kveikur is the ideal starting point.
ANDREW MCMILLEN revisits our occasional “Storytellers” series, whose premise is simple: one song by one artist, discussed at length. This week it’s Gotye, the Lana Del Rey of M+N, but not for the song you might expect.
It feels a little strange to revisit what was once Gotye’s biggest hit in light of the monster that is ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, the Melbourne-based songwriter’s 2011 collaboration with Kimbra which topped the Hottest 100 and has since clocked up more than 63-million views on YouTube since being posted last July.
Yet without that track’s runaway success, Wally de Backer might not have felt as comfortable in discussing ‘Hearts A Mess’, the third track from his 2006 album Like Drawing Blood.
When I first approached de Backer via email in May 2010 to raise the possibility of a Storytellers feature about this song, he declined, stating that, “I’ve talked about that song a lot, and I’m working on new stuff, trying not to look back at the moment.” I picked up the thread again in September 2011 and found him in a place where he seems more than happy to look back.
Between overseas trips and a 10-date Australian tour, we spoke at length over the phone about the track that charted at #77 on triple j’s Hottest 100 Of All Time countdown in 2009.
Gotye on ‘Hearts A Mess’
‘Hearts A Mess’, with apostrophe, not without, correct?
[Laughs] To be honest, I think the lack of an apostrophe was just an oversight. Which, for me – someone who’s fairly fastidious with grammar – it’s quite hilarious. It was an oversight at first, then I just decided to leave it.
Does that mean your high school English teachers are cursing your name for making such a simple mistake?
[Laughs] It’s funny. I’m actually in touch with my Year 9 high school English teacher reasonably regularly. He sends me [album] covers to sign for his friends in random places like Scotland and South Africa. He’s never mentioned that before. [Laughs]
Do you feel like you’re in a good place to reflect on this song now, after it’s been superseded by a bigger hit?
I guess so, yeah. I guess the songs are kind of related; the place in the track list on the respective records, the kind of emotional terrain, my own possible scruples while putting together this record [Like Drawing Blood], wondering whether the song ‘Hearts A Mess’ was the high watermark of what I want to achieve with my music – at least in terms of the response from people, the connection with it. So that’s been interesting to see [‘Somebody’] take off and eclipse it, from one perspective.
I believe ‘Hearts A Mess’ was two years in the making. Is that correct?
Yeah. It’s like a macro example of my whole process. It spanned the whole making of the last record.
Where do you start, with a song like that? The final product is so smooth and seemingly effortless, but I know there are so many layers going on underneath.
Well, quite specifically, I started with laboriously editing multiple snippets of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat’ song [embedded below] into a coherent, one-bar loop of music. That was an interesting process in itself. I’ve never edited bits out of a track so extensively, to then reconstitute them into such a small amount of music; that one bar. For whatever reason, when I heard the possibility of chopping around Belafonte’s vocals to get into the backing track of that recording, and turn that into a loop to underpin a possible track … I don’t know. Right from the start, that loping groove had something for me that felt – how can I describe it? Like it had something special about it. I felt the desire to keep that specialness right to whatever the end product, whatever the song would become. That pulled me forward through the pretty extreme length of finishing the song.
It’s almost like I committed myself; in that regard, I feel like ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ is quite similar, to a lesser extent, because the little two-note guitar lines from the Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá that I sampled [in ‘Somebody’] also started that song off. It didn’t necessarily have as much of a hypnotic pull for me as that bar loop that underpins ‘Hearts A Mess’. It still felt the same thing. I was like, “This has an aura about it that I can’t quite describe, and I just need to not fuck that up. And anything I add feels like it has to enhance that and feel like it stays with that initial aura that I sense, whatever it is”. In both instances, that would lead me through to the final song.
How much live instrumentation was recorded?
For ‘Hearts A Mess’? None. Oh, not true. The shakers are played by me. [Laughs]
At what point did you begin introducing lyrics to the equation?
I can’t remember whether it was before or after I had some of the “hook” figure, like the Hammond line that’s in there. I think it might have been before. I basically had that kind of loop from the ‘Banana Boat’ song, and I had some textural things like the lofty string bits that provided a sense of the chord progression over that loop. Then I started bits of the verse, and found bits of strings that would give some of the descending chord progression the turnarounds throughout the song … There’s an interim bit in the song with the lyric, “Love ain’t fair/So there you are/My love.” I had that penned as an anti-chorus for the song. The chorus was written quite late, and I had it penned as a textural piece that just had these little drops, that functioned as anti-choruses for probably the good first six months to a year of it sitting around, as a piece.
In the second verse there’s a bit of call-and-response going on between your vocals. What was the intention there? Was that the narrator arguing with himself?
Yeah, as it usually is. Possibly even more so on tracks from the new record [Making Mirrors]. There’s kind of multi-voice conversations happening in a few songs, which I think usually represents the various internal dialogues that sometimes can go on in my head, or the discussions that you sometimes have with yourself: second-guessing yourself, playing devil’s advocate.
A news story for the March 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. Click the below scanned image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.
Jebediah Returns From Hiatus
Much-loved Perth rockers prepare for fully-fledged comeback with fifth LP
By Andrew McMillen
Instruments in hand, four Perth musicians glance nervously at the ceiling as debris falls around them. Overhead, a Godzilla-like monster trades blows with Comet Girl, a costumed vigilante who’s fighting a losing battle. All looks lost until another superhero arrives: Jebediah! The two heroes join forces to vanquish their foe.
Embedded deep in the realms of fantasy – a warehouse in Sydney’s inner suburbs – the real Jebediah, Perth’s celebrated alt-rock outfit, are shooting their first video in more than six years. “She’s Like A Comet” is the second single from the band’s fifth album, Koscuiszko, due in April. Between takes, drummer Brett Mitchell laughs about the “contrived” nature of music videos. Earlier, he was attempting to drum along to the song at a precise speed of 145 per cent in order to capture some slow-motion footage. A few hours into the shoot, as frontman Kevin Mitchell sings into a microphone placed just inches away from a camera, one of the crew expresses his surprise that the singer is so willing to be filmed: he’d heard of Mitchell was camera-shy. “They must have been being sarcastic!” bassist Vanessa Thornton laughs.
Amid a worldwide climate of once-popular acts reforming for cash, Jebediah – completed by lead guitarist Chris Daymond – are different: they never broke up. Though their last release was 2004’s Braxton Hicks, they’ve played a handful of shows per year, and 2010 was no different: the day after their video shoot, they played to a packed Annandale Hotel, before doing the same at The Zoo in Brisbane. With a seven-year gap between albums, the band is relishing the new material.
“This one’s easily the most fun I’ve had making a Jebs record since the very first one [1997’s Slightly Odway], and I also think it’s the most playful we’ve been in the studio,” says Kevin Mitchell. “It’s the closest thing to the first album, where we made a record without considering anyone except ourselves.”
The sixth album from this Californian hard rock band solidifies its reputation for consistency. Though founding singer-guitarist Josh Homme is the only ongoing member, he has become known for attracting a rotating cast of accomplished players since the band’s self-titled debut in 1998.
There are bands with distinctive sounds, and then there’s Sigur Ros. These Icelandic gentlemen have produced seven albums, including Kveikur (pronounced ‘quaker’, meaning candlewick in the mother tongue); and with each successive release they further distance themselves from any other act, past or present.
