two men scale a hill

Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

There's really no mountain here, not even a hill. I think if you had to spatially imagine this band it would be more horizontal, more like an ocean I think. Nevermind.

To begin: At Mount Zoomer is cleaved. Whereas, for me at least, it was difficult to tell if it were Boeckner or Krug singing on Apologies to the Queen Mary, each and every song on this album clocks on with full vocalist (and lyricist) details from the outset. And there's this annoying habit of having them one after the other, in this kind of two-man baton pass but I'm not really sure what the baton is or where they're going. Anyway, I think it's clearly an (unintended?) effect of their growing solo careers in Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown particularly, who have both released in the interim. They're staking out a territory and putting up flags - sure, fighting over the same general chunk of land, but it's like a Starcraft map with a river separating the two of them. Whereas something like Beast Moans (paging Krug) approached music creation as an antagonistic process of coming together, At Mount Zoomer seems to propose that gaps are inevitable, well, that they at least grow from somewhere and then it's like tectonic plates at the surface, when the road cracks and splits and gapes. I hope I find a bridge.

blog club seven!

Thanks to emmy for the opportunity.

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

Spring, eh? Anyway, time to get thoroughly autobiographical and live out the contradictions to two posts prior. Indulge me.


Die! Die! Die! - Sideways Here We Come
2008 begins and ends with Promises, Promises (literally, and musically); I'm quite sure that nothing will surpass it for me that I don't think I'll go through that arbitrary and thankless year end list exercise. So I've picked this one from the album because it is the most obvious and continually burrows itself through my consciousness/conscience but truth told I could have picked anything from this album, even Whitehorses. And I do admit that it is very hard to dissect this song, because for real it has become biomechanic - it would be like trying to pick apart your insides - do you know that feeling? But fuck it, let's try. It starts principally with the drums, fuck those drums like pounding pounding pounding, I'm losing articulate abilities here, and it's not the first time. But oh well, to continue... Or why bother, when "Some things are best left blind; darling I'll try make you mine" Oh yeah you're probably snarking to yourself, thinking that's real cute and quite trite almost for how obvious it looks as you scan across those lines. Fucking listen. Fuck you. Okay, sorry. Carried away, once again. I don't think I can really do this right now, so I'll just leave it with an observation from the horse's mouth:

"Sideways Here We Come was actually [written] a day before [recording the album]. Yeah, it was the last song we wrote on the album. What I found really funny was that was the song that was gonna be left off the album because we weren't gonna finish it, and that one - the structure’s actually not kinda finished."

Seams, yeah - all the time, it just seems set to come apart and show its guts, and yet it is sutured just by pure force and emotion. This is the dialectic of Die! Die! Die! Nothing can beat this down, except itself.


No Kids - For Halloween
Where's this coming from? It's like harmony groups just found the keys to amazing beats and lyrics and collegiate ennui and they all just partied. It's like, get up to the downbeat, that superflat bass drum that just trips its away all through the paths and summer houses and ends up somewhere where slow, middle, and fast just unite in all their great ways.


Portishead - Silence
There are a lot of things that can and have been said about Third but I'll just leave mine as a little footnote to an already out of control mythos. And mine doesn't go far, well, it can't - Portishead won't let me. For two reasons: this is the first - and best - song on the album, and second, it ends in a way that just cuts you off to everything but it. I'm not sure how to describe this - because it's not like falling off a cliff. You fall off a cliff you know where you're going and usually you're going down and you see the chasm that you fall into and it's all quite a drawn out process actually (it usually takes a good few minutes in movies, at least). Well this is isn't a cliff. It's a ... fuck, what is it? Because it strings you along, literally - rising strings, a beat that just nods your head constantly, pulling over for a brief break before returning to the course and an amazing guitar lick creeps in and then some heavier strings and you're like, wow [4.30], this [4.41] is [4.48] ... 4.59! What?! Where did it go? I'm not sure, maybe it's like being thrown into a void, and it seems like the time they choose at which to throw you was completely arbitrary and yet fully calculated (like, why bother doing it at 4.59? - that is both way too obvious and yet perfect). And it's maybe more like limbo, because there's nowhere left for me to go when I reach this point. What comes after 59? Naught.


Chromatics - Running Up That Hill (cf. Kate Bush)
It's a funny thing, this - how does it all work when a cover is the first thing you hear? In the great 'pop covers' rulebook that is sitting dusty on some shelf up the back of some official building that not many people visit anymore, there's a section about covers having to 'add something' to the original. Well, how does this go when you've never heard the original? When Running Up That Hill you first heard (to complicate things even further) on the Placebo Covers album, fitting the general pattern of what that band was only ever good for - making human relations truly alien - and that was what you took as your template (maybe it fits)? Not the banging, crashing mess of a thing by Bush that you only first heard on vinyl a week or so ago, which, actually, you didn't really like? Well, maybe it's like preposterous history. It's like you only know or care about the original because not only has the cover 'added' to it, it has literally made it. The cover is the original. And the original is great, too, beamed in on a post-urban record player, floating lyrics and metallic puttering basslines bringing it all to its most cinematic fullness.


Thom Yorke - Black Swan
I know this may seem like I'm stealing, but honestly I'm not, just following the precepts laid down by the almighty meme. And meme directs me to enjoyment (a fuzzy category that only pertains in tangential ways to most of what is on this 'list') - and I must say I quite enjoy this song. And only for one reason - A Scanner Darkly. This song and that movie are like this amazing conjuncture in which two perceived wrongs truly made a right. Because, initially, I was avert to both these works - both were just, well, too schematic? Too obvious. "It should be obvious, but it's not". And then they came together - Darkly pulled a moral and a purpose out of the preceding near-two hours of mess, and Black Swan snapped into focus as the credits rolled and they became perfect partners. I can't quite describe what happened at this exact moment, but suffice to say, I love both. "People get crushed like biscuitcrumbs".


The The - This Is The Day
This is the day
Your life will surely change!
This is the day
Your life will surely change!


Joanna Newsom - Peach, Plum, Pear
I'm really not sure where to start here. Well, I stumbled upon this song one day whilst forcing myself to listen to The Milk-Eyed Mender once again, an album I find I have a very conflicted relationship to, so much that I've never really gotten past Sadie, the fourth track. Well, things have their way and it happened that I made it all the way up until this song, the ninth. And what a time to happen upon this, what a perfect time. It grabbed me and shook me seconds inwards, as the harpischord lights up after the preceding bundle of harp strings, placating and quiet for eight long songs. Drastic, urgent - that doesn't even begin to approach what I'm hearing. Always twice, too, for some reason, even on the very first listen, I am compelled to press rewind, to avoid the saccharine Swansea (well, musically at least - but that's always the first thing we perceive, isn't it?) and hear whatever I do again, often with as much force. Yes I hold to a notion of music coming from without and directing me, I'm not sure if this is idealistic but this is Peach, Plum, Pear, don't you hear it? It bleeds with pathos, things just all seem like they're breaking as they roll on insistent, and then they turn:

This was unlike the story
It was written to be
I was riding its back
When it used to ride me

And yet who is controlling who here? Where does the power in this song lie? Now no now no now no now no now no now; is that what (s)he is saying? "Galloping manic" to a point ahead that seems distant and yet forever imminent, it hits! Dozens of Joannas come out in full-blown force, clipping the edges of the recording and breaking beyond the barriers of what once barely contained it:

And IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII am blue!! [wait...]
I am blue!!! and unwell

Scream it! Or whisper it screaming if you're on the train replacement coach that takes an hour and a half longer. Things break down here, it's like the literary facade propping up this whole ornate (and yet very simple) structure beforehand just gets blown away by this wind. The only moment where a fucking hurting, knowing, feeling human comes out of the pixie forest and makes themselves be known. And it is hard, and harsh, and it cracks and scratches but it is catharsis. And for once that term is fully apt (look it up properly and just watch the connections fire). Because things slow down again, regain their calm ("Now it's done..."), and yet their is an indelible mark, no matter the metaphors that one tries to cover it with:

Peach, plum, pear
Peach, plum, ...


Time to go: garage, incurable, cmg (lol), cassettes, .al, rose, mechanics - hehe hope you haven't been memed yet, apologies, my circle is small.

talkin at me

You know this ad, right? Fucking annoying thing it is, too, I know - along with those godawful Optus ads featuring animals carrying out surveillance in cranky Telstra customer's homes, the telcos have the 'most nerve-wrenching commercials' categories tied up. Anyway, I think the wonderful thing about this ad (viewable here, if you are tricky enough to click 'Small & Medium Business' or 'Enterprise & Government') is how it dramatises the condition of these 'classic' Gold FM ditties. Because no one actually does remember the original lyrics (or artist) of the song it so shamelessly tears apart and rewrites according to its control society telematic narrative - this ad thematises the way in which this sort of music is so completely divorced from any original context and just floats around disanchored in our culture as a little harmony or rhyme or snatched lyric, ready and waiting to be snatched up by some misguided Telstra ad-man. Its lyric-sheet might as well read:

everybody's talking at me
i hear every word they're saying
with my phone and laptop combined

people conference call me
i can see there faces
send them files every time

etc. etc.

(btw, it was Harry Nilsson who sang it 'originally')
(btw, how did we ever conduct business without this array of highly useless-looking technologies? The answer, of course, is that we did. Telstra always seem so desperate to concoct practices that never really need practicing)

they have a secret world

I think the brilliant thing about M83's Saturdays = Youth is how it imagines teenagehood specifically as some amazingly poetic and romantic and idyllic time when in fact it never was. We live our relationship to our young selves through nothing other than the dioramae of nostalgic popular culture such as this, which sets a scene (full of sultry night air, violent romance and meaning, so much meaning) that never really existed. The album itself never quite gets to this youth it so insistently turns upon, the space it is looking for which is also a time, and that itself is profoundly melancholic and beautiful. I listen to You, Appearing and the rest of it all with bad teenage poetry lyrics and heavy solipsism and I just marvel at the time, the beauty, that becomes mist (and it certainly does after a few listens, losing all of its evocative force when you realise the rickety structure it is built upon - but you still have that initial moment, the youth of this album, which you remember as an idyllic time, and you find yourself looking for it, and on).

corporate rox

Just having a moment here, sorry...

Fuck I am sick of all these new pop stars that have come up grass roots style off social networks and the like. I don't care whether they do it themselves genuinely or if some marketing machine cooks it up, it's just terrible anyway. This whole ground up, 'DIY' thing where they post pictures of themselves with witty captions and blog about their life, I really don't care to know. I like my pop thoroughly adherent to the discursive division between public and private, in which the latter can only sublimate through songs. Here's to well-manufactured, primmed music celebrities whose minders actually hold back from throwing themselves all over the Internet. Get off my Internets!

(talkin' bout this, and this was the archetype)

reading sound

Whilst of course not a simple march of succession, the shift from vinyl to compact disc and now to MP3 represents a kind of arc to an increasing impenetrability of the musical format, as music’s physical form becomes less and less clear through the recording device:

• Whereas vinyl offers the tactile fetish of a needle literally scratching across the grain of the record;

• CD obscures the particularity of the grooves for an unreadable surface sheen, that is nevertheless read by laser in a spiralling movement. We cannot see it but we can still hold it. (with burnt cds you get the unique phenomenon where one can ‘gauge’ the amount of data or length of recording via how much of the original surface has been burnt a slightly darker colour)

• MP3 quite stubbornly hides the process of its encoding/decoding within the player (be it mobile or computer terminal), there is nothing to penetrate or read or look at beyond the file, which of course can be constituted as a sequence of code, but only at great effort and still completely indecipherable.

What does this mean culturally? For music?

What about the sense in which this impetus to obfuscating stands in inverse relation to the quality (conceived of as 'fidelity') of the recording? Is it true, as Adorno argues, that the better a technology gets at reproduction the less 'real' the music sounds? This is attached to notions of authenticity and aura, which themselves are fraught with the danger of privileging the original artifact, something that cannot possibly be done in terms of sound recording (this is a positive thing, in my view).

Just some thoughts...

ii

Why I hate iPods #143

Amongst my biggest problems with these devices, or any other portable digital music players, is they way in which they structure a social tautology - the individual no longer moves to the rhythm of the urban soundscape but to their own daily schedule, continually modulating external events' affective states by bringing them in line with what's inside. Eg. I'm on the train, I don't like the sound of these people talking about whatever, I'll put on my iPod and listen to x because it will put me in the right mood for what I need to do when I get off the train, and then when I'm walking to there I'll put on y because it's good walking music, and so on and so on. Rather than attunement to whatever sonic textures surround one, the digital player allows you to continually collapse bodily and mental movement so that the only thing your listening practices mirror is yourself. Not even does the iPod force you to at least sit with a particular piece of music (say, a cassette or a disc), but at 'touch' you can switch things around endlessly, shuffle them up until all that's left in meaningful, affective, material terms is whatever you want it to be. Sure, this isn't some kind of liberated freedom rather a form of micromanagement of the self, post-Foucauldian control in action. Just what about the music though, at least? Does it even matter anymore? Is a politics of genre (or artist, or period, or any other identity of actual songs) even possible under these conditions?

"Frances Densmore, collector, with Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot tribe, 1906. On behalf of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, Densmore made many field trips using Edison's recently invented wax cylinder recorder, as pictured here. [T]his photo, taken in Washington, D.C., reflects the special aims and conditions not of the "oral poetry act" but rather of what might be called the "photography act." For the benefit of the photographer and posterity, Mountain Chief has donned his ceremonial native dress (his own?). At his side are emblems of the vanishing Native American culture that Densmore was doing her best to document. The collector adopts a non-assuming pose, eyes lowered on the machine. Mountain Chief gestures as if declaiming, although any sound that he is uttering at this moment would not be registered, for he is seated before the listening horn of the machine, not the recording horn."

I can't even begin...

No Age - Nouns

This will hopefully find it's way into Beat but of course you never know ... and reading over the review it struck me that it seemed more at home in the knotty intellectual domain that is (con)temporary, so here you go!

No Age - Nouns
(Sub Pop / Stomp)

A reactionary evaluation of the debut proper from No Age might go like this: so they're signed to Sub Pop (after releasing a string of totally indie vinyls that were collected into Weirdo Ripper), therefore they had lots of cash to make Nouns, so how come it sounds like shit, like they just chucked the tape recorder in the middle of the room and pressed play? I want to hear the KILLER tracks underneath all this crap! Well sure, No Age do pile things on, it's rough, distorted and their tracks are buried under a certain mulch, but this itself is a subtle reconfiguration of the traditional lo-fi aesthetic that one might initially angrily attribute to Nouns. Because the very thing is, Nouns undoes the ideology of lo-fi the says it can only emerge from tape recorders and the dole, just at the same time as they trash the notion that studio production itself must aim for a kind of perfect sound. It's clear from a little closer listening that No Age truly didn't just set up the mic in the middle of the room and then bash around it, but that its lo-fi grain is actually as much an addition of production - they use overdubbing, looping, resonant atmospherics and so on that take what might actually have been a fairly crisp punk track initially and cast it in some kind of mystical, elemental aura. This itself also delays the orgasmic excess that your traditional punk listener might want from his tracks, as if music were reducible to ejaculatory actions - Nouns says 'fuck that', asserting that we MUST bury things under mulch, make the ears work a little harder and recognise the duality of things - that punk itself can be ambient, and that ambient can be punk. It doesn't let you hear it kicking, even though it clearly is busting out of its seams of that grainy, tactile cloth that lays over it. This sound is punk as an environmental force, not one that works to charge you in force and politics but that works through bodies and envelopes of noise until it reaches something like a scuzzy nirvana. As such, Nouns ceaselessly seems to extend beyond itself, reaching past its initial hearing to emanate beyond and take primal flight - it makes sense that this band have played at the foot of canyons and gorges in their American homeland.

Their mixture of studio production and what you might call field recording (live music or otherwise) also flies in the face of what might be a positive evaluation of lo-fi as some kind of pure sphere of 'press record and play' musical creativity that lends recordings a life-giving and totally authentic force (case in point: Springsteen's Nebraska, “OMG he actually sat at his kitchen table to record this and that’s exactly what we’re hearing!”). No Age more subtly understand lo-fi itself as a form of engineering or trickery, not the beginning and end of production but one means among others to arrive at a particular recorded sound. This particular recording also smashes the two-piece mentality, which amazingly is what No Age are - against that whole ‘what you play live should be what we hear on album’ bullshit, the endless layering and marks of far more than just four hands that pervade this sound force you to hold this album as its own material entity. We're not evaluating what they should sound like here (which the reactionary review might ask for), this isn't sheet music and it isn't a gig. It's Nouns, and it’s the sign of something great happening in music when it can steer a smooth course through knotty, ambient complexity and fuzzy, unbridled fun.

Die! Die! Die! - interview

("everybody move so fast none of this will ever last")

I spoke with Andrew Wilson, front man for NZ trio Die! Die! Die!, for their Australian tour, which is now underway - they hit Revolver on Thursday the 24th, it's well worth checking them out. They are insane live. We chatted about their new album Promises, Promises and what it means for the band. Andrew was warm and really nice to speak to, I'm not sure if that translates into hard text, but he was quite open and grateful to chat. I'm not sure if I interjected far too much, as well, stopping his flow and thoughts. Most of our conversation is below.

The last time you were out here, you played a gig at the Prince of Wales...
I had terrible food poisoning then, I went to hospital after that show. I was really, really, really fucked up – I don't want to go into too many details but I totally thought I was dying. It was probably a really laid back performance.

(Andrew screamed his way through the set, put his head in the hollow drum kit at one point whilst Michael Prain was hammering away at it. Meanwhile Lachlan Anderson, the bassist, is jumping up on the stacks and free falling.)

Well, by that stage, you were playing almost exclusively from Promises, Promises, despite the fact audiences here were yet to hear it.
We've started to play old stuff again now, it's just that we'd only gotten off touring the old stuff overseas and it was just kind of refreshing to play the new music.

It was strange for the crowd, but I thought still quite cool – an entire set list fresh to my ears was a great experience
We actually thought we got a really bad response from Australia, lot's a people were like 'ah you're not playing all the old songs', but see in New Zealand we kind of had the reverse reaction from playing all the new stuff.

(Andrew is at pains to justify playing this new material, but really the crowd should have just necked up.)

So how do you find Australian audiences in general? I find them very standoffish.
Yeah, sometimes, we've had really mixed reactions. They're either really, really, really super enthusiastic or they're super the opposite, and that Prince of Wales gig, well, I wasn't really sure. But I guess in Melbourne it's because you get exposed to so many amazing bands, so a band has to really impress you to get a reaction out of them, and really everyone is way too cool.

You tour shitloads, do you find you pick up many influences along the way?
Yeah, not really by choice we've spent a long time in America, which, um, I mean it was quite inspiring ... I haven't really seen that many bands which inspired me but just the hectic lifestyle and everything has just definitely inspired us, and we're really into dancehall and reggae this year because we ended up hanging out with all these, Rastafarian dudes who decided to really like our band and come on tour with us. So we've had some interesting stories, we're really influenced by the places we're at. When we were in LA we were hanging out with all these people really into Morrissey and the Smiths and stuff, and they're all like Mexican ... I wouldn't say gang types, but tough types. Everywhere has kinda got its own individual flavour and we definitely get influenced by where we're at.

The Locust Weeks EP looks like it has a photo taken in the US, on the front?
Yeah that was the street which we lived on in New York.

And was Locust Weeks the title any reference to your time there?
Nah: we practised on a street called Locust St, and then we recorded it there. I don't know about that recording - we did it in three hours.

Strange, I love that record, especially the last track - it feels like it's been made in three hours, but that lent it something.
Yeah, I mean, it was really - that song 155 has been around for a while. The other three we kind of wrote in NY, but 155 we wrote in Auckland before we moved.

Locust Weeks sort of seems like a bit of a continuation of the debut album, and it almost seems like it was kind of like it was the last chance you got to really kick out a lot of, not anger - but really expel something. And Promises, Promises seems a bit more calculated, do you agree?
Um, oh, I think a lot of that was that the first EP was done in a day, the Steve Albini LP was done in three days, Locust Weeks was done in three hours, and then Promises, Promises was done in 12 days. If you think about it, 12 days mixing and mastering in there too, is actually pretty insane. 12 days is not really that long. Although, I know what you mean calculated, but also the fact that we're working with the producer on Promises, Promises really affected, you know - working with Shayne [Carter, renowed NZ producer] really influenced Promises, Promises.

How?
Kind of arrangements and moods.

Because it definitely has a different recording grain/texture than say the Albini one which seems a bit more polished, whereas this one seems rougher around the edges but the songs themselves seem a little bit more hemmed in.
Well, that's kind of it actually. The sound is actually a lot more budget because we didn't have as much money as the other three recordings but the songs are a lot better, I reckon.

They seem like they have a longer gestation.
Well, actually, probably the opposite - we wrote most of Promises, Promises a week before we recorded it. Sideways Here We Come was actually a day before. Yeah, it was the last song we wrote on the album. What I found really funny was that was the song that was gonna be left off the album because we weren't gonna finish it, and that one - the structure’s actually not kinda finished.

It’s my fave track on there, especially the ‘ooo’ [makes terrible imitation of modulating, wordless falsetto refrain] in the background.
That was the most unfinished song definitely on the record.

So how do you explain that then, so you're saying it’s a bit rougher in the sound and then the songs sound more measured/focused, even though you still only wrote them a week before? Is it the song writing process?
I think that we really did make it an idea not to write stuff we'd already done, make sure that it was kinda fresh. I dunno we've just kind of got in a real pattern of song writing with the other records and we really wanted to mix that up, definitely.

From the self-titled EP to the self-titled album, it did almost seem like a loop.
Yeah, exactly.

This one it seems like you guys have entered into a new phase, this is a maturing of the band.
I definitely reckon. I mean like when we did that first EP we were 19, you know what I mean. And now we're 23, well Lachlan is 21. And there's a new bass player as well. Well I mean we've definitely grown up a lot, and a lot of the shit which used to impress doesn't impress me at all and a lot of the shit which used to make my skin crawl like now I really love, you know what I mean. And I think that's natural to anyone who is involved in music, your tastes kind of change.

Well what are some examples of shit you used to hate and you’re now into?
I dunno, like Led Zeppelin, I used to despise them. When I was really young and you know, punk music - I was like fuck that dinosaur rock shit and now I love Led Zeppelin. Not saying that Zeppelin has got an effect on our band, but. And even like T Rex, that classic rock. And we've got quite a good scene of friends and music in NZ and they've all changed what they're into as well, and I dunno we're all kind of just creatures of the environment.

This is a difficult question to ask, maybe even retarded.
I love difficult questions.

I'll ask you first from your point of view - do you write the songs/lyrics mostly?
Yeah I wrote the lyrics but the songs we all kind of write.

Well, what is it that sort of – if you say that you’re not as angry as much that you used to be – well, what is it that is still driving you, because there's still a sense of pissed-offed-ness that comes through.
Well I'm definitely still kinda pissed off. I dunno, just life and love and stuff. It's just kind of, well I've noticed Promises, Promises is more direct in the lyrics, and you know, on the first record I dunno I kinda wrote about the stuff I didn't really put my head around. Just kind of let me put my head inside it. I dunno, it's really hard to talk about.

Yeah, your other records seem a bit more obtuse, you kind of put what you were talking about to the side, whereas this one it's just kind of head on.
Well that's pretty much exactly it. Before it was like ‘Oh shit, do I actually wanna sing about that, oh maybe I’ll add something else funny into it so I'm not actually directly talking about it,’ whereas on this record, I just went like ‘Fuck it, I’ll just be as honest as possible for the whole record.’ It's quite a hard record for me to listen to, but in hindsight I feel a lot better about it than the other record, where I was not really trying as much.

So have you found it hard to go back, to play it?
Oh yeah, it's been out in the New Zealand since October so we've been playing it a lot, it is quite a ... it does take a lot to play it. Yeah. But you know, we're all so involved in it now that it’s all pretty good.

Is it almost that it's beyond yourself now?
That’s what I've noticed about it, it's definitely its own beast.

Whether or not it’s hard for you personally, too bad you've just gotta keep going on the juggernaut?
Yeah exactly. And now we've kind of, yeah. I mean it's kind of like, in New Zealand when the first record came out, it was really hated on - actually all our recordings before Promises, Promises. And when this one’s come out it’s actually be quite well received in New Zealand for the first time ever. And the first other recordings did really well overseas but not in New Zealand, and then this record has done quite well in New Zealand, and it's been out in America for three weeks, and its already outsold the first record which we thought did really well. So it's just become its own beast, we've really get into the mindset of it, and we've written a lot more new music recently, in New Zealand, but then we can't really do Promises, Promises justice unless we just kind of go overseas and just play it over there.

That's a good background actually - because I read some overseas reviews on you guys and you're stuff was coming up on quite a few US sites and the reaction was good.
It's doing really well in America, I think we're playing on one of those American talk shows. They've chosen one of our more abrasive tracks off Promises, Promises as well - ATTITUD. It's pretty funny actually.

What a gauge of how big you've gotten over there.
Yeah it's doing surprisingly well. and when it came out in New Zealand and we found that people were starting to like it in our home country which was a really big step, and everyone in Australia hated it. But now people in Australia have started to hear it they're catching on to it, and people in America are really starting to catch on to it. Hopefully it will be good - it could just flop, and we could be back in Dunedin on the dole, writing more songs.

So where to for you guys now?
Yeah we're recording a new EP probably in the next month actually. But um, it's for this American label - I dunno if it's gonna come out in New Zealand or Australia yet. and then I think we're touring in America in their winter. And then at the end of the year we wanna, we just wanna settle down in Dunedin and probably write our next record.

You're pretty quick really.
Yeah, we are actually. I mean there's a hell of a lot more prolific bands, but you know - it's just because we were kind of stuck in a rut touring that first album so much, for so long. With that first record, we kinda got trapped just playing that first album for so long.

And you know, so many of those songs on the album are on the EP as well.
We really weren't very prolific for a really long time, which was probably the time we should have been most prolific. Oh well, I reckon it's good, because we're not going to be like ‘first album fucking yeah’ and then, you know - we're quite glad we're not that band. And if we kind of reached our peak on our first record that would have just been a total disaster.

That wasn't quite the height you wanted to hit.
Totally not, just because we weren't prepared you know - we kind of wanted to get out of NZ so quickly and we didn't actually think about the music as much as we should have.

And so now do you feel like, not like you have more time because you're still on a strict schedule, but do you feel like you have a bit more space?
It's not really like we've got time, because we're playing more than we ever have, but I definitely feel like we've got a lot more space from it all actually.