STACK #161 Mar 2018

MUSIC NEWS

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great! It was a good moment of handing the song over to someone else, and seeing what they wanted to do with it. Who’s playing the all-time best instrument, melodica, in Pathetique ? That’s me! We really wanted to get a saxophone player in, but there’s a degree of pragmatism when you’re recording; as much as you want to bring all these instruments in, you have to be able to replicate it live. So I needed a happy medium – something I could solo on, but something I can also play live. And the melodica actually sounds pretty good, I think! It doesn’t sound like a toy in that recording – which it is. In Something InThe Air , the synth line goes up in an angled semitone when you don’t expect it to, and it gives it this mysterious slant, which really fits with the song’s theme.Were you deliberately looking at how you could communicate this kind of ethereal feel? Yes, that’s exactly what that note’s supposed to do. Sometimes when I’m writing I’ll stumble upon lines that feel really obvious, and a lot of the time I think that’s the sign that you’ve found something really great – good ideas do seem really obvious. But sometimes things are so painfully obvious that you think, no, that’s a bit too basic, how can I spice this up? And a really simple way of doing that is playing… an accidental [a sharp or flat note that isn’t in the key/scale of the song, creating an unusual effect]. And funnily enough, that was an accident. I played it wrong one time, and it was kind of right. The album title is a bit of a paradox, but somehow it fits your aesthetic perfectly. Why’d you choose it? I never liked the idea of naming a record after a song that’s on the record; to me that’s like naming a book after one of the chapters. I wanted something that was like an umbrella for the whole record. But the songs are all about such different things, and there was just no phrase that really tied it all together. The one thing that did tie it together was this sound that we were trying to create. I was trying to describe it to [Matt Neighbour, producer] initially, and it was this kind of synesthesia thing – not that I claim to be able to do that, at all –

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INTERVIEW

COUSIN TONY'S BRAND NEW FIREBIRD We sat down with CousinTony's Brand New Firebird songwriter Lachlan Rose to shoot the breeze about the band's new album Electric Brown – a textural and retrostyled masterpiece of syncopated soundscapes, led by Rose's baritone pipes and the astonishing vocals of bandmate Francesca Gonzales. Read the entire interview online at stack.com.au.

things, but it’s about having a

Blaze includes this marvellous lyric: “Hold my beer while I try to remove this here

bunch of sentences that flow in a really cathartic way.

man’s brassiere with a mind trick.” I don’t know why this line is so triumphant; I’m sure the melody has a lot to do with it. Does it have a story behind it? Not really, to be

I never liked the idea of naming a record after a song that's on the record; to me, that's like naming a book after one of the chapters

The track also finishes on a double-time jam out. Did this happen while you were recording and all went a bit mad, or did you plan it out? Generally I’ll do almost 100% of the songwriting by myself. But again, Blaze felt

honest! I generally put a lot of consideration into lyrics making quite literal sense; I like them to make some kind of cohesive sense

but Matt was like "What do you mean?! Can you be more articulate about this sound?" and I’d say "Electric brown! You know!" He wasn’t quite getting it. He’s got this filthy old Corolla from the ‘80s which he’d park at his studio, and it’s just the definition of 'electric brown.' So I said, "Make the record sound the way this car looks." And it’s on the record cover now. So it’s really just a reference to the overall sonic palette of the record. ZKR

like this really organic process. So when I started

playing it with the band, originally it didn’t have that [outro]. But then we’d get to the end of the song, and Nick [Reid, drummer] decided, “This is not over”, and just broke into this double- time thing. And we were all kind of laughing – it felt like we were King Gizzard for a sec – but then we realised, actually this is really fun, and it sounds

when you’re reading them off the page, and obviously the lyrics in Blaze don’t do that. But at the time I would normally start by singing lots of gibberish, and that [one] was a whole line, a whole verse, that just walked out. And it just feels really great to sing. That’s as far as I wanted to take Blaze conceptually – it feels like this massive release. There’s lots of little funny references in there but they’re personal quirky

Electric

Brown by Cousin Tony's Brand New Firebird is out now via Sony.

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MARCH 2018

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