STACK NZ Nov #68

EXTRAS

MUSIC

visit stack.net.nz

Q1/ This is your first studio album in almost 20 years but there is a timeless feel to both the sound and songs; it’s like you’ve never been away… After so long a gap between full albums I wanted to see what my songs would record like using modern techniques and I wanted there to be a connection with what had gone before. We have normally avoided as much as possible sounding like what was going on around us, and that has helped the music age well on its own strange outside timeline. Q2/ From what sort of time period do the songs date from? Perhaps a third of the riffs and concepts date back over anything up to 20 years or even more, but, once there was a go ahead to record a new album, the bulk of the writing was done over a period of about a year. Some songs, like Warm Waveform , have been kicking around in my head in many different forms for years and that particular song was released as a short lyric-less version called Warm on my album of home recordings, Sketch Book Volume One , back in the ‘90s. Q3/ There is a strong political edge to lyrics, something which you’ve not been known for in the past. I have generally avoided making political statements in my music as I have seen that date other people’s music badly, but I found that those were the concepts that were really firing me up, and I decided that I didn’t want to simply add more light-weight rubbish to the mountain of music being produced currently. Also, as a song-writer and lyricist it was a personal challenge to see if I could use my skills to actually say something important without it descending into slogans and clichés. Q4/ You also seem to be in particularly strong voice at the moment – what’s your secret? I have been taking better care of myself but I have also learned not to force my voice, as I thought I had to when I was an earnest young post-punk. Plus I have actually learned to change the key of the song I am writing to suit my vocal range - something I knew nothing about when I was younger! Q5/ Flying Nun is enjoying something of a revival both here and overseas. How do feel about being seen as an older statesman of the scene? It is wonderful that the music from that time in New Zealand is still sending waves around the world and I am proud to be part of that. But I do wish I had better recall of facts and dates and a far larger reserve of snappy, amusing anecdotes! Martin Phillipps The Chills

FIDLAR frontman Zac Carper on the band’s second album, Too , and why the group have been unfairly pigeonholed in the past. By Zoë Radas. FIDLAR ON THE ROOF

Z ac Carper and his FIDLAR (F*ck It Dog, Life’s A Risk) cohorts have had all kinds of modifiers thrown at them since the inception of their group’s skate-punk (putting it simply) sound. “ Leave Me Alone is about people saying, ‘These kids just party, and they’re stupid,

We will always record our own stuff.’ But the producer we worked with is awesome; his name’s Jay Joyce. We flew out to meet this guy and he was a totally eccentric dude, and smoked two packs of cigarettes while we were hanging out with him, and just had this weird mystery about him, and he talked like Tom Waits.”

and they’re slackers, and blah, blah, blah,’” Carper says. “The reality of it is that I worked really hard. We’ve all worked really hard to get to where we are, and after a while I felt like we weren’t being taken seriously. And it’s just the way it goes. It’s the way that the media has knocked us into a certain spot.” The song he refers to sits bang halfway through the tracklist for FIDLAR’s second album Too , which the vocalist

The resulting album is crazy and irritated and petulant and completely compelling; Carper attests it took him a little while to tap into the energy which has ultimately spilled out into the recordings. “Honestly, I wrote about 30 songs for the record and the first 20 songs were f–ing terrible. And it was only until I started to actually just write songs for myself... I was like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not

The producer we worked with is

awesome; his name’s Jay Joyce and he was a totally eccentric dude. He talked like Tom Waits.

and songwriter sees as a huge, blossoming, forward leap. For one thing, he decided to get a producer. “I started noticing records that I really loved always had a producer,” he chortles, “and, in the reality of it, I just wanted to try something new. It was scary. It was really scary. There’s f–ing interviews of me saying ‘I will never work with a producer.

how FIDLAR started. FIDLAR started from just writing songs about what’s going on in my life.’ I’m not as agro. It’s more sad or whatever. So, I’m f–ing sad as f*ck, dude. It works.” Yes, yes it does.

Too by FIDLAR is out now

Silver Bullets by The Chills

is out now

NOVEMBER 2015

14

jbhifi.co.nz