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Critics are going mad-dog
forThe Maccabees third
album, Marks to Prove It; the
gorgeous creation is a love
letter to the band's home town
of Elephant and Castle, which
is teetering on the verge of
gentrification. "Elephant is quite
an odd place and it gets quite a
tough rap from the rest of London
because it’s only just started to
be regenerated," guitarist Felix
White tells STACK. "But just being
involved in it you realise what a
special place it is, and how many
little communities there are in it."
The album's tracks veer all
over an emotive spectrum, but
a common thread of 'cinematic'
growth links them together –
they're even getting Arcade Fire
comparisons. "'Arcade Fire' has
just become a kind of metaphor
for an epic sort of joy, hasn’t it?
I think there’s a natural positivity
in our music and an 'everything
is going to be all right in the end'
type of thing,"White muses.
084 AUGUST 2015 JB Hi-Fi
visit NEWS MUSIC
FormerYothuYindi frontman and uniquely celebrated
musician Gurrumul has released an album of
stunning gospel reinterpretations; the Indigenous
multi-instrumentalist and vocalist drew from childhood
memories spent with his family and the wider
Galiwin'ku community at the Methodist church on Elcho
Island (several hundred kilometres off of the coast of
Darwin, where he was born).The rhythm and blues-
bent hymns, traditional lullabies and soulful meditations
are wrapped into a devotional harmony in Gurrumul's
capable hands.
With brand new album Hell
Breaks Loose, critically
acclaimed country icon and
producer extraordinaire Shane
Nicholson ('Our Shane')
decided he wasn't going
to get involved in the nuts
and bolts, instead handing
production duties over to the
accomplished Matt Fell. "I’m
a huge fan of what he does; I
think he’s probably one of the
leading producers in Australia
at the moment," Nicholson tells
STACK. "When it came time to
do [my album], I was just a little
bit over producing. I thought,
‘I trust Matt implicitly,’ so we
gave it a crack. I think that’s
why I actually like this record
more than any other too,
‘cause I didn’t get involved in
the science of it."
What transpired rolled out
almost effortlessly, with the
singer discovering he'd created
something of a career digest.
"We never pushed any song
into a mould," he explains, "and
interestingly, because there
wasn’t any plan, it’s funny
now listening back: it
sounds to me almost
like a summary of all the
albums I’ve made before.
It’s got little bits of every
kind of style I’ve struck
out at before, and it kind
of references all of them.
In that way it’s almost like
a career summation." It
certainly helped having
plenty of recent life
fodder to write about; in
addition to splitting with
his wife Kasey Chambers,
Nicholson acquired an
entirely new label and
management team.The album
is in turns melancholy, poignant
and uplifting, but Nicholson
admits that the bleak times
are best to write in. "It seems
to be quite a general rule that
a lot of us do not want to sit
down and write when we're
happy or when it’s sunny or
when there’s fun to be had,
‘cause generally they’re the
days you don’t sit inside acting
all morose at a piano. Often
it feels like songwriting is
the mental home for creative
people; that’s where they go
when they need some therapy.
I guess it’s a record about
growing up or learning new
things. I’ve had a few people
tell me, ‘It’s so bleak, this
record.’ I’ve had other people
say, ‘It’s the most uplifting
record you’ve made in a long
time.’ So I don’t really know
what to think," he laughs.
Hell Breaks Loose is out on
August 7 through Sony – check
out our review on page 94.
continued
shane nicholson
in a handbasket
the maccabees can prove it
Tim carroll
holy holy
Q1/ How did yourself, Oscar and the touring
band get along during the recent European
tour?
We had a lot of fun. Interesting conversations
about interesting music, film and politics: the van
journeys are pretty good. And adding into that, the
European landscape – I’ve travelled around Europe
a bit but I had never been to Amsterdam, Belgium
or Cologne.
Q2/ The new album gives us Fleetwood Mac
vibes, and the word "nostalgic" is being used
a lot around you guys. What does that word
mean to you?
A lot of the equipment and the way we record is
kind of a ‘70’s approach. We use two-inch tape and
Neumann microphones, but as the project developed
we did decide at times to use Pro Tools. [Music-
wise] Neil Young is a big influence, but there’s
also a set of things that influence [us] in the more
contemporary world, like Here We Go Magic, Lower
Dens, Band of Horses and Father John Misty.
Q3/ After last year's The Pacific EP, how
did you approach putting this new material
together?
Once we’d signed with Wonderlick – they feel
like a family business: they’re small and don’t have
a heap of artists on their rosters, so they put a lot
of care and attention into everyone – we could’ve
released an album, but they said 'We think you
should put together an EP and then do a bunch of
touring.' That was great; it was really good for the
band to get comfortable together on stage and
work out what did and didn’t work. We also wrote
a bunch of songs during that [including] History, You
Cannot Call For Love, Outside of the Heart of It and
Holy Gin.
Q4/ You live in different cities; how does
jamming work?
Organising rehearsal studio [time] is... really
important. When you’re going back and forth and
you’re all separate, there’s no capacity for the band
to work together. The other thing that happens is
somebody will do something as a joke, like a solo or
a drum part, and then it ends
up being something awesome.
gurrumul gets gospel
Marks to
Prove It by The
Maccabeess is ou
now on Caroline/
Universal.
When the Storms Would
Come by Holy Holy is out now
through Sony.
The Gospel Album
by Gurrumul is out now
through MGM.
Read the whole interview
online at