STACK April 2016 Issue 138

77 / 98

that, especially with new
bands. Now you’re more
well-known, are you
trying to cultivate a more
encouraging scene?
Big time. We've played
on a lot of bills where you
aren't allowed to chat to the
other bands, can't hang in
the band room, don't have a
rider. All that sh-t is so lame.
On a Bennies tour we share
everything with all bands!
You can borrow our amps,
you can drink beers with
us, you are allowed to hang
out wherever the f-ck you
want. That's what playing
music and making friends
is all about. Death to the music industry
dinosaurs!
Q3/ Do lyrics come from a day-to-day
diary any of y’all keep?
A diary sounds like a good idea! We all
approach lyrics very differently. For myself I
generally write lyrics one or two sentences
at a time, just whenever the mood strikes
me. But I know Jules will generally wait
and see what each riff inspires in him and
then write towards that feeling. Anty has a
Q1/ The art on the LP is absolutely
stunning. Who created that image and
what’s it about?
Cheers! The artwork was a collaboration
between Anty's dad and our good friend
Chris Cowburn from The Smith Street Band.
Anty's dad painted the image in the middle:
it’s four mystical characters riding their
horses above the clouds surrounded by a
dragon and a phoenix – very ska (haha). We
wanted the artwork to match the psychedelic
journey of the music, and we couldn't be
more stoked with what Chris added to bring
our vision to life. He is truly one of the most
talented and best dudes in the world. Our
dream was for the artwork to make you feel
like you were about to be transported into
'the realm of The Bennies,’ and we feel like
Chris and Anty's dad have achieved that.
Q2/ You've said that while touring
Japan, the other bands were wishing
you the best of luck and cheersing you
and such. Melbourne isn't always like
mixture of both methods and also can write
in more of a story throughout his lyrics. But
partying for sure plays a massive role in the
inspiration for all of us, haha.
Q4/ You have toured China a few times
now - what is it like?
Touring China is the best. We've been
lucky enough to tour there twice now, and
even played a couple of big festivals over
there thanks to This Town Touring. The
people are super friendly, the food is insane
and the fireworks are easy to buy – and
perfectly dangerous. What a place!
Q5/ You just played a massive cruise
party last month - was it a sea of happy
puke?
It was fun as f-ck: Dallas Frasca, Tequila
Mockingbird, Massive and The Bennies! We
also have a sweet national tour happening
[this month] to promote our new album
Wisdom Machine – so across all these
shows there should be plenty of inspiration
for more lyrics.
Bassist Craig Selak gives us the goss
on new album Wisdom Machine.
05
REVIEWS MUSIC
MUSIC
Wisdom Machine
by The Bennies is out
now via Poison City
Records.
sounds very Smashing Pumpkins. “Well, when
[Smashing Pumpkins] are sad they like to
write a song. They don’t feel like writing happy
songs. It’s just not them. I feel like that’s the
stuff I want to write; that’s where I find my
inspiration,” Boerdam says – but it goes deeper
than that. “I feel like there’s this other way to
view the world out there, and when you really
step back and view what we’ve built around us
and the reality we find ourselves in, some of
it is really bizarre. I like to find those moments
and find those weird occurrences and point
them out.”
One such occurrence is the siege for which
the album is named. It deserves a Wikipedia
look-up if you’re not familiar, but in a nutshell:
an isolated religious sect in Waco, Texas, run
by megalomaniac loon David Koresh, became
engaged in a gunfire-choked siege with the FBI
for 51 days in 1993. The stand-off concluded
in an enormous fire which consumed the cult
compound, killing 80 people. “Completely
blindly believing the whole myth that they
created for themselves,” Boredom muses
disbelievingly. “I just find it fascinating, the
human nature behind it, that this is how we
deal with things, how we deal with reality.
There’s the whole Third World out there
completely living in poverty and asylum seekers
knocking on our door. It’s how we deal with
the world: we distract ourselves. We all live in
our own little shell, to some degree. A lot of
this record is about that kind of control, and
illusion.”
Time: it’s literally what
separates the men
from the boys (thanks John
Oliver). It also makes all the
difference, luxury-wise, when
you’re writing one of the most
anticipated follow-ups in the current
Aussie album landscape. “Hungry
Ghost took three or four years, and we were
basically writing whenever we wanted to,”
Violent Soho’s lead singer and songwriter Luke
Boerdam tells us of his band’s 2013 release.
“This time around it was, ‘Hey guys, here’s a
CD of demos, and you have to learn them in
two weeks.’”
The studio time dedicated to WACO, the
fourth album from the Brisbane four-piece,
included many sessions that went post-
midnight; but it’s the way those initial song
ideas came to Boerdam which he expounds
upon. “I do a lot of writing whilst sitting on the
couch watching documentaries on mute, just
basically trying to get out of the comfort zone
of making some rigid process out of it,” he
says. “The best ideas always happen when you
least expect them. It definitely feels truthful, in
songwriting.
LUKE BOERDAM
VIOLENT
SOHO
WACO by Violent Soho is out now
via I OH YOU/Mushroom.
The boys are touring Brisbane,
Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney
from May 10 to May 27;
check for details!
I always found the more you try to follow a
particular idea, the worse it gets,” he continues.
“There’s even been times when I accidentally
put part of a riff on loop [in Logic] and it
sounded better. Takes like that are a relief. It’s
a bit of originality, when you find little spikes of
ideas that you weren’t expecting.”
In addition to the singles Like Soda and
Viceroy, which roil with the slurred but hopeful
Motor Ace energy Violent Soho are known for,
there are some gorgeous surprises on WACO.
Tracks like Sentimental, SlowWave and the
superb album closer Low – which is filled with
resignation, and the prettiest little guitar-picked
riffs over the top of deep, almost whispered
vocals – are full of a graceful melancholy that
INTERVIEW
THE BENNIES
Photo by Ian Laidlaw