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06 FEBRUARY 2016
MUSIC
Restructured, re-recorded and
remixed, the tracks on Hilltop
Hoods' new album comprise
selections from the hip hop group's
previous two releases and presents them with
arrangements from the Adelaide Symphony
Orchestra and the Adelaide Chamber Singers Choir.
The boys are about to embark on a massive tour
with the country's best orchestras - stay tuned.
master plan," Lennox says. "I find it interesting talking
about the music after the fact, and you go over all
these steps and decisions that you made and realise
that there was a story or a narrative or this creative
arc that you were on, but it wasn’t like you were
having a daily conversation with yourself, hatching
this plan. Only in retrospect you piece together what
that subconscious theme was.”We dig it. Read our
review of PaintingWith on page 16.
L ike a playground handclap, the vocals on
Animal Collective’s new release Painting
With are a lively interplay that on first listen
sound as if they’ve just got to have been digitally
arranged. But Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) asserts
that he and Dave Portner (AveyTare) spent a
lot of time practising, with much trial and error,
to get the effect right. “We had this idea of
wanting to write music for two singers where
it kind of felt like one vocal part,” Lennox tells
us. “So if you took one of the voices away, the
songs wouldn’t really work the same way. I must
NOAH lennox
ANIMAL
COLLECTIVE
HILLTOP HOODS
continued
After an untimely pause in
production (beginning just
after the release of the excellent
Colourmeinkindness in 2012),
Basement return sounding like
Motor Ace's badder big brother:
heavy guitars are metered with
skillfully-wrought melodies in this
gorgeous release.
BASEMENT
Painting With by Animal
Collective is out Feb 19
through Domino.
Promise
Everything
by Basement is
out now through
Cooking Vinyl
say the hardest part was trying to write it
that way, because you’re singing one part
while trying to imagine the other part. I
mostly just did it in my head.” Eschewing
traditional stave notation to communicate
ideas or rhythms, the guys used visual
references to explain a particular song's feel
to one another: “We don’t really have the
technical language of music to be able to
translate ideas to one another, so we found
ourselves trying to express ideas to each
other in other ways. A lot of the time that
meant describing an image or a gesture, and
for this group of songs we found ourselves
talking about paint. For example, somebody
might say ‘In this song, I want to make a
sound that’s like taking a paintbrush and
swabbing this colour across the song.’
That’s where the title comes from.” It began
with first single FloriDada – one of Portner’s
eight demos, which Lennox matched with
eight of his own – which set the visual
and sonic tone. “It’s easy to look back in
hindsight and piece together the way that
you were doing things, but we didn’t have a
and you’re in some club in Berlin, and someone’s
just playing a minimal tech track which is just kicks,
and people are loving it. I think before we spent time
there I had a totally different understanding of a song
like that, that could go for ten minutes and not do a
lot. But once you’re there, and you’re in that room,
I cannot explain it. It is something else.There’s [so
much] more detail they’re putting in the music, and
it’s so not cluttered, but you just feel it hit you. It’s
like a giant meditation of people going, ‘Oh yeah,
this is great.’" Alesha Kolbe
RÜFÜS spent their early days together
in Byron Bay, surrounded by the hype
of Splendour in the Grass and Falls Festival.
“Splendour and Falls are two of my favourite
festivals,” vocalist Lindqvist says. “I just really
love that area up there. I think we snuck in to
Splendour two or three years ago.” Even the
best of us can’t always get tickets. “Me and
Jon [George] took our chances; [we] climbed
under some fence and it was a muddy affair. It
was crazy because we were standing in the Mix
Up tent, and then [later on] to be in that tent
closing one of the stages to play a show, that
was crazy.”
Following the success of Atlas, the band’s
TYRONE LINDQVIST
RÜFÜS
Bloom by RÜFÜS
is out now through Sony.
What started out as a couple of
dudes kicking back and making
tunes is now an international
sensation.
new album Bloom draws from the
stronger structural aspects of the first.
“The overall feeling of the album in
terms of a journey – sounds cheesy
when I say that – [is] just like a nice
feeling, just leading into the record.The
first four or five songs [on Atlas] are
really ‘feel good’ songs and that’s similar
in this record as well.The back end of
the album is a bit more… not introverted,
but [they’re] definitely more personal songs
that might not be played out at a party as
much.They’re probably more a headphone
listen.” And right he is. Bloom is both
laidback and calculated, and full of beats and
bounces. But what else would you expect
from a group named after a bar of soap?
The trio drew a lot of the inspiration for
Bloom from their time over in Germany.
“It started off with David August,” Linqvist
explains. “I guess he’s big in Germany. He’s
got an album called Times… it’s almost like
a film score type album.There’s not a lot of
singing or anything; it’s really different. If
you’re getting stuck for an idea you’d go out
Drinking From The Sun, Walking Under
Stars Restrungby Hilltop Hoods is out Feb 19
via Golden Era/Universal