STACK NZ Aug #65

MUSIC

FEATURE

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BRIGHT GREY The Phoenix Foundation’s Luke Buda explains to John Ferguson why theWellington outfit’s new LP Give Up Your Dreams is actually an uplifting album. W hen a band has been together for more than 15 years – more, in the case of The Phoenix Foundation, if you count

good things of having six people in the band is that we’re always on the lookout to make sure it hasn’t gone too far. If it gets too wanky someone in the band, will say ‘Yuk, that sounds horrible!'” Lyrically, though, the new album explores some darker places. For Buda, the most personal song on the album is probably Jason , which faces up to the fact that neither he nor his friends are getting any younger. “When we were touring Fandango , Sam had a major slipped disc problem and I had never really seen anyone in so much pain before. When we did the gigs, he played them sitting down. Then six months after he came right, my partner went down with the exact same thing and she was in chronic pain for something like three months. It was just a bit of a time of going ‘Oh my God, we’re getting older – if anything f**ks up in your body, you’re f***ed!” Similarly, Scott’s title track offers a funny, if somewhat mordant, take on the challenges of pursuing a musical career. So has Buda ever thought about chucking it all in? “ Give Up Your Dreams is actually a pretty honest song from Sam, even though it is completely tongue-in-cheek,” he muses. “It’s kind of like, ‘We are approaching 40 and we have no financial security whatsoever in an increasingly nasty, right-wing, capitalistic world’. “But in terms of throwing it in, I don’t really know what else I could do. I think we’ve been

was kind of a band thing. With Bob, Lennon, John, Dylan all I had [was the rhythm] and the two chords and the rest we just jammed out. And again, with Sunbed , I just had a bit of the groove and a couple of a little bits of the bassline when I brought it in. One of the aims of the record was to make the band more of a focus.”

their high school beginnings – it’s not surprising that for their sixth studio album Give Up Your Dreams , lead songwriters Samuel Flynn Scott and Luke Buda have been looking back and doing a bit of soul-searching. With songs that reflect on the ageing process and whether it is even worth continuing being in a band, you could be forgiven for thinking that their new album might be a bit of a downer. But while it might touch on some gloomier themes, Buda maintains Give Up Your Dreams is still an uplifting affair: “It’s party music but it’s pretty depressing,” he quips, explaining its partly because the band adopted a more collaborative approach on this record. “It was basically about making something that was more immediately exciting, as opposed to a slow burner,” he tells STACK on the phone from Wellington. “All the reviews of Fandango were like, ‘You’ve got to stick with this one, it starts opening up after the 27th listen.' So hopefully this will grab the listener from the get go. It is definitely more rhythmically exciting than we have been in the past.” For Buda, that meant making some changes to his songwriting process. Usually he writes mainly on acoustic guitar, developing a song from a chord and melody point of view. However with his contributions to Give Up Your Dreams , he often started from just a scrap of rhythm and built the song up from there, before getting further input from the rest of the band. “The writing on this album ended up being pretty collaborative,” he says. “With Mountain , I had the rhythm, but the whole middle section

One of the good things of having six people in the band is that we’re always on the lookout to make sure it hasn’t gone too far.

Although still unmistakably a Phoenix Foundation album – as always, it boasts some gorgeous slices of pop, like the wistful jangle of Prawn and the electro shimmer of Celestial Bodies – the rhythmic focus gives it something of a trippy, cosmic vibe; proggy but in a good way. Buda reckons that it’s a pretty fair assessment, although the band is always conscious that things should never get too self-indulgent. “I am a muso and I don’t mind ‘muso- ey’ music,” he admits. “But one of the

through our ‘personal differences’ time and those days are behind us. We’re old enough now not to let things be taken too personally – most of the time we all get along fine.”

Give Up Your Dreams by The Phoenix Foundation is out on August 7

AUGUST 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.co.nz

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