Cover Feature - Bernard Fanning

Published in the July / August issue of Rhythms magazine (cover feature - excerpt)

FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN

While BERNARD FANNING’s new album stems from a feeling of unease, it blooms as one of the songwriter’s strongest releases. He talks to SAMUEL J. FELL

It’s a Monday afternoon. Late autumn and sunny. It’s crystal clear and the air is sharp, cool in the shade courtesy of a light breeze but warm in the sun, brightening the scene; makes the grass seem greener and the surrounding shrubs livelier despite the fact there’s been no rain for a month or so.

Bernard Fanning sits on a day bed, leaning against the wall of his small studio, up on a hill above Byron Bay. You can see it down below, spread along the coastline in among the trees against the water’s edge. Out in the bay itself is Julian Rocks. It’s so clear you can see the whitewater breaking around their base. The lighthouse sits atop Cape Byron, slightly to the south, the sunlight glinting off its tall, white walls, standing guard over the most easterly point in Australia.

Fanning sits taking it all in. It is, as I’d mentioned to him when I’d first arrived, a view you’d not get sick of. He agrees and during the couple of hours we spend sitting out here, we both periodically gaze out over it all. It’s calming. Serene. Seems to me to be a perfect place to put together a record.

Fanning, in light blue jeans and black jacket, hair hanging down to his shoulders, flipping across his face, grey stubble, pale skin, is in good spirits. He smiles a lot and his laugh rings out across the green, sloping garden, occasionally startling lorikeets playing in the trees hanging over the driveway to the side. I’m always wary prior to speaking to prominent rock stars, well aware they could be completely consumed by an inflated sense of self-importance, nothing more than preening posers.

But Bernard Fanning’s not like that. Sure, he’s a prominent rock star, he fronted one of the most iconic Australian bands of all time in Powderfinger. His solo debut, Tea & Sympathy, was incredibly successful, five-times platinum. But he’s just a guy with a wife and kids, sitting here having a chat about music, about the state of the world, life in general. Just shooting the breeze like any of us.

Inside the studio, producer Nick DiDia is tinkering. Occasionally, music drifts out from the open door around the corner, soundtracking certain parts of our conversation. “It’s shit, isn’t it,” Fanning says at one point as he looks out across the Pacific. He laughs again. I do too as I follow his gaze. “Yeah,” I say. “Terrible.”

                                                            ***

Bernard Fanning’s new album, his third solo effort, is Civil Dusk. It’s the first in a two-part series, the next being Brutal Dawn, slated for release sometime next year. Civil Dusk was written in part in Kingscliff, a small coastal village a little further north, and partly in Madrid, Spain, where his wife is from. It was all recorded here, aside from the demos, in this little space on top of a hill overlooking Byron.

“Civil Dusk, the term actually comes from civil twilight, which is a photography term,” he tells me. “It’s when the sun has gone down beneath the horizon. Scientifically, I think it’s when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. But pretty much everything is still visible, but not in direct light. And it looks different. So that idea, that metaphor…”

He trails off at the end of that sentence and switches focus to the term brutal dawn, which we both agree is the perfect name for an album by a Norwegian death metal band, but the sentiment is clear. Civil Dusk is about things not being quite as they seem, or quite as you remember them, and they’re about to change. Perhaps to be revealed once more, in a different light later on, under a brutal dawn.

I ask him if, as a person, he’s a worrier, if he’s prone to anxiety. “Oh yeah, totally, I’m a real worrier,” he says candidly. The reason I ask this is because in the bio that accompanies the new record, he’s quoted as saying, “Each day, I wake with a feeling of unease.” It’s a line which ties in with the idea behind the record, the civil dusk preceding a brutal dawn.

“Yeah, doesn’t everyone?” he asks with a laugh when I read that quote back to him. “It sounds a little too depressing. I don’t mean… it’s unease, it’s not full-blown anxiety. It’s more like, I’ve got shit to do, lots to do. As an artist and a human being. Firstly as a dad, the basic stuff of making breakfast, getting school lunches ready, you know. Making sure everyone’s got two shoes on when they leave.

“[But] it’s a combination of everything. When I’m writing, I don’t sleep very much. I wake up a lot of times at night, and often with the last idea I had before I went to bed, kinda ringing in my head. And it’s pretty annoying, and pretty annoying for my wife. It’s hard to shake when you have an idea that you haven’t abandoned yet, that you haven’t managed to go, ‘I’m not gonna keep going’.

“And what I mean by that, that’s a completed song as well. It’s not like, ‘That song’s finished’, it’s ‘I’m not working on that anymore’. Because inevitably, a few months later, you’re gonna find holes in that idea and go, ‘Fuck, I wish I’d done that’.”

I venture that this is the lot of the artist, that no matter what you do, you’ll never really be satisfied. Or at least you’ll think you’re satisfied, only to realise a little while later that you no longer are. “Yeah, that’s exactly right. You have this momentary satisfaction,” he says. “Anyway, the anxiety thing, I don’t want to play that up too much… it’s more because I usually get up first in the house, at around 4:30, and I read the paper. And that usually starts that feeling of unease, just reading about the state of the world.

“And that impacts a lot on the way that I write.”

Despite this assertion, Civil Dusk isn’t a record populated with songs dealing with literal world events. It’s not an album that bemoans the state of the world, not in a direct sense anyway – Bernard Fanning, who in the past has been very vocal about, and supportive of, a number of pertinent social issues, isn’t setting out to preach to a world he sees as wrong, or broken. Civil Dusk seems to be more about a feeling and a state of being, as opposed to presenting like a list of injustices, set to song.

As well, these feelings are framed through a series of love songs, whether happy or sad, disguised somewhat – the meanings are visible, but not in direct light, the songs civil dusks in themselves.

Another strong thematic vein that runs through the record is the idea of decisions and their resulting consequences. “I guess that’s another symptom of age and being forty-something,” he muses. “Looking at decisions I made when I was in my 20s and things that I thought were a great idea at the time. I mean, I’m in the unfortunate position… of having a lot of the things I’ve said, recorded, when I was in my 20s and maybe not at my smartest.”

He laughs again. “So, things like that. But also looking at that in the wider sense, how are things like, even on a personal basis especially, Powderfinger breaking up, how that has impacted on me and other people around me, stuff like that.”

“I don’t really want to be drilling down into the detail of what the songs are about, because I don’t really like doing that,” he then says, changing position on the day bed. “I want people to have their own discovery of songs, they have that thing where they… it’s what I do, put myself in the position of the author, pretty much all the time, when I’m listening to music.

“If I can really relate to it, then I can sing that song with a real kind of verve, it resonates with me. Otherwise, it doesn’t really impact… I like people having the opportunity to do that themselves, without it being all explained and spelt out to them. I mean, you don’t really need to do it anyway.”

“The future's suffocating on an echo from the past.” A line from ‘Belly Of The Beast’, the final song on Civil Dusk. One could interpret that in myriad different ways. It’s a strong line though, one of the strongest on the album. It sums up the civil dusk, the decisions and resulting consequence. It’s powerful.

Fanning laughs again, and I sip from my cup of coffee which is cold now, and light a cigarette, moving over to a sunny patch on the grass. We both look out over the ocean and we’re silent for a bit.

                                                            ***

Cover Feature - Jess Pryles & Meatstock

Published as the cover feature in The Music (Sydney), Wednesday February 3.

Smoked, Not Grilled

It’s Australia Day when Jess Pryles skypes in from Texas. It’s quite coincidental, given Australia’s national day (whether you agree with what it represents or not) is traditionally given over to all things beach, beer and BBQ – BBQing being what Pryles is all about.

However, that’s where the coincidence ends – for we’ve not arranged to chat on this particular day about the Australian way of BBQing, far from it. This chat is focusing on American BBQ, southern BBQ, Texas BBQ. “Yeah, we’re talking smoked, not grilled, which is generally how Australians know BBQing to be,” she says with a smile.

Pryles, an Australian who’s been travelling to Austin for the past seven years and who now resides there, is generally regarded as the Antipodean authority on southern BBQ. She’s not a chef, nor a journalist, but is someone whose love of all things smoked has evolved into a career. She writes a highly-trafficked blog along with regular columns in a variety of publications; she’s an accredited Central Texas BBQ Association and Kansas City BBQ Society judge; she produces the annual Carnivores Ball; she’s the co-founder of the Australasian BBQ Alliance – it’s fair to say she’s a fulltime carnivore.

“It was as simple as girl meets rib, girl falls in love with rib, you know that old story,” she laughs on how her love affair with the smoking culture began. “It was really when I visited Texas for the first time and got to try my first beef rib… it was just like nothing else I’ve ever tasted. You know, it’s burnt but it’s not burnt, it’s this amazing charred bark, then the super tender inside.

“I’d always loved eating meat, but that awakened not just this love of BBQ, but a love for red meat in general that I just wasn’t aware was always there.”

BBQ and smoking culture has, in the past six or seven years, taken on a life of its own, spreading from its traditional homeland in the south of the US to all parts of the world. Indeed, low ‘n’ slow BBQ has become almost painfully hip – it’s not uncommon at any of the many BBQ-related events around the country these days to be inundated by crowds of hillbilly-chic; check shirts and beards and trucker caps.

“I think there are a few reasons [why southern BBQ has taken off], first and foremost because it tastes great,” Pryles opines. “The second reason I think, is the craft element of it. Because the type of BBQ that has become popular, and it’s important to note the difference here, there are some joints in America that effectively use something similar to ovens… but the guys who have become legendary, Aaron Franklin for example, they all use manual, wood-fired, non-technical smokers, it’s really a craft – the meat is turned by hand, they’re dirty, they’re smokey.”

“So just like we got into craft beer, or craft beard lotion or whatever, it’s just caring more about smaller businesses producing items with more care by hand,” she adds.

The rise in popularity over the past decade or so of things like craft beer, farmer’s markets, and even things like vinyl and folk music, harken to people’s need to simplify, to go back to things that originally, were about care and love, things which offer comfort in their downhome-ness – it seems, as Pryles notes, it was only a matter of time before smoking culture became a part of that list.

Australia itself, despite its traditional way of BBQing, has taken to the US version with a fervor. The Australasian BBQ Alliance, which only a few years ago was curating a small handful of events around the country, this year has over twenty on its books, testament to the culinary method’s growth.

Next cab off the events rank is the inaugural Meatstock, running in Sydney in mid-February. Billed as ‘The Music & Meat Festival’, Meatstock is essentially a one-stop shop for anyone looking to get their fix of the variety of smoked meats that comprise this culinary canon – brisket, ribs, pulled pork, sausage. Add to that a cracking lineup of bands all based in the ‘raucous roots’ category, and you’ve got a weekend even the most casual of carnivores would embrace.

“[Meatstock] founder Jay Beaumont, who’s also my co-founder of the Australasian BBQ Alliance, he’s just a meat fan who allowed himself to dream big, he founded BBQ Wars in Port Macquarie, which is the biggest event on the Australian calendar,” Pryles explains. “He’s a really great operator with a really great passion, and he wanted to bring that which we love to the biggest cities.”

“I think it’s really impressive that he’s made [Meatstock] about everything as well,” she goes on. “Celebrating the butchers too, the produce, the meat, the type of music that seems to be the soundtrack to the whole thing.”

Meatstock is, to employ an overused term, epic. We’re talking BBQ Wars (essentially an amateur BBQ-off); Beard Wars (15 amateur barbers, chosen via Instagram, going head-to-head onstage); Butcher Wars (59 butchers who have a set amount of time to break down half a saddle of pork and half a lamb – Pryles is a judge for this particular War), along with an Expo showcasing the best in the culture’s accompaniments – smokers, dry rubs, hot sauces, meat producers, clothing. Plus there’ll be enough smoked meat, cold beer and American bourbon to satisfy everyone. Epic indeed.

“People really fall in love with the culture of it,” Pryles says. “When you walk through and you see the teams… sitting around, having a laugh, the competition is in pretty good spirit.”

“And it’s one of the few culinary competitions that you’re able to enter as an amateur,” she goes on, referencing the BBQ Wars aspect. “Unless you’re a CSA baker knocking out lamingtons for the Royal Show, there’s nothing else really. I mean, Masterchef is the closest as far as turning amateurs into chefs – these are guys who are just enthusiasts, most of them don’t have a BBQ restaurant, most of them are just backyard cooks. And they’re really proud of what they do.”

The size and popularity of events like Meatstock are testament again to the popularity of this culinary art, although it remains to be seen if it sticks around outside of its native Carolinas, Texas, Memphis and Kansas, whether or not it’s just a fad, albeit a reasonably long-running one.

“I definitely think it’s permanent,” Pryles asserts. “I think the fad exists at the restaurant level, and not so much restaurants opening up, but places that are suddenly adding a BBQ element to their menu, or places that suddenly use brisket, even though it may not be BBQ’d, because somehow they think brisket is a magical word.”

“So I think that that will eventually drop off, just like you don’t see as many cupcakes in cafes anymore,” she adds with a laugh. “Certainly I think, though, we’re only starting to see the popularity as far as backyard cooks being into it.”

As we finish up our interview, that quintessential smell of charring sausages drifts from next door’s Australia Day party through my office window, and I can’t help but hope this is true – Aussie BBQing is one thing, but low ‘n’ slow smoked meat, US-style, well that’s just something else.

Samuel J. Fell

The View From Room 8

After a few years in the wilderness, sometimes literally, Jordie Lane comes back with sublime new record, Blood Thinner.

Cover pic by Andrew Kidman

European autumn 2009, and I’m standing outside the Hotel Ibis at 49 Stationsplein in Amsterdam, just down from bustling Central Station.  Three days ago I’d been in France for the wedding of a friend, but had since hopped a fast train to the ‘Dam, the City of Excess, where good men go to die and the rest of us stagger out sated and full.

The reason I’m loitering outside a plush hotel instead of seeking the myriad sin this city produces in spades however, is because a few days before leaving France I’d been tipped off that Jordie Lane would be in Amsterdam this same week.  Given we go back a ways, I’d shot him an email and we’d arranged to meet, to hang out for a day or two, sample some of the local brew and generally shoot the breeze.  Our initial contact that week was actually through the Instant Messaging aspect of Gmail; “Mr. Lane,” I wrote.  “Word on the street is yr gonna be in Amsterdam this week... me too. Playing anywhere?”

His reply came back forthwith.  “Really??? I am there right now.  No, I ain't got gigs, trying to have a holiday.  But feel a bit lost not playing, I must say.”

To those who know Jordie Lane, whether personally or through his finely crafted, Americana-tinged music, the idea of him not playing is indeed quite odd.  He’s well known on the Melbourne scene (and increasingly, the national scene), as an artist of the utmost veracity and doggedness when it comes to playing, writing, or anything to do with his craft.  What makes this situation even more peculiar as well, is that as I waited for him outside the hotel, it was barely even three months since he’d released, in Australia, his debut long-player, Sleeping Patterns. 

This was a record that was long overdue by anyone’s standards, it was a record which when finally released (as it had been the June just gone), garnered almost instant critical acclaim.  It was a record which heralded the arrival of, as has been noted in the press, “one of this country’s brightest new roots music stars.”  It dropped, and then Jordie Lane fled overseas after the briefest of promotional tours.

I’ve been lucky enough to track him down though, and as I lean against that hotel wall, having waited for fifteen minutes or so, I hear a whistle and looking up I see a be-hatted head amongst the sea of bikes chained up outside the station, the man himself strolling nonchalantly towards me, guitar case in one hand, bag in the other, Jordie Lane, loose in Europe, seemingly without a care in the world.

 

We head straight for Dam Square where we sit in the sun and drink large mugs of Heineken and he seems happy and I’m happy to see him but underneath, under the smile and the idle chat, I realise that despite all this, he’s basically dropped everything, and is hiding.  Hiding from the release of an album he laboured for years to make.

                                                            ***

“I was really fucked up,” Lane comments with a goofy laugh when I remind him of that time.  We’re talking in the beer garden at The Park, the pub in Suffolk Park, just down the road from Byron Bay, a good two years almost, after our time together in Amsterdam.  “I don’t know why I was, but I was in a very confused, post-high kind of phase, because finally the record did come out and it got a really good response, we did some great shows on the tour and that was really exciting.

Jordie Lane pic by SJF

“And then I left the country for Europe, didn’t know why I was going there, I can’t even remember what the original purpose for me to go to Europe was,” he goes on.  “As far as my musical headspace though, I was not keen on anything at that time, it was a bit of a bad spot for me.  I know I had the guitar with me, but I was too scared to play it to people… it’s true, I was petrified, I don’t know why.”

The reason we’re talking now, amidst the bustle of The Park’s lunch rush, is because Jordie Lane has recorded (and by the time you read this, released) the follow-up to Sleeping Patterns, the sublime and strange and elegant Blood Thinner.  We talk for about an hour, and the strongest thing I take away from the interview is the stark juxtaposition of how he was then, to how he is now.  Then, he was covering for something, something he hadn’t yet come to grips with.  Today, he’s genuinely happy, he’s ebullient, he’s a man who’s climbed the mountain, planted his flag at the summit, and made his way back down.  He’s conquered.  Although it certainly wasn’t an easy experience.

...

Samuel J. Fell

Excerpt - published in August issue of 

(Cover Feature)

(for pics and commentary from the interview day itself, click here)

http://www.jordielane.com/

http://www.myspace.com/jordielanemusic

World Wize

Published in Inpress Magazine (Melbourne), 18th May 2011 (Cover Feature)
Excerpt below


Blue King Brown

Where once they busked on the now-gold-plated streets of Byron Bay, weaving rhythmic tapestry to feral hill folk and sandled city-slickers alike, now they play to the world.  Where once they played to few, now they play to many and are embraced by anyone with a penchant for dance and a predilection for reggae-soaked grooves, the latter of which they’ve fought, tooth and nail, to meld to their own whim, slowly but surely distancing themselves from the other, mundane and painfully stereotypical replicas of bands gone by.  They are, of course, Blue King Brown, and life for this eight-piece collective is far from the same as it once was.

So to heights before unimagined they’ve risen, and yet still they’re a part of those streets they began on all those years ago.  As well, to those same people they play, more of them yes, but still the same message they preach and the same ears it reaches, although now, with close to a decade of experience under their belt, Blue King Brown are able to spread that message wider and further than ever before, and if the truth be told, there’s no end in sight.  Yes, they were cut from the same cloth as countless others before them, but they’re now woven a new one and it shows in their live sets, their recorded work, their ethos and their music as a whole.

To talk with frontwoman, Natalie Pa’apa’a these days, is a different scenario than it once was.  In speaking to her numerous times in the past I’ve found her haughty and distant, but with the growth (and indeed success) of the group she co-founded with bassist Carlo Santone around seven years ago, she seems to have mellowed out and come to accept that the (media) interest in this group is a positive thing and so she talks without restraint and gives out an aura of calm and confidence.  As well she might, for Blue King Brown are taking on the world, they’re becoming world-wise you might say, and this is, whether you care for them or not, just what they deserve.

“In between three and four weeks, we hit up Canadian Music Week in Toronto, we did a showcase in New York with a bunch of other Australian acts, we did SXSW in Austin, plus our own shows in LA and London,” Pa’apa’a outlines on what the band have been up to over the past couple of months, showing exactly how big the interest in BKB is getting overseas.  “So it was really great fun for us to get over there and perform at these industry events because we’re obviously always trying to expand our opportunities in international territories.

“We’re still largely unknown in those territories too,” she goes on, “so it’ll be a struggle (to really break it), you’ve gotta be prepared for years of it because it takes a long time of returning to these territories with continuity to actually build up a strong fanbase.  So we’ll be returning to Canada in June and July, and I think Europe as well.”  Blue King Brown started making forays overseas in 2008, they’ve already got a steadily building following in the UK and Canada, and last year they toured through the States supporting roots rocker, Michael Franti – it’s a slow build, as Pa’apa’a says, but it’s one that’s worth following up given the exposure and the response they’ve had thus far.

Later this month, the group will tour Australia, their first headline run here in a year and a half, which is a long time by anyone’s standard.  The reason for this touring gap is also the reason the band are starting to garner genuine overseas interest, the making of their second record, a double disc set, Worldwize.  In 2006, BKB released their debut long-player, Stand Up, a record which set the Australian roots scene on fire and branded them as a band to watch.  Such was its home-grown success, that a stellar second effort was called for, hence the two-disc set that is Worldwize.


Samuel J. Fell


http://www.bluekingbrown.com/

Beyond Blues - Joe Bonamassa

Published in May issue of Rhythms Magazine (Cover Feature) - excerpt below





Joe Bonamassa

It was a little over a year ago that Joe Bonamassa made his Australian debut, taking to the stage as part of the theatre that is Bluesfest, giving people who’d been listening to his records for years, a taste for what he’s like in the flesh, the real thing up there on stage in front of you.  He experienced a few technical difficulties during the set I saw, but nothing short of Armageddon itself was likely to stop him playing – whether with his acoustic and his voice, or with his electric which speaks its own language, Bonamassa was there to play to audiences he’d not before entertained and this was one set that grew legs and so to my mind, he walked tall amongst the myriad other acts on the bill.

He returns this month, not playing Bluesfest, but on a headline tour in his own right, and with him he brings not one, but two records released since those sets last year, and two very different records at that.  Those who know of Bonamassa know of his versatility – perhaps more so with his guitar than with his voice or in his songwriting – and it’s safe to say that these two records speak volumes as to what this man is able to accomplish, both off his own bat, and in the company of others.

Firstly, he carries with him the debut, eponymous release from what is fair to dub a supergroup, Black Country Communion.  The second is perhaps closer to his heart, his latest solo release, Dust Bowl.  Both records have Bonamassa’s fervent six-string antics stamped all over them, but as mentioned, both are quite different.  One boasts flat-out power, to hell with the aesthetics and a flipped middle finger to the purists and indeed, the faint of heart.  The other sees the man on an evolutionary tangent, one I personally thought him not capable of following.  I’ve been proven wrong.  Regardless, since Joe Bonamassa was in Australia last, he’s crafted two fine records, both of which are beginnings.  The start of something even bigger.

                                                            ***

Joe Bonamassa, now 34, began his professional career at the age of 14.  The story goes he played his first paid gig in a club in New York at that tender age, and 500 people turned up to see him play.  Since that fateful night, Bonamassa has gone on to release nine solo records, three live cuts plus a handful of DVDs, not to mention dalliances with various other musical luminaries in a career which has seen the likes of the Washington Post dub him the master of the electric power blues.

A more pertinent tag you’d be hard pressed to find too, because this is what Bonamassa specialises in – electric power blues.  He’s a man many blues purists would write off as a show-boater, a musician of limited compositional skill, an artist capable only of excessive guitar masturbation.  From a purity point of view, perhaps these detractors are right, but it goes deeper than this, as the length and breadth of Bonamassa’s career thus far attests.  Blues itself, as well, is about interpretation, and this is a man who interprets the blues to his own whim and leaves you to do with it what you will.

It’s buried deep within the primordial sludge of rock n’ roll though, that we find Bonamassa when we take a closer look at Black Country Communion.  Of course, those of us in the know are well aware that rock n’ roll is spawned from the blues, and so to find this man thrashing in the dark isn’t too much an odd prospect – it’s not, actually, that far removed from his blues playing, such is the power and verve he displays whilst performing that oldest of genres.

Black Country Communion, the initial idea anyway, came about when ex-Deep Purple/Black Sabbath/Trapeze frontman, Glenn Hughes, joined Bonamassa onstage during a gig in late 2009.  The idea was then floated past producer Kevin ‘Caveman’ Shirley (Led Zeppelin/Black Crowes/Aerosmith), who’s worked a lot with Bonamassa, and who then suggested they recruit drummer Jason Bonham, and keyboardist Derek Sherinian (Dream Theatre/Billy Idol/Alice Cooper).  Black Country Communion was thus conceived, spewing dirty and wet from the loins of rock n’ roll, the blues no doubt a proud father who at he same time wondered to itself what, exactly, it had helped create.

“Yeah, that was Kevin Shirley’s idea, and truth be told man, it was really cool,” smiles Bonamassa on the beginnings of the group, who almost immediately after forming, headed into the studio to record Black Country Communion.  “He said to me, ‘Do you want to do a record with Jason Bonham and Glenn Hughes?’ and both of those guys are my friends, so I was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be great’.  So I was thinking we’d just spend a week in the studio and call it a day, you know?  But all of a sudden it came out and it was actually fairly successful, so it’s like, ‘Shit, we’ve gotta tour’.  So for me it’s been a real pleasant surprise, I’ll say that.

“And we were just making a record for ourselves,” he adds as an afterthought.  “We were trying to make a record which sounded like it was made in 1972.  And that was the whole point of it, it wasn’t to be the Arctic Monkeys or any of that nonsense.  Not that they’re a bad band, but we’re not trying to sound modern.  Some music magazines have reviewed it and they said it sounds dated…well, no shit, Sherlock, that’s what we were aiming for, but thank you for the back door compliment.”

Dated certainly isn’t a word I’d use to describe Black Country Communion, released in September last year – perhaps eclectic is more along the lines of where I’d head.  It certainly, in parts, sounds like 1972; the swelling bass of bands like Sabbath, the soaring vocal of Zeppelin, the Les Paul squeal so common to that era, but elsewhere the record strays into ‘90s power-rock territory, courtesy mainly of Hughes’ voice, which to my mind sounds eerily similar to that of Chris Cornell during Soundgarden’s halcyon days, circa Badmotorfinger or Superunknown.

As well, it dips between flat-out power and more subdued (albeit punch-packing) balladry and so paints a picture of a group capable of extending its collective muscle at whichever end of the stylistic spectrum it chooses.  There are some odd moments (the string section during the latter part of ‘No Time’, for example, not sure where that came from), and there are some great moments (the call and response between Hughes’ vocal and Bonamassa’s guitar on opener, ‘Black Country’) – overall, this seems like four guys having a hell of a lot of fun, making some music, blowing off some steam.  And at the end of the day, isn’t that what’s it’s all about?

So fun, in fact, was the making of this record, that another is already in the can.  Tentatively titled 2, this is a record which sees Black Country Communion realising they’ve got something here, and expanding upon it.  “I think the second one is way better than the first,” Bonamassa enthuses.  “Not that the first one was bad, but here we had more time to really explore our different options (the debut was recorded in five days), the music is deeper on this second one.  It’s the same kinda vibe, I mean, we play a certain way, the band itself has a certain sound…we can’t be anything that we’re not.  So yeah, it’s wicked, and it’s already done.”

2 is slated for release around June of this year showing that Black Country Communion are in it for the long haul, a supergroup worth its weight in musical gold.  This brings us then, to Bonamassa’s next offering, also worth its weight, his ninth solo record, Dust Bowl.

                                                            ***

Samuel J. Fell

http://jbonamassa.com/

Tool

Published in Tsunami Magazine (Nov 2010) and Forte Magazine (Jan 2011), (Cover Feature)

Tool

I remember seeing Tool for the first time back in 2001 in Melbourne, at the Tennis Centre of all places.  I’d been a fan of their music since they’d released Undertow almost a decade previously and all through high school I’d been aided in my studies – or lack thereof – by that album, by Aenima and Lateralus, three records all up which epitomised my world view at the time and which kept me sane through those adolescent years, a soundtrack to the life and times of myself.  At the Tennis Centre that night, those three records came alive for me and the thousands who’d flocked in all their black majesty – the entire GA section heaved and writhed like a giant serpent bent on it’s own self-destruction, a sweaty mass in ecstasy and awe as these sounds rained down around them all.

Today sees Tool as one of the big bands of our time.  They took heavy metal and applied, for wont of a better term, some intelligence to it.  Not to say other metal bands – thrash bands, black metal bands, death metal bands – weren’t using their brains, but what Tool managed to coax from the recesses of their collective mind was a step above, something ethereal that kept on going and no matter how hard you tried, you’d never get to the bottom of it, and that was just fine by us.  These four purveyors – Maynard James Keenan, Danny Carey, Justin Chancellor and Adam Jones – are monsters of their time and the music they’ve created is as timeless now as it ever has been.

It’s now 20 years since Tool first exploded onto the scene with Undertow, changing the way people, the world, viewed heavy music.  They have, of course, released another record in this time, 10,000 Days, and it’s in the aftermath of said record that we find them now, coming out of the dark and back into the light, finding their feet once more and testing the waters.  For this is what the band do – they release and then they tour, and then they part ways, each time taking longer to come back into the fold, and this isn’t to say they’re bored, but as bassist, Chancellor tells, it’s just a natural thing, just the way the band works.

 “Every time we tour, it’s always a different world that we come back to,” he muses.  “We tour for a long time, so we really age quite a bit over those cycles, and I think each time you get back, everyone kinda sits down and wonders what the future is for the band.  It’s a bit of a strange, insecure feeling I guess, for a while, because we go away from each other and we don’t really know what each other is up to.  So after a year or so, we get back together and talk about it and more importantly, you find out if everyone is hungry to do another record with Tool.  And that’s a really good moment when everyone is excited and has all these ideas, and sure enough, you find out everyone has been working on other stuff, but they’ve been writing for our band as well.”

It’s strange to think that a band like Tool would worry about whether or not each other was up to carrying on – as a fan, it just seems like they always will, they’ll always be there making these epic records and putting on mind-blowing live sets.  But it’s not like that, and listening to Chancellor talk, it makes you think you shouldn’t take this music, this band, for granted.  Drummer, Danny Carey, who I also spoke to (the day after Chancellor, oddly enough), has his own theory.  “I guess it’s as you get older and you have to put up with people’s idiosyncrasies just that much longer,” he smiles.

“It takes a little longer maybe to come up with new things to say to each other I suppose,” Carey adds.  “We won’t do a record until we do have that, so however long the sabbatical takes, that’s what it’ll take.”  Carey seems somewhat more downbeat about it all than Chancellor, and you can’t really blame him – it’s been  a long time and this music, it’s not easy.  Having said that though, where both Chancellor and Carey agree, is on the feeling in the band when they come back from a break and it’s all systems go, all cylinders firing, as it is now – they’ve been away for a while, but Tool are slowly but surely coming back.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” Carey enthuses on that feeling.  “I mean, it’s a little strange at first, sorta like a guessing game, wondering where we’re all gonna be…and it’s interesting wondering if what you’ve got will translate with the other three guys…so it takes a while, it took about three weeks of jamming this time around to really lock in that groove, to find something that sounds like Tool again.”  What this means of course, is that he band are working toward another album.  It’s still very much in the early stages, the writing stages, but give them time, give them space, and there’s no doubt Tool will once more deliver the goods.

“Well, we’ve been playing all year and I can tell you that we have a really monumental amount of interesting material,” tells Chancellor.  “But we’ve only recently started to put those piles of ideas into song structures, so I think we’ve taken more time over this one than we ever have before and I think that’s because our responsibility to ourselves is to come up with something that we’re really proud of again.”

“Yeah, it’s hard to pick, we are quite early on at this point,” says Carey when I ask how the material so far is a sonic evolution from 10,000 Days.  “One of my favourite tracks from the last record was ‘Jambi’…that had a great melody and this pretty extreme polyrhythmic stuff going on, and so we’ve got three or four ideas that are kind of heading in that direction…I’m liking it, that’s for sure.”

“Whether or not it’s intentional, but we come up with ideas that are in unconventional timing when you count them out, and it can be a struggle to put them into a song, but I feel in the last few months we’ve been playing, that there’s a lot more fluidity to it,” Chancellor expands.  “Before I think, the mass, you could feel it fighting against the melody.  So it’s got this smoothness to it that I haven’t noticed before.”  Obviously this is a record which is a long way off, and whilst pieces are beginning to fall into place, whilst the band are definitely in it 100%, it’s still a fledgling being, something even these four aren’t sure how it’ll turn out.

For a band like Tool then, and indeed any band of such standing with a back catalogue bursting at the seams with modern classics, I imagine going in to make a new record would be a daunting task – how do they go about doing this, with the success of the past work, forever sitting behind them, peering over their collective shoulder?  “We don’t think about it too much,” muses Chancellor.  “Because we know that people are going to give us the patience and the time to do what we need to do in order to be true to ourselves and our art.  And that’s the really awesome thing about the people who buy our records – not only are they waiting for our art, but they’re actually allowing us the time to be that artistic.”

Time is of no nevermind for Tool, and truth be told, Chancellor is right – as long as we know it’s coming, we know it’s worth waiting for and we’ll wait patiently until it’s done.  For that is what Tool do, and have been doing for the past 20 years – slowly but surely moving forward, a monster of it’s time, only getting better with time and age.

Samuel J. Fell