Melbourne's The Drones have become near critically-unimpeachable in recent times, by virtue of their unique spin on rock n roll; existential angst with a soul. Their critical breakthrough Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By and 2006's follow up Gala Mill capitalised on years spent in sticky carpet wilderness, tour vans and line-up changes. On new record Havilah, guitarist and vocalist Gareth Liddiard says, they got bored of black hearts and lightened-up.

Just returning from a US tour with Meat Puppets and Built To Spill; I guess you're very much an international band now.

An international support band, yeah.

You were the most underrated rock band in Australia but now you must be, what, rated?

We're the most overrated now, we've made the leap. [Laughs]

Is Havilah the first album Dan Luscombe (guitar) has been properly involved in, even engineering?

He played on a couple of songs on Gala Mill. It's a weird thing, I'll be doing my thing and he'll be advising and suggesting stuff. I twiddle Dan's knobs when he's playing guitar and vice versa. We fiddle with each other's sound. Dan knows his way around a studio and all sorts of gear.

Do you feel there's any validity in the talk of a cleaner, calmer sound?

Yeah, that was the idea. I've read a few reviews where they thought it was a line-up change thing, but it's not.

Why did you want to step things back?

Because we haven't. It's something different. You get bored easy doing the same old shit. As well, if you're whole set consists of going ballistic it can't be a good thing.

Did the Victorian highlands locale affect it?

As far as not having any distractions goes, yeah, in a massive way. Same with the songwriting.

But you were more businesslike in recording this time.

Yeah, we had a deadline. We had time off. We don't get a lot of that, especially enough to make a record. We had to set ourselves a deadline. We started writing songs in February and by the end of March we'd finished recording it.

Is it hard to find that balance between underplaying and overwringing when writing?

That's going to happen so you may as well embrace it. Some of [the songs] are undercooked but I'm thinking more in a sense of a vocal delivery or where you realise you could've done a cooler thing on the guitar. Not really the songwriting. The songwriting is the songwriting.

What I most love about the single 'Minotaur' is your maniacal vocal delivery. How do you achieve that without being self-conscious?

You just do it. You have to do it. The best motivator is a new song, and a new song you like, you get a little bit more energy. You just let yourself go and 'Shazam!' [Laughs]

I don't want to deconstruct your lyrics, because I assume you don't, but I heard you had a technique of reading four books at once while writing.

Yeah. Not necessarily four novels. William Butler, Yeats and Flann O'Brien and James Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, stuff like that. I mean, just reading anything that's worth its weight.

Is that just to break up the tone, get a lot of different voices coming in?

Yeah, and with a limited amount of time to write a bunch of songs you want as much information going into your head as you can.

Is it true that you also did that Surrealist cut-up technique of random word association?

Yeah, but I did it on some free software that does it for you. Fuck doing it with scissors; I'd cut my finger off and that would be the end.

Was Burke Reid (Gerling) a fifth opinion or an involved producer?

He was a fifth opinion. He wasn't really a 'producer'. We made a point of putting on the album 'This album was made by Burke and The Drones', rather than produced or engineered or anything like that. Because, what the fuck is a producer? It could be someone who wipes Motley Crue's ass. It's such a vague thing. He was the fifth member, basically. If he had something to say , we'd listen and vice versa. He was a member of the band for that period.

Havilah is out now on ATP Records. Read our review.

Andrew Tijs
 


The Drones - 'The Minotaur'