INTERVIEW: BOB EVANS TALKS TOMORROWLAND

Our writer Suze caught up with Bob Evans re. ‘Concrete Heart’ from his upcoming record ‘Tomorrowland’ and more!

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You have a new song out?
Yes. I have a whole new record called Tomorrowland that comes out on April 16th.  The most recent single is called ‘Concrete Heart.’ 

It’s a great tune.  The sound is almost like The Beatles meets Jebediah. 
I guess there used to be a real gulf between Bob Evans and Jebediah but that has narrowed somewhat over the years. The Beatles thing is undeniable. In previous times I have been directly influenced by Beatles stuff and you can hear it over previous records.  This time around I wasn’t really listening to or being inspired by The Beatles, but they still managed to sneak in there because the artists that I was listening to a lot were inspired by them! For me when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present this song, I was listening to heaps of Tom Petty, particularly Full Moon Fever. It is probably his best-known record and I really fell in love with it. Obviously a few of the songs I knew very well because they are such massive hits, but I had never really listened to the whole record properly and its now one of my favourites. There are a few songs on that record that are just power pop songs, guitar power pop. I thought that was the angle I could take with this one. 

I read that you had used a bit more electric guitar this time around on the album.
Loads. I mean this really feels like the first traditional rock album that I have made as Bob Evans. Not just because of the instruments we used but also it’s the first time where I have recorded live with my band in a room. Very minimal overdubs, minimal edits. There was just five of us in the room and we smashed out all the songs in like six days. I’ve never done that before. It was important to do because  I wanted this record to have its own unique feel and to be a real point of difference to previous records. I had to look at things that I could do differently. A few years ago I wouldn’t have had the confidence to make a record like that. I would have been worried that it wouldn’t be good enough to pull it off. So it’s pretty awesome to be in a band where you look around and you go these guys are great musicians and we can totally do this. And we did. 

I also heard a whisper that you are touring.
Yeah. Well, the tour is definitely happening. I’ll be going all around the country. We just have to hope that everything remains open. Obviously, as everyone knows, this year is going to be pretty volatile but at the moment, the way things are going in Australia it looks pretty good. 

I reckon things should stay pretty safe in Adelaide.
I’ve just been in Adelaide.

I was just about to say I came and saw you do Club 27 at The Fringe a few weeks back.
Cool, what did you think?

I absolutely loved it. 
It was a lot of fun. So I’ve been to Adelaide twice because I did a Jebediah gig there earlier in the year as well. Look everywhere in Australia seems to be doing pretty well, I think there is reason for us to be optimistic. Certainly more so than last year. 

Absolutely. So back to ‘Concrete Heart’. I liked where you kind of got the inspiration from. That whole putting stuff up on social media in a discussion that is important to you and having someone call you out for being a ‘bleeding heart’.
What it specifically refers to is when you weigh in on some kind of debate that is political in its nature, you know it might be something to do with immigration for example or perhaps indigenous Australia. You put forward an opinion or a comment that is sympathetic and a lot of people who disagree with you use the term bleeding heart as a dis. I have always found that really fascinating and kind of funny because it’s like the criticism from the other side of the debate is pretty much like ‘Oh you care too much'. Is that really a bad thing? I like the idea of taking this bleeding heart thing and wearing it like a badge of honour and making a bit of fun out of that whole term. Concrete Heart is the opposite of that. I mean at its essence it is serious, but I tried to approach it the song in a light, fun way because it is a little bit funny as well. 

It is, because you never get a comment to back up the diss. It’s just you’re a bleeding heart. There is no actual discussion or reasoning why.
Yeah, I don’t even understand what somebody means if they use that term against somebody. What are they really trying to say? I guess they are trying to say that you are too emotional and you’re not rational or logical. Maybe that’s what they are trying to say.

It’s because you are passionate about something. That is why you enter those discussions in the first place. 
Having said this, I rarely weigh in on social media debates. I try really hard not to read comment sections around issues that I care about. It can get really depressing when you see the things that people write. It can be a very toxic environment. So yeah it’s not something I do very much. 

I just can’t anymore because of that reason. And the more you read those comment sections the angrier you get.  Some of them just aren’t going to change their opinions. It’s better to just bow out.
That sentiment is in the song as well. There are lyrics in the song that pretty much say exactly what you just said. I’m the same, you just have to back away because it is not really doing you or anyone else any good. 

No, it doesn’t.

Back to Tomorrowland. Are all the songs that little bit more rocky than normal Bob Evans?
I think so.  I suppose it’s a lot to do with the attitude with which they were recorded. Like I said with the band recording them live I think it just gives the songs a real kind of electricity and a character.

You get that vibe off of each other being in the studio together. 
That’s right. There is a character that I can’t recreate on my own. It really is its own unique thing. I’m really proud of the guys playing on it and what we were able to achieve. And Steve Schram who produced it, it’s a really good sounding record. It’s definitely going to be one of my favourite ones that I have done. 

Is there an underlying theme or is it just a collection of 10 songs?
Well, actually there are 11 songs on this record. We were only planning on doing ten and we got up to day six and we only had two songs left. Steve was like “You know we are going to finish early should we try and squeeze one more song in?” I had to go back to my demos and in a very short amount of time I had to choose one. Of course, the guys had to learn it on the spot. All the other songs we had spent rehearsing before we went into the studio. The second to last song on the record is called ‘Fits and Starts’ and it came out great, it sounds awesome, but the guys were literally learning it as we recorded. It’s one of my favourite songs. 

Tomorrowland is out 16th April. 

INTERVIEW: BRISBANE’S HARDCORE ‘HEADWRECK’ TALK NEW MEMBERS, NEW SINGLES, DREAM LINEUP, AND AUSSIE FAVES

After their previous band disbanded in 2018 three Brisbane mates decided to continue their music journey together. After some searching they added a fourth member and in late 2019 Headwreck was born. Their first single As Is (featuring Luke Harriss from She Cries Wolf) also dropped at the same time. Headwreck have just released a killer second single Good Grief. I caught up with vocalist Connor Hickman

You have a new single! I was excited to see it pop up on my newsfeed. It’s been a minute between singles for you guys.

We released ‘As Is’ in December last year and we were actually trying to push for ‘Good Grief’ to be out mid-April. With all the quarantine and stuff we just got shut down. I had to fly to Mt Isa for work and then we couldn’t get our promo photos done. It was just a nightmare.

It’s a bizarre time that’s for sure.

It is. We’ve been trying to stay as busy as we can and working towards trying to get more new music out by the end of the year.

As in an EP??

Oh no. That’s the big scary thing! We are just big believers in the whole single game. We really like doing that. Not everyone always stops and listens to the whole EP apart from a select few. It’s better for us to just stick to singles and put out our best work. Our drop box is full of music so it’s good to just try and figure out what’s best at the time and drop that.

The single game seems to be the way a lot of bands are going now. Redhook being a great example of how well it can work.

That’s the exact example I was talking to Callan about the other day. I didn’t realise that they hadn’t actually done an EP or album

Speaking of Callan how did he end up in Headwreck?

He’s been involved in the band one way or another since day one. We actually asked him if he could fill in on bass and just from that it developed so much further. Instantly he was helping with aesthetic ideas for our graphic designs for logos and ideas for music videos, helping with song writing and the vision process of what we were going to do next. He told us from the start that he wouldn’t be able to be in the band because he’s super busy with Days Like These stuff and that was all good with us.  We actually asked him before we played with She Cries Wolf back in February, probably about 30 seconds before we went on stage, if he wanted to be our full-time bassist and he said yeah! We did kind of put him on the spot a bit…

And speaking of She Cries Wolf how did Luke (Harriss) end up doing guest vocals on ‘As is”?

We approached Luke ages ago. When we were recording As Is, originally we really wanted to have a feature of some sort. we talked about it and decided we may as well shoot for the moon and ask Luke. Growing up in the Brisbane music scene I’ve been watching She Cries Wolf since I was 15-16. Luke’s always been approachable and happy to have a chat with me. I shot him a message and just said Hey man would you like to be on our first song, and he said yes. We got him to record his section and it’s all history from there.

What’s your writing process?

So it’s pretty much bare bones. We self-record ourselves so it makes it a lot easier. Jamo spends a lot of time writing stuff and coming up with ideas. He’ll record an instrumental and put it into a drop box and we will nit pick at it for a bit, make changes and restructure songs a little bit. We complete the instrumental part and then I come along, start listening and think about what I want to write about. Then I do what I think pretty much every other vocalist in Australia does, and looks to the phone notes and find one of the 1000 little one liner’s I’ve written and try to work off something like that.  So I put some lyrics to it and then Jamo, Callan and Sam have a look at it. We may reshuffle and reword things a bit and then we record it. We sit on the demo for a bit till we are sure we like it and then record it. Jamo has a little home studio and we do the final take then he will mix and master it all.

It’s good to be able to do the whole process ourselves Factors like the cost, being able to sit on it and listen to the song to make sure it’s 100% what we want. I feel you get a much better result, from a vocal stand point, you ‘ve got all the time in the world to perfect it. I think that’s the way of the world now.

And with social media and music platforms these days you can release it and hit your audience immediately...

100%. With both singles that we have out we’ve done a little campaign before with Ophelia from Collison Course. She is an absolute gem. I was saying to the boys the other day that she obviously really cares about what she does, and we are so thankful to her for that.

If you could tour with your dream line up who would that be?

We’ve actually been asked this question a couple of times and I’m not sure if the boys would have the same answer, but I have a very definite one.  Days like These (Callan’s and Jamo’s other band) we always joke about it and say how much fun it would be. You know the four guys in Headwreck and the 4 guys in Days Like These but 2 of them overlap!! So the 6 of us plus Andrew who does the photos and filming for us.

You’d only need one van!!

Exactly! And it just sounds like so much fun because we are all really good friends. It’s actually something that is super achievable for us too which is really exciting.  Before the world ended we actually had a show booked and Sam was getting married the next day, so he wasn’t able to play the gig. So we were looking at who we could get to replace him and instantly the first person we thought of was Noah!! Sorry if you read this Callan…. Then we were like we can’t have 3 members of Days Like These and me playing and then straight after them playing again. It’s going to look pretty stupid!! That gig ended up getting canned with Covid.

Who are your Top 3 Australian acts?

Alpha Wolf: they are just so so good. I remember seeing them in 2017 for the first time with their new line up and being absolutely blown away by how good they were. And that’s a band that you can listen to their discography from start to finish and really appreciate the progression. Their new song Akudama and the video for it is crazy. I saw a comment on the YouTube video –

 Producer: How many special effects do you want

 Alpha Wolf: Yes!

Slowly, Slowly:  I first heard Aliens a couple of times on JJJ and have been absolutely hooked since then. I try to see those guys live as often as I can. Benny’s just so amazing. It’s definitely a genre that I have always listened too – bands like Violent Soho The Smith Street Band etc.

Stepson: I’ve always loved these guys; they are the nicest people. Here’s a story for you.. In 2015 I was going to catch about 3.5 hours’ worth of buses to try and go see them on the North side of Brisbane and I actually managed to convince one of my friends who had their license to go. That was the second time I saw them and I spent most of the set singing along,  it was such a good show. Since then I’ve been hooked on every release. I get so excited for the music that they put out.

I’m pretty confident with those answers and I’m so glad you said Australian.

Special mention Ocean Grove, Trophy Eyes and Columbus

People are taking the time during lockdown to explore the bands more and spend the time listening to the releases and discographies-

I think its way better to sit down and listen to someone’s discography. Say a band drops an EP, it’s so important to listen to it right through from start to finish. Give yourself the chance to sit and relax and really appreciate why they picked those songs in that order, why there’s a little flow on bit at the end of one song that rolls into another. Just little things like that, like we talked about The Rhapsody Tapes before. You listen to that and it’s pretty much one song for that whole album because each song flows into the next. The songs have been picked for that reason; it’s been made like that from start to finish. And some of the songs on there if you listened to them on their own you’d be like well that’s a bit weird. The way What I Love About a Natural Woman flows into Beers, that’s just how an album starts, it brings you in and puts you in the mood and then bang straight in to it. Same with Slowly Slowly, their lyrics are so unique, I can’t even explain it. You almost have to read it to make sense of it, they’re so good.

Another band that I have just started to get into that I’m beating myself up for not doing sooner is Bloom. They are so good, and their lyrics are awesome. They are going to be huge they are just so good and so personable. I was watching the hate5six full live set; you could see that their music is obviously pretty important to them.

You can find Headwreck’s latest single Good Grief on all platforms.

HEADWRECK ARE:

Vocals -Connor Hickman

Guitar – Jamo Benadie

Bass – Callen Batson

Drums – Sam Conroy

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INTERVIEW: DAVID FREELAND CHATS ABOUT LUNE’S LATEST RELEASE, GHOST

Melbourne’s Lune released their debut EP Ghost this week and are even about to hit 100k streams on Spotify for the title track. Our new writer Suze caught up with Lune’s guitarist David Freeland for a chat;

Hey David thanks for taking the time to chat with us. For those unaware, can you tell us a bit about Lune.
We are a relatively new band, a couple of us are from other bands (Blind Oracle, I, Valiance) and a couple of us aren’t but we have all been around in the music scene for a while. Our first single, Ghost, came out in November 2019 we followed up with 2 shows. A release show for Ghost with In Vanity, Vatic and Advocates and a bushfire relief show with BLKLST, Foxblood and The City. We are keen for some more but for obvious reasons it’s not really happening at the moment. This project has been in the works for about 2 years or so.  

Tell us about that.
Nathaniel wrote all the lyrics and Krys did pretty much all the music on this project.  On the new stuff we will be writing collaboratively The project kind of came about as a side project for Krys so I wasn’t initially involved but a lot of it was done by Jamie Marinos and Krys then I came in later and added my production elements and Nathaniel did the vocals. So with the influence kind of stuff I think they just range from all your classic heavy bands , I can only speak for myself but a lot of like the prog metal stuff from the early 2010’s Periphery, Tesseract, and then your classics like Metallica, Slipknot and Slayer.

You’ve melded your sound; you guys don’t quite sit in a specific genre.
That’s the plan, it’s humbling to hear someone say that, it makes me feel good, like feel somewhat accomplished that we fit outside of some sort of category genre that someone has created in their mind.

I guess we are jumping onto some sort of new wave of metal. It’s probably difficult to come up with classifications for this stuff in real time, a lot of that stuff comes up in retrospect. I guess for the time being the less expectations about the way the trend is going the better, we can just completely approach it with a fresh mind.

I’m a big fan of bands that sit outside the norm of specific genres and are happy to experiment with their sound.
That’s what I’ve always strived to do, unclassifiable essentially, as much as possible but then again if someone wanted to call us metalcore, deathcore or whatever then that’s fine as well. It’s not something I personally subscribe to though. If it helps people understand it. If it gets us on a Spotify metalcore playlist then that’s fine by me!

It would have been tricky with covid because you haven’t been able to do shows and gauge a following…
Yeah it has been. The only thing you get to see is comments on social media and reading reviews and stuff its really impossible to translate that into a metric that you can comprehend

You’re not far off hitting 100k streams for Ghost on Spotify. Where you expecting that sort of response?
Yeah that’s real surprising. No way, nothing like that. Because Krys and I used to play in I, Valiance we were expecting a little bit of boost off the back of that but nothing like 100k streams. That track has surpassed most of the songs I’ve released in my 7 years!

You’ll be keen to get into live shows once restrictions are lifted..
We are talking about it. We have one member from Newcastle, Harrison our drummer, so it would pretty much be a situation where he would have to road trip it down depending on the situation. It’s also dependant on whether it’s safe to do so. We are looking at doing a Melbourne launch show as a starting point, we obviously had dates and stuff planned to go with the EP release which won’t happen, that’s all been canned. So, we are pretty much just going to take it one show at a time.

What are your plans for release day?
I’m taking the day off work and will probably meet up with the guys and take it from there. I guess then we’ll jump back in the studio and keep working on the new tracks. We’re always writing that’s what we like to do

So, you have more songs in the works for another EP, or an album or just a few single releases?
Again, it’s hard to gauge what people’s reactions will be because there are no tours or shows or anything like that. Depending on if shows start to free up and the momentum we gain from the EP, we’ll probably look to follow it up with a couple of singles. We have an album’s worth of material, but we don’t want to release it all too soon. It’s impossible to know really. I’d like to say we’ll have another couple of tracks out because we have been writing so much. The stuff that we have already written but not released on Ghost feels old already so we just kind of want to get it out there. We’ll probably talk to someone who knows what they are doing to work out a plan.

There are a few bands that are going down the single release path.
Yeah look I admire the art of the album but the thrill of having multiple releases days a year is very appealing as well. To continually assert our relevance especially right now with the way things are.

I think you guys will be okay after tomorrow, there’s been a lot of talk about this EP!
I hope so. Yeah that’s real humbling even seeing all the pre-orders come through on Bandcamp and stuff it’s just so much more than what I expected. We are literally such a puny band and we haven’t been around for even a year! The response has been so good.

To finish off what are 3 of your top Australian acts at the moment?
Justice for the Damned – They have a new album out this week too (Pain is Power) I’ve toured with them back in the day and I know they put on a great show. They work extremely hard and are one of those bands where they just get everything right and now they are getting the payoff from that.

Alpha Wolf – I’ve pre-saved their new album (a quiet place to die). I’ve toured with Mitch a lot and played tonnes of shows with them. We’re pretty close with those guys. Big respect for them they work hard as well.

King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard -I’ve got the new live King Gizzard album Chunky Shrapnel that just came out. They are probably my most favourite Australian band I froth them so much.

LUNE's debut EP 'Ghost' is available everywhere now HERE and on BANDCAMP

LUNE are
Nathaniel Smith - Vocals
Krys Smith - Guitar
David Freeland - Guitar
Tyler Hendley - Bass
Harrison Mills - Drums

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