Welcome to The Soundtrack, a column where we plumb the depths of our musical knowledge to bring you the best* (subjective) music to listen to for very specific life situations. This week, we’re gonna help ya stay cool with tunes for when it’s actually way too hot to do anything.
As a (basically) lifelong resident of Brisbane, trust me when I say I know what it is to endure a hot day. There are no words that can accurately, succinctly describe the absolutely disgusting feeling of being completely immersed in a hot bathtub with no escape or reprieve. It’s horrifying, and if recent weather is anything to go by, it’s about to be that time again. We can spend aaaall year pretending like Summer (the season, not the Ricky and Morty character) is some incredible, carefree time of year where every song that’s released is a banger, beach trips are fun and whimsical instead of guarantees of loud children and sand in your everywhere, and the heat isn’t really THAT bad, but we are wrong.
It’s a hellscape of fire and brimstone proportions, so horrific that you literally go to your local shopping centre on purpose for no reason other than to escape the cruelty of the Outside World. And when it gets too blistering for you to even fathom leaving your house, these tunes can be your saviour. I know, because I turned my air conditioner off while putting this together so I could truly write from the heart. That’s dedication.
Django Django – Storm
This has just the right lazy-but-intricate vibes to help you feel like you’re actually kinda doing something when actually you’re just stuck to your shitty polymer second hand couch with a frozen facewasher on your head. It has a pleasant, loping pace that won’t exhaust you or overwork your poor overheated brain, and the canonic chorus is pure expectation fulfillment bliss. Normally I’m not a huge fan of songs where you can predict what’s about to come next, but seeing as you literally haven’t moved since you got up to get a cup of ice three hours ago, maybe relative simplicity is what you need. Besides, this song isn’t even really that predictable, but it is relatively tame by Django Django’s usual (delightfully) batshit standards.
Purity Ring – stillness in woe
Huge if true: Purity Ring can save us all from the impending Aussie summer. I’ll up and admit to never having been a gigantic fan right here and now. I never disliked them, just didn’t quite get the hype – but I get it now. Thirty minutes into my self-induced heatwave torpor, suddenly all I wanted to hear was the shiny, crystalline, icy vocals of Megan James. Synths gently distort and blow around like winter breezes over the frozen tundra on stillness in woe, and I swear my core temperature dropped by a couple of degrees. The lyrics, like all Purity Ring lyrics, are Wacky And Largely Impenetrable (though it’s definitely not a happy song), but despite their complete sonic clarity due to James’ impeccable diction, they really do take a backseat to all those wintry elements. You’re welcome.
Cloud Control – Ice Age Heatwave
Fact: when you call your song something that directly relates to a The Soundtrack topic, I am bound by law to include it. Not really, but it would be rude of me not to. You may think this week’s topic actually arose from me listening to this song, but this is untrue. What is true is that this is a seriously great song and I would have included it even if it was called something else. Cloud Control are another band that deal in zany lyrics and atmospheric synths (on their last album, anyway) and I unreservedly love them for it. Like, I went insane on the pavement/Married a pyramid crime wave? What the heck does it mean??? Does it matter? (Not for our purposes, it doesn’t.) When you chuck this on, imagine yourself going for a nice stroll in Antarctica and riding a (willing, friendly) polar bear for maximum cooling affect. Also, @CloudControl, if you’re reading this pls release another album soon ok thank u.
HABITS – Ether
Ooooooh yeah. Smooth as butter (not the butter you left on the kitchen bench this morning, that is melted/congealed now) and super immersive, this cut from Melbourne’s HABITS is guaranteed to soothe you as you come to grips with the fact that you just accidentally drunk some sweat that dripped down your nose. Let’s face it, you weren’t going to do anything productive in this stank-heat, so you might as well lean on into maximus relaximus mode. Since you’re basically couchbound, you might as well take this opportunity to do some introspection, no? It’s a fitting backdrop for quiet self-reflection, but it’s also layered and labyrinthine enough to distract you from doing just that if you’re the type who’d raaaaather not be alone with their thoughts.
Hush Moss – Slowly Disappear
By this point you probably wish you could disappear, albeit not that slowly, to anywhere even sort of cooler than where you are. Or maybe you’re thinking you would murder everyone on your street for a simple light breeze to blow your way. The long and short of it is, you’re probably feeling relatively agitated and sorry for yourself. Well guess what? It’s time to get over it, and Hush Moss is gonna point you in the right direction. Bubbling reverb, smooth brass, sweet oooohs, twinkling chimes – this delightfully carefree jam has all the right stuff to put a grin back onto your sweaty, disgusting face. Maybe it’ll even motivate you to get up. Not dance of course, that sort of heightened, frenzied movement is absolutely and completely out of the question. But it could prompt you to sway along a little, and that’s a huge accomplishment in and of itself.
Image: Marcus’s Lil Projects
UK four-piece Django Django visited Australia across New Years to perform at Falls Festival. Their gorgeous 2015 album Born Under Saturn, following on from their eponymous 2012 debut, garnered critical acclaim, and made for one hell of a live set.
We recently sat down for a quick chat with drummer and producer David Maclean and synth-man Tommy Grace to talk about the transition between albums, why they chose to record primarily older material for their sophomore, and the importance of learning how to play live.
One thing I love about Born Under Saturn is its diversity on such a macro level. It’s not that each song sounds different, more that there’s so many elements within each song, everything from ’60s rock to modern electronic. Did you plan to sort of wear all those influences on your sleeve, or was it more natural?
Tommy: It just comes out, really. I grew up listening to 60s stuff as much as 90s stuff, and it’s come out as a bit of a mishmash. The Stone Roses and Primal Scream, bands I was into when I was younger, I was already seeing them fit their love of 60s music and dance music together, so I think since Screamadelica and that era, there’s been a mishmash of it all. Even in the ’60s they were using those electronic elements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjTuN8Hz16A
The second album of course was a collaborative effort than the first [their first album was primarily created by Maclean], are you planning to continue along in that way?
David: Yeah, definitely. I can imagine it’s gonna work similarly. We’ll be starting the new album in a few weeks time, but we haven’t actually had a talk about it, really.
T: I think it’ll be played live more. I think we’ll take much more time over it, I don’t think there’s as much of a rush to get something out now, it’ll all be done from scratch. With this album, there was a lot of getting rid of old ideas that were hanging around, that we felt we needed to get off our chest.
So what made you choose to focus on that older material rather than starting fresh for this album?
T: I think if you just let ideas hang, you wonder what could’ve been. It’s annoying for me to have unfinished stuff, so I wanted to get that all out and done. We have now, so maybe there’s two or three starting points, but really it’s starting from scratch.
How did the full band effort change the production process?
T: it just made it quicker! If there’s three people working on something, it’s better than one, so it just made it move quicker.
D: Less dead ends. If you’re stuck, just pass on the ownership to someone else. *laughs* We’re not precious, we’re pretty honest and frank with each other. If something’s not good, well just say it. No one really gets that upset. I guess you’ve just gotta be that way though, or you wouldn’t get anywhere – and there’d be a lot of tears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E191TC8nCbg
I read that you were so surprised at the reaction to the first album, it was so much bigger than you had expected it to be. With the second album, did you feel like you needed to hone in on certain elements of the first, that maybe you hadn’t thought of as a main focus the first time around?
T: If you see the live set now, it’s really different. The songs we play live are totally different to how we recorded them on the first album. They’re better because of it, we know which bits to change, we started to learn what works with our audience. You can tell when things are working when you’re playing them live, so certainly in that respect we were keen to have those elements and incorporate them into the recorded stuff we’ve been doing.
Which elements in particular were those which translate so well live?
T: Drum break downs *laughs*. Big, extended outros, disco edits of all of our tunes. We put the tempo a lot, it’s a tempo race – just stuff to dance to!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmUX14Tkf5I
There was a quote in an interview which said “we were running to keep up with where the album was going.” Do you still feel that way?
D: I think it’s settled down and plateaued a bit now. We’re used to playing live now, so it’s a bit easier. In the beginning we felt like we had to learn how to play on the job, none of us are trained musicians or anything, we winged it a bit. We just got better as things went along. Like there wouldn’t really be drums, there’d be a drum machine and a kick drum. But it just built from there. For the first two years there was no snare, no cymbal…
So it was all programmed?
D: No, we just had a kit that was really stripped back, a bit like Alt-J. But then it just built up as I got more confident with it.
You keep coming back to how the live performance affects the studio recording so much. Did you take that into much account for the second album?
D: We didn’t really have time to make the second album very live sounding in the end, because we spent most of the time writing and recording as opposed to playing. There was such a small time frame for when the songs were written, there was no time to demo it. I think if we made the second album now, it’d be better. It’d be more live sounding, it’d be more interesting, but that’s always the way. That’s what we wanna do next time. With this [next] album, we want to make sure we have time to go back and forth and take the live stuff properly into it. It’s just nicer to have them closer to being live than on the album, there’s less work when you go to play it live *laughs*. People love a live sound.
Django Django’s second album Born Under Saturn is out now.
Image: The Guardian
Django Django
Foals
Guys, we have less than two months until Foals grace our shores once again. The UK rock heavyweights released what’s perhaps their best album to date, What Went Down, earlier this year – and along with the release came the beyond-exciting news that they’ll be touching down in Aus to headline Falls Festival across 2015/16 New Years! They last performed here as the last-minute fill in headliners at Splendour in the Grass 2014, at which point they blew our minds. We’ve bene recovering ever since, but we’ll be ready for them come December 30.
Along with the news that they’ll be headlining Falls alongside Disclosure and Bloc Party, came the highly anticipated reveal, that Foals would be performing a few headline shows too! Okay well, just two to be specific, but we’ll take what we can get.
Support acts have now been announced, and they’re absolutely incredible. One of my favourite parts of festival season is that so many bands are in town at once, that they all just play together – so Foals attendees will be treated to a brilliant musical triple threat, ft. London’s Django Django and Sydney natives Mansionair! Both acts will be performing at Falls Festival too, but here’s your chance to catch all three in action from the comfort of your home city (if you live in Sydney or Melbourne).