“The best songs are like bad dreams…” is as much a prophecy as it is an opening lyric. It’s (Gareth) Liddiard firing a warning shot ever so slightly over your head. The kind of slap that stings the back of your neck and the pit of your stomach all at once. If the best songs are, indeed, like bad dreams, then Feelin Kinda Free sees The Drones offering up a sweaty nightmare.
“As an overall picture it’s a really good representation of where the band are at the moment…” percussionist Chris Strybosch reflects. “It’s been a long time in the making, this one…which tends to be the case for some of The Drones’ records.”
Feelin Kinda Free is The Drones’ seventh studio album, their first since 2013’s I See Seaweed, and in most parts represents a notable departure from the sound of their past records.
“It’s such a different sound for us and we just enjoy doing different stuff. None of us can keep doing the same old stuff – even if it’s just a slight change in Gazza’s writing, or the way we approach working in the studio, or the massive change which this is…it keeps us interested and we just love it.”
“It’s always pretty organic…starts with Gaz writing these songs which we love playing…and essentially he hasn’t changed the way he writes too much. Once he brings something bare bones to the studio – it’s how we go about putting it together.
“Rather than just bashing away at drums and guitars…this time we used more triggers and loops, synth, minimal guitars in places, mixed samples with live…sometimes it’s like working at a little space station. It was conscious in the way that we wanted it to sound different from other (The Drones) records, and I think we achieved that.”
“We also had a lot more time than in the past…this pretty much took a good year really from start to finish. We have our own studio and space…so we had the luxury of time and it got away from us a little, which is pretty predictable towards the end, when you give a band free reign in a studio. It meant we could spend a lot of time on the songs, and could get them sounding just the way we wanted”
Feelin Kinda Free also represents a return to the group for the drummer (affectionately known as ‘Chrisso’) since taking a hiatus following the 2005 record Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By.
“It’s really really special for me… I certainly missed it while I was away. I was always in close contact with the guys, it’s so good to be back. They’re all my mates which makes it all the more enjoyable to be seeing them all the time, to be making music together, that’s what it’s all about. “
The Drones have always been known for delivering an intensity of live performance which sets them right apart on the local scene. Their ability to blend the visceral with the intellectual, to seemingly move and unite a room around them, is a patch upon which they are rarely rivalled.
“If you’re not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.”“This album tour is probably going to show it even more than past albums have… we probably don’t play the songs exactly as they are on the album. We can be two very different bands…we don’t feel any pressure to be true to the exact sound on the record, we prefer to thrash it out on stage. That’s what you get when you come out to see us on tour. That’s what keeps us interested, the songs change from show to show…it could be quite a spectacle, or debacle!”
The honesty, themes, and strength of the song writing on this record is as worthy of admiration as the production value. Everything from nationalism (what Liddiard describes as “Anzacery/being gallipolized”), to racism, classism, the banality of the right and of the left, is all on the table and is fair game.
From a song writing perspective, it’s an almighty breath of fresh air and contains some messages that are bound to resonate very deeply. Liddiard’s sentiments and lyrics strike right at the choke-points of the modern Australian experience.
The reality of releasing an album like this, in Australia, in 2016, means that not all folks are going to take kindly to some of those messages. Australia doesn’t love a mirror, mostly because it’s hard to stare that of ugly in the face for too long. A young country still trying to arm-wrestle some kind of identity from within itself, still (at least politically) unsure of where it sits on some very basic principles.
[include_post id=”461609″]To share a quote from Liddiard as to why he thinks that might be: “The reason people don’t like to look back in Australian history is sooner or later you get back to the bit with the Aboriginal people. And it’s not nice to know that’s what you are: the offspring of a bunch of colonial parasites that just destroys anything in their wake, even humans.”
As a good example – tabloid journalist Andrew Bolt responded after being named in a lyric of the album’s second track ‘Tamam Shud’, a tune that also calls out other frustrations with similar undesirable and ineffectual parts of current Australian culture and psyche. Apparently also a music critic, Mr Bolt was quick to decry The Drones as “stamping on the ashes of the West’s musical traditions” in a column that he writes.
Truth is, he might not be altogether wrong. This is not like other music.
It was Chomsky who told us that “if you’re not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.” If the likes of Andrew Bolt are paying attention enough to at least feign some kind of outraged offence, then The Drones might just be the most relevant and important group in Australia right now.
Feelin Kinda Free is available in stores and digitally today March 18th
Independently through Tropical F*&k Storm Records and MGM Distribution.
