New Zealand husband-and-wife duo Terrible Sons have released their highly-anticipated EP, Mass. Lauren and Matthew Barus kindly gave us a track-by-track breakdown of their latest offering.
Mass is a stark, quiet collection of deeply romantic songs that hark back to the sweeping indie glory of Kings of Convenience and Feist. It’s the kind of music that feels destined to soundtrack the idiosyncratic indie cinema of the mid-2000s. It’s luscious, organic and so, so intimate. Check out what Terrible Sons had to say about it below.
Listen to Mass by Terrible Sons:
‘Mass’
‘Mass’ to us is the idea of similarity over difference – that we all share many base experiences – sadness and beauty, love and disappointment, and they’re all tangled up and we alternately taste heaps of some of them and less of others. But we’re all there, our stories weaving together. We lean into the hope that we’ll learn something along the way and end up in a better place. It gets dark but there’s hope, right? We’re a resilient lot.
We worked with Tom Healey from Tiny Ruins on this EP – drama free and a breeze. We recorded at home in our backyard studio and there are birds and kid sounds buried throughout. We’d set up drums and bass and recorded the rhythm section and then added guitars, piano and vocals. We were really keen on layering heaps of rhythm – home-made shakers, cracked cymbals, whatever was on hand. It was ‘playing’ in the true sense of the word, messing and larking around. Making music with your friends in this situation was revelatory. We played and then ate together, people would zip home to see family and come back to add parts while Tom sat faithfully for 12 hours a day on a support-free stool. We’ve since bought an ergonomic seat for him to use next time and save him future physio-fees. He’s a genuine wizard, relentlessly creative and skilled. The word is out.
Love Will Make Fools
Our relationship, this love thing, it’s domestic, small but impactful. Love brings about the gentle death of who you used to be, the old you who operated as one.
Before we made Mass we set up a playlist of songs we loved that we thought could shape the sound of our new collection. Two songs on top were Lovesong of the Buzzard from Iron and Wine’s album The Shepherd’s Dog and Jose Gonzalez’s Let It Carry You from Vestiges and Claws. They’re both gentle but groovy with really compelling rhythms and peppered with lots of interesting sounds floating in and out. That’s where we went with Love Will Make Fools.
My favourite part is a wee bass line Jo (Barus, my younger brother) played with a really old and dodgy Line 6 phaser pedal…he reckons it’s the same pedal that Tom Morello used in Rage’s first album. His bass comes in halfway through the bridge and I hang out for it each time. The other bit I love are these smooth ‘Ahhhh’s’ that Jo McCullum our drummer does in the verses…melded onto the rhythm tracks. Tropical.
What A Friend
A lament about not living up to what your friends want you to be. A realisation that you can’t save anyone, you can’t live their troubles and pain.
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We recorded an early version of this song called Buddy for our last EP With Feathers. It didn’t really fizz so we sat on it. Lauren and I dug down on it and thought we hadn’t nailed the sense of sadness and failure in this story. Talking about your own failures doesn’t come easily and I’m sure any therapist would say it should. Our friend Cam Pearce who is a trumpet maestro was playing horns on some of the other more ‘up’ songs and he took a pass on this one and it felt like Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’. Jazz cool, although he’s not sure about the melding of jazz and pop.
‘World Is Walking Over Us’
This could be a resigned look around at what we’re giving our children – an obsession with consumption, a community of inequality and a disregard for how we treat our world. Some gift.
And yet, we’ve got a chance.
We talked about not wanting to be solely self-absorbed folk writers and we wanted to be pushing out into how the world shapes us. Folk has a strong tradition looking outward so we took something from Woody Guthrie and Aotearoa’s own The Eastern. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is obscene and yet so many of us continue to value stuff over each other. Sadly, this is what our society still aspires too. It’s simplistic but for me, it’s the endgame of the cult of individualism, which just is selfishness repackaged.
‘You Are The Gold’
Finding love. But beforehand there’s acres of failure. When I hear this I think it’s a country song with Lauren as Dolly and myself as Kenny, there’s definitely a twang in Lauren’s delivery. To me, there’s that country story – beat down and getting nowhere in love, and the question of what’s holding me back? And then late in the game unexpectedly realising that the treasure was there all along…
‘Streets of New Love’
The gentle giddiness of new love, like spring’s arrival and the duality of desire and doubt. We were sitting in the control room talking about how amazing D’Angelo’s album Voodoo is, with the skewed time of Pino Palladino’s bass and Questlove’s drum…apparently, D’Angelo had told them to play behind the beat but they were sure it sounded whack and outta time.
Lauren had this piano line which we thought would head off in a classical vein but the conversation crossed over and we were keen to try some voodoo on this track. Jo and Jo’s drums and bass are so behind the beat it feels like train-wreck hip hop. Fan-boy stuff.
We made a short video for Spotify for this song, cycling down our street at night holding an iPhone to get some footage and dodging oncoming cars. In the first pass, we basically filmed each other’s feet and pedals as we were using the screen side camera as it worked best in the dark. The head-on collision made worthwhile by some half-decent footage. Mental note to purchase one of those tacky selfie-sticks.
‘No Sleep’
Exhaustion, sleep, insomnia. Repeat for years. That twilight where you care for others or parent children. For Christmas a few years ago a friend bought Lauren this huge foot pump organ. It’s something you might find in an old church. Turns out it’s an Estey Chapel Organ from the late 1800s, made in Vermont. He bought it for a dollar and managed to load it into our front hallway wrapped in a ribbon. He was trying to get it into our lounge but it wouldn’t fit through the doorway. It got booted to the garage. Lauren is not a hoarder and was keen to get rid of it but we convinced her we could use it on the EP. It wheezes and grinds through the whole song, which we thought was apt for the idea of raising children. You can hear the sound of Lauren pressing and pumping the foot pedals. Domesticity.
