Feature: Catfish and The Bottlemen reinforce their indie identity with 'The Balance' →

PHOTO CREDIT: Jill Fumanovksy
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY TRIPLE J, MAY 2019

The Welsh rockers continue to be champions of the genre's longevity on third album The Balance.

Catfish and The Bottlemen are a band who know who they are. Over the course of three celebrated records, they’ve embraced an indie rock space that is defined by chugging guitars, anthemic lyricism, and Rockstar charm. They’re relatable to the point where all of their songs are singalongs, but they’re also powerful pedestalled performers - just far enough out of their audiences’ reach to make them an international rock commodity.

Sold out tours around the world, huge festival performances, and a fiercely loyal global fanbase have earmarked the band of bastions of modern indie rock, and they serve it up super well on album number three.

It’s a record heaped with hallmarks from a band who dare to double-down on what works, rather than throw away the playbook to write a narrative of reinvention. Which begs the question: when you know your formula and you love the music you're making, does a lack of wild experimentation matter?

On The Balance, Catfish and The Bottlemen prove that it doesn't.

The band exude athleticism and confidence, following on from sessions in the UK with producer Jacknife Lee (The Killers, Bloc Party, Two Door Cinema Club). You can hear a genuine love for these songs – whether they’re laying the riffs on thick, or moving through moments of introspection and vulnerability like on standout tracks '2All' and 'Longshot'. It’s already begun to translate to the band’s live shows:

"'Fluctuate', I love playing that song live," frontman Van McCann told triple j's Ben and Liam recently. "The singles, we like those songs, but the ones off the album that aren't necessarily singles, we're loving those."

The uplifting and optimistic nature of 'Longshot', as well as the grunge nuances present on 'Conversation' and 'Basically', are prime examples of Catfish and The Bottlemen's stylistic strengths. Not since the heyday of Kasabian and early-era Arctic Monkeys has there been a British rock band who has harnessed such palpable energy, teased on an album and full realised on the live stage.

"We've never had a one-off tune," McCann told Billboard in 2017. "When you come to a show you'll see that they [the audience] sing the whole album word for word, both albums now. I think we're at a place where we can properly appreciate it and grab it and run with it."

It’s true – in spite of criticism that the band “played it safe” on second record The Ride, the band have actually played it to significant success. “Running With It” appears to be part of the Catfish and The Bottlemen ethos, as the band have crafted bodies of work that thrive on consistency and coherence.

"The whole album, the artwork, the titles and the tracklisting; it's like the Rocky box set." McCann told Ben and Liam. "By the time Five and Six come out, you've got the full collection and you can all link up."

Keeping this in mind, it’s fair to ask what the larger Catfish and The Bottlemen picture look like. Following the Rocky analogy, perhaps there will come a time when reinvention will inject life and longevity to a proven and popular formula; but because The Balance does sound so alive and so current, it’s pretty clear that that time isn’t now.

They've aimed higher within the bounds of arena-primed indie rock on The Balance - 'Sidetrack' is sure to be set staple - without throwing in any alienating left hooks, or bolo punches.

As a matter of fact, taken as a statement album, The Balance sure feels like a defiant reply to the criticism that followed The Ride.

Catfish and The Bottlemen have reinforced their identity and struck a balance between the endearing songrwriting that first connected them with the pub crowds of their early days, and the huge, stadium sounds the band is fast becoming associated with and considering the norm.

The band has all the ingredients in place to produce rock music that will last, and when indie music takes its next turn back towards rock belter territory, Catfish and The Bottlemen are bound to be at the forefront with more new music to brandish.

"Simple things, get them right," McCann sings on album track 'Mission'. "You'll have enough to last your life."

Case in point.

Interview: Cat Power

PHOO CREDIT: Eliot Lee Hazel

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY BEAT MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2018

Over the years, Marshall’s songwriting skill and musical identity has both strengthened and diversified with time and experience. Currently  preparing for the release of her new album, Marshall — and fans — anticipate the tenth Cat Power studio record: Wanderer.

The singles that fans have been delivered so far (‘Wanderer’, ‘Woman’, ‘Stay’) have been strong in their presentation, yet Wanderer shines as a whole for its great sonic contrasts, as well as Marshall’s defiance; in both her writing and vocal performance. Where other Cat Power albums are known for a somewhat cathartic channelling of pain, Wanderer is built on ideas of hope and possibility, taking a road less travelled in search of redemption, or emotional enlightenment.

“I think it serves a purpose,” Marshall says of Wanderer. “There are some things I needed to release. Songs are like a mystery inside my mind, you know? There were some things I needed to release to help me as a human, as a woman.”

Wanderer is the result of some years’ work of writing and recording between Miami and Los Angeles. Marshall notes the impact her son had on her work as a musician, and how integral he was to the formation of this record.

“Having my child, or maybe having his soul in my body, carrying around someone’s soul in your body may link you with some sort of divine synergy,” she ponders. “I am much more grounded and extremely self-protective and protective over my life. My intention while recording this album was one of complete protection and security of personal space; protection of the intention of goodness.”

Bringing Rob Schnapf into the fold to help produce Wanderer allowed Marshall to relinquish some of the already heavy workload she had taken upon herself, and also allowed for a strong, new dynamic to thrive.

“If I hadn’t left Miami, my comfort zone, and gone to mix somewhere else, I probably wouldn’t have recorded the song ‘Wanderer’, because it was so personal,” she remembers.

“It was more of a meditation. I wouldn’t have recorded ‘Stay’; that whole recording was just a soundcheck, basically. He had been recording and I didn’t know.”

“My ex-label was calling him and asking if there were hits and he kept that information from me. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t find out until  recently. He upheld his integrity as an artist too. Working with him, it was like being in his house. It was so comfortable.”

The importance of finding beauty in nuance was crucial for Marshall on Wanderer and in Schnapf, she found a comrade.

“He did a lot of work with Elliott Smith, who was a friend of mine,” she explains. “He understands the elegance of simplicity, you know? That’s really important.

“It was similar with Lana,” Marshall adds, reflecting on her relationship with Lana Del Rey, who features on ‘Woman’. “When she asked me to go on tour with her, there was an understanding of, ‘Hey, we’re a team’. That’s what we’re meant to do. We’re meant to relate. If you see an old man who’s just broken down on the bus corner crying, we’re meant to put our hand on his shoulder and ask him if he’s okay or if he needs help, you  know?”

Speaking openly about how this process differed from creating Sun six years ago, Marshall vividly recalls the external pressures put on her to deliver a career-defining album.

“For this record, I had the pressure on me again,” she admits. “I knew there was pressure to do a hit record. When they asked for it and when they returned it and said it was no good, that I needed to change it – I worked very specifically on this record. I had clearly visualised my path of  recording this record right after my little boy was born.”

“Sun was so overpowering. It was so dominating. I worked so hard to make sure that I created and formed sound and words with integrity. It’s so hard, because the idea of a ‘hit record’ just doesn’t make sense to me. Fame and wanting to be famous, I’m not comfortable with how absurd and how pointless that is.”

Within the bounds of previous Cat Power releases, there is a gorgeous, albeit haunting, quality; the mark of a songwriter that flits cleverly between elegant warmth and painful vulnerability. Wanderer holds this quintessential Cat Power quality dear, while also navigating a more mature creative landscape that has only formed itself from time spent slowing down, and appreciating each of life’s experiences; both good and bad. Many would argue that music is a remedy, and for Marshall, it has always been a crucial medicine.

“There are things we all need to get free from and music helps,” she says. “I didn’t talk to people when I was younger. I didn’t talk to journalists, no one wanted to interview me about my songs. Over these years, I’d meet people who would say, ‘this song helped me’. That (music) also saved my life a long time ago.”

Interview: Theresa Wayman

PHOTO CREDIT: Delaram Pourabdi
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE AU REVIEW, MAY 2018

Do you remember the last time you bought a CD or a vinyl record you were hangingout for? That sound of the plastic peeling off, that first time you thumb through the album booklet? We lost a lot of that with the digital age – unavoidable – but it’s a feeling of connection with music that a lot of us still chase today. Theresa Wayman is one of those people. With the creation and release of her debut solo record  LoveLawsas TT, Wayman has reached an apex of her personal musical journey.

“I commend you for being a person that likes to listen to albums and have that perspective,” she says. “Not everybody does, so it’s really good. As an artist, I do feel a little bit like I’m on an assembly line. I’m doing the things that we all do to promote the album; I’m here talking to you and tomorrow its the next person…it’s just content, content, content and that’s what everybody expects. It can sometimes take the beauty out of the whole thing, so that’s really nice to hear.”

“In a way, it’s made me wanna go deeper into making art,” she adds. “That environment makes me wanna go home and just make things and express my feelings. Go to the root of what’s behind making music for me, which is figuring out my life and my emotions and who I am.”

Out just ahead of the weekend, LoveLaws is a personal look at a creative navigating emotional terrain, allowing vulnerabilities to shine through quite beautifully and honestly.

“I just can’t believe it.” she says of the final product. “I finished it and it’s here and it’s happening. It’s very fulfilling; it’s one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done.”

“It began when I was daydreaming about making music like this when I was a teenager,” Wayman says of LoveLaws‘ origins. “Through Warpaint, I’ve gotten to be able to get some of that out, but it’s not always quite the same process since we do other things. Then I started learning how to use Logic and drum machines in Logic – that was eight years ago. I started making some of these loops and song; “The Dream” started seven years ago. It’s changed a lot and I expanded on it, took it out of the computer with my brother and actually made the album out of that. As far as when the idea started, it was so long ago.”

Going from the band dynamic Warpaint operates within, to working largely on her own, Wayman opens up about how her work changed as a result, and how outside influences took their form.

“I was afraid I was going to be in a situation where I didn’t know how to communicate the control that I wanted to have over the project,” she admits. “I was working with my brother [though], he’s family and it was maybe a bit easier to get to a place of collaboration.”

“I definitely got caught up in not knowing sometimes what to do and then throwing things on and still feeling like those things weren’t right,” Wayman says, reflecting on her creative process. “Deciding on what to gestate; that gestation was crucial for the process, because I don’t always get that much time to make things right when making an album. Usually I’m up against time and money and with this, I didn’t have that pressure. I did get to set things aside and wait to see how I felt about them later; if they had a longer shelf life then I knew it was right. That’s a very luxurious process.”

“It’s been really nice and necessary, because when you are part of a band for so long, you don’t really know who you are sometimes anymore. It’s so great to be able to explore and have fun and learn about your process.”

LoveLaws, though a cathartic process for Wayman in some ways, wasn’t without its challenges. Overcoming these challenges and bringing music to life in a way that struck out from the rather guitar-heavy roots her work with Warpaint is largely known for, led Wayman to write music that she’s still loving re-discovering even know, considerable time after the writing process had been completed.

“”The Dream”, I was saying before that that was one of the first songs I wrote,” she remembers. “I wasn’t happy with the original melody I had for it; it took me a while to find how to change it because it had been so embedded in there for years. It took some real effort to reimagine it but I really, really love how it came out. I was finally able to let go of the etching that was the original melody and have a clean slate; everything happened there right at the end. It was the last thing I did before I finished, so I love listening to that because it’s still kind of new to me. Then there are other songs like “Too Sweet” and “Take One”; they still feel great to me every time I hear them which is amazing to me, because I don’t always feel that.”

Interview: Everything Everything

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE AU REVIEW, AUGUST 2017

An email announcing Everything Everything‘s return to American shores hits my inbox roughly 10 minutes before I find myself on the phone with the band’s vocalist and songwriter Jonathan Higgs; while the band haven’t been on a stage in some weeks, he’s quick to note that their ‘down time’ has been filled with promotion for their new album, A Fever Dream.

Despite the banal elements of doing press cycles and the itch to get back on tour that often presents itself around this time for a band, he’s enthusiastic about heading Stateside again this October.

“The last album did really well in America,” he says. “It’s nice to go back with something new; do it again and do it properly. Just to see our American fans again too; we’ve got a lot out there, which is weird, but’s it cool.”

“It’s a very strange feeling when you go somewhere you’ve never been,” he remembers of earlier visits abroad. “We were somewhere in America and this entire family – Mum, Dad, four kids – had travelled something like 300 miles to where we were. They were all wearing Get To Heaven t-shirts, all of them. This five year old kid! I was like, ‘What the hell is going on? This is so weird.’ It was in being very far from home and having these guys be this into the band that they’d come all that way…it was crazy.”

The band’s reach has extended greatly since 2010’s Man Alive positioned them as a breakthrough British band to keep on your radar, though in 2013’s Arc, Everything Everything experienced more widespread acclaim. In 2017’s A Fever Dream, we see the band as frenetic as ever, though the chaotic nature of the arrangements indicates that this is a group harnessing more greatness in their artistry than we’re likely to have seen previously.

“It feels like the right thing to do,” Higgs says of the album. “The right record to have made and the right way to react to the last couple of years. The right way to react to our previous record. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves, we didn’t want to drastically go against what we’d done. We wanted to develop it and make it a bit more human, a bit more nuanced and a bit more mature. Whatever Get To Heaven was, we wanted to move on properly; see what we’d learned from that record and make it better, move on from some of the stuff we’d done.”

Looking at their now four-album strong body of work as a snapshot of how the band has developed over the past seven or eight years, Higgs reflects on the writing process behind A Fever Dream and how it’s progressed, particularly since Get To Heaven.

“I found it easy.” he says. “I don’t know about the other guys but I think it definitely did [come easier]. We were writing while we were touring Get To Heaven and that made sure that we had a lot of material when we came to the studio. We had hundreds of things and we’d worked together on so much of it, rather than slaving away by ourselves. It was very collaborative.”

“We had a lot of songs before we got to the studio,” he remembers. “Sometimes when you go into the studio; you’re like, ‘Oh shit…’ but this time, we knew we had it down. So often in the past, people have said, ‘[Everything Everything] don’t know who they are, they’re all over the place’ and I’ve thought, ‘Well we do know who we are and we’ll show you, but we’re not going to stay like this – sorry’!”

Everything Everything make their Australian return before the year is out, set to spend the final days of 2017 out our way on the Falls Festival tour. It’s been a while in between drinks, but Higgs assures me that with this record, the band is very much in the best headspace they’ve been for creating and their sights are very much set on what is still to come.

“I feel like we’ve found out who we are in lots of ways, but we’re also still searching. We’re all in a stage now where we’re not young anymore, but we’re not old. We’re in this transitionary period and we’re still figuring it out. We’re much more confident in ourselves.”

Interview: Foster The People

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE AU REVIEW, DECEMBER 2017

The last time we caught up with Mark Foster of Foster the People, we were in Chicago; the band was set to play Grant Park’s Lollapalooza, a festival that had come off the back of a trip out to Australia for Splendour, as well as some sideshows to promote their then-latest album, Supermodel.

Even then, it was plain to see how much Foster the People had elevated themselves as a live unit since our introduction to the band in 2011. A formidable band exploring multiple influences that brought them out from under the indie rock umbrella, Foster the People were proving themselves to be more than a flash in the pan act out of Cali.

Fast forward to 2017, and I find myself in contact with Mark once more and the band is in a very different space to where they were when we first met. Returning to Australia for the first time since that Splendour tour for the Falls Festival, Foster the People have not only a new line up to debut for Australian fans – following the departure of Cubbie Fink in 2015 – but a new album too, in Sacred Hearts Club.

Executively produced by Foster, the frontman and songwriter takes me through the process of regrouping and pulling their ideas together for Album Number Three.

“It was the first record where I felt the confidence to be able to go in as a producer and not bring anybody for the bulk of the record.” he admits. “It was me and my band mate Isom [Innis]; the two of us locked ourselves in a studio and really took time to explore and see what the aesthetic was going to be for this record and really wanted to see what kind of music was revealed itself to us, as opposed to going in with somebody else overseeing it and cracking the whip in pushing things forward. I think we were just patient; our label was patient and everybody just said, “Take your time and just explore and see what comes out.””

“The first year in the studio, we just wrote without finishing anything,” he remembers. “We just wrote whatever came to us, whether it was hip-hop or heavily electronic influenced; punk or rock or psychedelic, whatever came we just chased it and then put it aside and started a new idea. By the end of that year, we had about thirty ideas out of eighty or ninety and started to carve out what the record was going to be.”

The end result of Sacred Hearts Club proved to be a significant sonic departure for Foster the People too, as the band explored those electronic, soul and funk influences that clearly trickled down in the early stages of production. As Foster explains, it was a freeing process.

“I think that we were intentional with not wanting the pressure of radio or trying to write a radio single,” he says. “We were really intentional about keeping that in the room and to just write and follow the spirit of creativity. I think that was very different from how we worked in the past; it was highly collaborative.”

“It’s nice to have that kind of support.” he says of the band’s backing from their label and behind the scenes team. “I also think over the years I’ve gotten better, even when that pressure was getting put on, my exoskeleton has gotten tougher. I wouldn’t be nearly as bothered as when I was 25 years old making my first record. At the end of the day I’ve learned how to take my successes and my failures – they’re going to land on my shoulders.”

“I think that there’s things I’ve learned from the past when rushing the process at the end and putting that out prematurely. It’s the worst feeling when you put something out when you didn’t quite feel like it was ready; you just release it and then over time, it’s proven to you that your instinct was right and it wasn’t finished. Now you have to live with that and all the thousands of hours put into that project would have all benefited from just twenty more hours. The last part of the marathon is always the trickiest, because song writing is like staring at the same puzzle for so long. At the end of it, you’re staring at these ten or twelve different puzzles that you think you’ve finished and then you’re stacking them next to each other, trying to sequence it with the whole thing. Making good records is hard.”