“I think Dave and I were getting pretty bored with life in general,” says Forrester. “We ended up getting a beer at probably the shittest pub in Melbourne. We were sitting there, surveying our surroundings, and I put it to Dave that we should play music again. So I started yelling out a riff like, ‘bah bah bah da da da’, doing air drumming and getting really excited about it, and we quite swiftly went back to my house, set up drums and guitar and figured out that riff.”
“A lot of the riffs off that album were mouthed at pubs first and then turned into real riffs after,” says Lees. “Realising that it was both kind of cool and annoying, but fun because it was simple and easy to do. We’ve got an aversion to playing typical metal as well, maybe because we listen to so much of that stuff. We wanted to do something really heavy but something that wasn’t conventional, or dare I say clichéd, and we decided we wanted to avoid that by basically playing one note per song.”
It’s easy to push a band to breaking point by contriving to fit in with a scene. Both seasoned musicians, Forrester and Lees have learned from past experiences and are now only trying to satisfy themselves.
“It’s more about the energy in the songs,” says Forrester. “If it makes you think, ‘This is awesome,’ we’re happy about that. If it makes us laugh, we’re happy about that. That’s what we’re going for.”
“We did all that serious stuff through our early 20s,” says Lees. “It was so much work going through weekly rehearsals and redoing songs to make them more complicated, then having in-band fights about what was going to work and what wasn’t. That weekly grind of being a normal band, we really wanted to avoid [that]. Joe and I spent a lot of time together anyway, so this is a crappy but fun project that we’re doing together.
“It’s taken on its own life form, because the album sounds so huge. So we should probably act more accomplished about it, but it’s definitely more about having fun than doing the typical ‘obsess over the music too much’ plan. That’s a sure fire way of killing all the joy.”
Constructing songs through a verbal back and forth seems liable to disintegrate into a game of Chinese whispers. All Of The Dirt All At Once’s songwriting method means the exchange of ideas can be tricky, but it does create some interesting mutations.
“Sometimes we get way off in the sense that I might mouth the noise, Dave will figure it out on guitar and the rhythm will come completely different from how we thought in our heads,” says Forrester. “It does go wrong sometimes, but usually we’ll just abandon that or it’ll work out pretty quickly.”
“The way Tennis came up – I think it was six days before recording – I started playing the riff, but then Joe started playing in a completely different time signature than I thought,” says Lees. “He completely changed the riff and I had no idea what he was doing, but the way he changed it was completely awesome. We have this weird thing where whatever riff or rhythm we’re hearing, I’ll hear it one way and he’ll hear it on the off beat – or what he’ll call the right way, my way being the wrong way.”
BY THOMAS BRAND
