“We wanted to find a completely different head space,” says vocalist James Grim. “We were sleeping in the studio, getting up in the morning and going for a swim and then going to record. It was a different environment – it was a luxury that we didn’t know how to deal with. It was great, but after it was over we thought for next time it’ll be straight back to a concrete box!” Grim laughs.
With a break in touring, Brothers Grim had decided to put down some new tracks for what would become the seven-song Roll It In EP (or “mini-album”, in Grim’s words).
“The initial plan was always to record an EP,” Grim says. “We tour all the time, and we like to have a new product each time we go on tour to feed to the audience. We could have looked at doing a complete album, which would have meant slamming down 14 or 15 songs and choosing the best ten in a more expansive process. But with a mini-album, it means you can spend more time over the songs.”
The brief juncture from touring also meant that Grim could spend more time creating the lyrics for the band’s songs. “Cathartic is a bit of a horrible word, but in a way that’s what it was for this record,” Grim says. “We finally had time to write after the last tour was finished. So rather than sit down and say ‘this is the album that we want to write’, it was more of a case of ‘this is the story that we want to tell’.”
Grim, the band’s chief lyricist (and fanatical front man) began with some choice sketches of tracks, each one of which was eventually realised in the recording process. “It was a really interesting time for us,” Grim says. “The new songs are all beasts of their own.”
While Brothers Grim have made a modern day art form of transposing dark and seedy tales into a confronting punk-blues aesthetic, Grim was wary of going down the slippery road to artistic contrivance. “You can go crazy of you spend too much time thinking of what you should write,” he says. “You have to write what you feel, and what you want to create, and then you work hard to finish that song. And on this record there’s a really wide variety of styles, from punk rock to Stonesy-riffs to weird prog, and it was all really enjoyable. We just let ‘em go where they wanted to go.”
On a personal level, Grim feels his own lyric-writing is maturing.
“With the genre I write in, it’s pretty easy to fall the misogynist trap, just because of the sort of material you’re dealing with, because you’re dealing with murder ballads,” Grim says. “But I want to empower the characters that are in the songs. So lyrically I feel that I’m creating characters that both men and women can appreciate – even if they don’t actually like those characters.”
On Roll It In, Brothers Grim pay tribute to the distinctive – and frequently under-appreciated lyric-writing – of the late Bon Scott, with a cover of AC/DC’s Kicked In The Teeth. “Bon Scott was a big influence on me,” Grim says. “He had a wicked, sly sense of humour. I think Back in Black is a brilliant album, but I’m not sure that if Bon Scott had stayed in the original band that the band would still be going at it today. Bon Scott certainly isn’t the sort of guy you’d want to peeter out.”
Bon Scott’s influence on Grim can be seen in the final track on the new record, Baby Girl. In the song, Grim adopts the position of a father contemplating what would make him turn to violence. “The song comes from a pulp story titled I Killed The Only Man My Baby Girl Ever Loved – when I saw that, I thought, ‘Wow, what a statement’. The novel was written from the perspective of the mother, but I started looking at it from my perspective, and in the context of domestic violence, which I absolutely abhor.”
Grim is conscious of the potential for the lyrics to be misinterpreted by the audience, but sees that as an occupational risk. “The person I want to respond to the song is the perpetrator of domestic violence – it’s a veiled threat,” Grim says.
With Brothers Grim about return to the road for a series of shows to promote Roll It In, there’s no immediate need for Grim to ponder an alternative career outside of music – but he does have a suggestion. “Maybe a cult leader – it’s all about getting laid, but doing it in a way that makes people more peaceful,” Grim says dryly. “But I wouldn’t be wearing sandals!”
BY PATRICK EMERY
