Pampering my senses with the piano-bathed indie rock sounds of Bendigo three-piece Fountaineer, I couldn’t help but be engulfed with Springsteen stimuli – modest lyricism purveying an entrenched love for their land. Frontman and chief creator Anthony White couldn’t be more proud of his Bendigo home and you don’t need to delve too far into their forthcoming album Greater City, Greater Love to see that.
“Greater City, Greater Love is meant to be truthful,” White says. “I’m not going to say that Bendigo is perfect and that it’s a perfect place to live. There has been a bit happening the last couple of years to force some conversations on the town but I think country people have been a bit reluctant to speak. So when the fascist protesters arrive on our doorstep it forces us to think and act.
“The album’s not just about that. There’s a song about drink driving, a song about growing up and coming of age but it’s all to portray Bendigo as we see it, as our truth. There’s definitely hope at the end of the story and it was really intended to be a story, a concept album with chapters, but there definitely won’t be a sequel to this. I’m not sure I can write about Bendigo that explicitly anymore, but it will always be there in the background.”
White and his bandmates, brother Francis and childhood friend Kieran Daly, have been sitting on a gold mine for a few years now without the shovels and spades to excavate it. Greater City, Greater Love was recorded three years ago and just as White was itching to self-release it, he had someone advise him to hold off and bide his time.
“We had this recorded three years ago and we’ve just been sitting on it,” White says. “We had a manager who really believed in it and didn’t want us to release it to no one, which was probably going to be the outcome. He encouraged us to keep playing shows and kept the faith because he really liked it and knew something would happen and it did.
“Eventually we got a label on board who helped us clean it up a bit as they wanted it to be the best it could be. Before that the album was probably opened twice. It just sat on a hard drive like all the things we cherish.”
Primarily a bedroom record, the 12-track release has wandered through many DAWs, interfaces and studio residences during its time, even taking a trip to Lake Eildon in the early stages, which White admits was a significant step in the recording process.
“It was a bedroom record which started here in Bendigo and then we went to a farmhouse in Lake Eildon for five days, they were really just sketches but we went away and got a friend to come and help record it.
“That’s when the songs really came alive. Daly, who plays bass live, does a lot of guitars on the record and my brother plays drums. There’s drum machines on quite a few of the songs and that was a limitation to begin with. I wrote drum music at home because I couldn’t record drums and we actually kept a lot of that.
“I think that bedroom sound still carried through to the end product on a lot of songs. Some people have described it as being quite introverted but jumping out as well which really expresses us. We’re not big personalities or anything so that reflects us personally.”
Greater City, Greater Love’s bedroom construction channels the opulent melodies of The National, White’s vocals running tight with the deep baritones of Matt Berninger. Behind their music potential is a maturity and decorum not often seen in emerging bands – a point of difference poised to see Fountaineer burst the seams of Australia’s busy indie rock industry.
