“There’s a unique sound to an empty room.” It’s an elegant way to describe one of his many Tuesday night front-bar solo shows, and one of many elegant or cutting statements Tom Lyngcoln makes when asked about music.
“I was terrified at solo shows at first. They turned into this battle to stay in tune with a guitar. The turning point was this support slot I did for Don Walker. I got over the fear at that point, it flipped a switch and I stopped caring.”
Double Negative is Harmony’s third album, and the first song is rather boldly called ‘I Love You’. It’s the perennially ubiquitous and maligned lyrical concept that stacks the odds toweringly high against the singer, taking on three words that are inherently “corny”, to quote Lyngcoln directly.
“That particular statement is probably the most confronting thing I’ve ever written. I’m probably nearly 15 records deep by this point, and I’m older now, but that’s probably the most terrifying thing I’ve written. When we play it live people get really uncomfortable, I see people shuffling their feet. I’ve got a theory that you hear ‘I hate you’ more than you hear ‘I love you’”.
Despite the fact that a lot of bands steer clear of difficult territory, he doesn’t agree with the suggestion that Harmony make ambitious music. “I think Harmony is pretty conservative. There’s a blueprint drawn up. Like, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, screaming away, but there’s more melodic parts to those compositions. It’s a simple dichotomy.”
The band is particularly striking because of the presence of three-part choir, the Harmonettes. It’s a lot to coordinate, logistically and musically, and the recording process was gruelling. Lyngcoln would be exhausted by the end of the day and fall asleep during takes. He admits that the eight weeks of mixing Double Negative were “painful” and that he broke down and quit the band for a while. In an album, dealing with matters of the heart, his words show his labour. And to write optimistically is not one simple, dignified gesture; it’s a fraught journey.
“It’s pretty corny but I got sick of singing miserable music, it’s too easy. I have a vocab that is long established and easy to cherry pick. I wanted to try to write positively which was so hard to do. I had an idea to use negative words to describe positive things. I wanted to try to use things with negative connotations in a positive way.”
Lyngcoln grew up in Tasmania, playing in punk bands such as The Nation Blue, before moving to the mainland around the turn of the millennium. “There were a lot of rock bands when we first got here, who would speak with American accents in between songs. We would’ve sounded like provincial bogans, ocker idiots. But the actual mechanics of singing are so much easier if you do change the timbres in your voice to let go of the Australian accent. You can sing in tune a lot better, but fucked if I ever want to do it, I have no interest.”
In some ways Lyngcoln’s resoluteness – it’s got to be this way, no question – shapes the creative processes that follow. They’re stoic and hard-worn, the result of doing things the only way that feels natural to him. A lot of work, repetition, and the meditation of repetitive work, is fundamental to the way Lyngcoln makes music. These themes come up repeatedly and bleed into his trade as a carpenter.
“The lyrics take forever. But it’s in the repetition – get on a machine at work, listen to the same demo of a new song for a day, two days, then in the lunch break put it down to paper in another shed. You just push through all the obvious shit until you come up with something you haven’t done before.”
