“It wasn’t exactly planned, the eight years between albums,” explains guitarist Jeff Boyle. “We released our last album back in 2006, and we did an awful lot of touring off the back of that for a couple of years, ending in a really amazing tour with ISIS in Europe. We came back to New Zealand to record an album and the plan was to go back and do a big headline tour of our own. As we started writing for the new album, I had to have surgery on my wrist.”
Boyle had been playing guitar since he was six, so it was a significant interruption. “It was the first time in nearly 26 years that I hadn’t been able to play guitar,” he says, before explaining the downtime required for his wrist to heal.
“It was nearly a year and a half I was out. All that momentum we’d built up over the last couple of years completely dissipated and I had to start playing gingerly, relatively, first up anyway.”
Not ideal. But it didn’t stop there for the band. In 2010, after a period of planning to get back into touring and start up the album process again, Jakob toured with ISIS in America on their final tour, completed a headline tour of their own in their native New Zealand, and rounded off the year supporting Tool’s sideshows during the Big Day Out tour over summer.
After that long time out of the saddle, it was proving hard to get the groove back. “I realised [what we’d recorded] wasn’t what we wanted at all,” says Boyle. “It wasn’t quite hitting the mark. We had to re-record a couple of things, re-did a couple of songs. We were doing a bit of chasing for awhile.” Prepared to re-record the entire thing, their first day in the studio was again put on hold when their drummer, Jason Johnston, slashed his hand open and severed a couple of tendons, needing six months to mend.
Towards the end of drummer Johnston’s recovery, Tool invited the band to join them on another tour, which they did. Boyle affirms the two groups have become friends over time, and this association with Tool prompted Jakob to finally finish the album. “We ran out of money so I had to do all the editing and mixing myself,” he says. “I’ve got a job and two kids so it’s not like I was working on it 24/7, but I was on it from nine to two o’clock in the morning every night.
Because the album took nearly two years to complete, Boyle says one’s expectations and ideals inevitably change over time. “You become so emotionally involved with it, it can become really hard to finish. I didn’t really know if I was happy with it at all,” he says.
“The time it takes between the finishing of the album – the negotiations with record labels, the pressing, the media – it’s given me some time away from it. I can now listen from an almost outside perspective, and I’ve fallen in love with it all over again.”
Boyle isn’t alone in that respect. The album, Sines, has so far received rave reviews, rewarding for the band given it represents the culmination of the best part of a decade marked by injury and false starts.
“Once you get it out to the public it’s no longer yours anymore,” says Boyle, “It belongs to everyone else as well.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
