Set to hit Melbourne this Friday May 20 for the release of their debut album Grit Aglow, Adam Connelly assures me that even though I’ve been waiting to hear the album for ages, they’ve been waiting even longer. “Most of the album’s been done for a while,” he laments. “A lot of the songs are from when we first started Megastick Fanfare, and then we had some recording sessions in 2009 and it’s taken us a while to kind of perfect it and get it finished but it came together over a slow process of the past two years.”
The length of the recording process has been a result of many factors, one of which is the lifestyles of temperamental and curious young Gen-Y band members jetsetting around the globe over the last few years. “Oh, man,” Connelly sighs, when asked whether the band’s been overseas much. “That’s part of the reason why it’s taken two years for this album to come out. We’ve all been going to different parts of the world; Europe, the ‘States, Japan…” And yet Connelly doesn’t feel like there’s a hugely ‘global’ flavour on Grit Aglow. Traveling isn’t so much of an exciting, unique thing anymore; more a given for 20-something-year-olds. “Some of the band members have had some good musical experiences… I don’t know, everything influences us in some aspect,” he muses.
“When we write, it’s always the five of us in a room playing,” he explains, of how Megastick Fanfare come up with their somewhat unique sound, which echoes Animal Collective and that kind of beautiful, high-energy, psychedelic experimental pop. “We don’t bring songs that we’ve written by ourselves; we’re just responding to what each other are doing. It’s just a product of the five of us, that’s where the inspiration is coming from. It’s pretty insular in that aspect,” he adds thoughtfully.
Mixed by the talented Jonathan Boulet (of Jonathan Boulet and Parades), Grit Aglow features songs which would be familiar to those who’ve seen Megastick’s live show, which is an ecstatic, high-powered pop rainbow road of happiness, generally. “Jono’s a friend of ours,” Connelly explains. “After recording an album for two years we really wanted to get someone outside to take the reins a bit and let us be in a different space. Just being able to go to Jono’s studio in his garage made things a lot easier.”
The connections between bands like Parades and Megastick Fanfare comes from both shared ideals and a lovely support network created through working together to organise shows. With what seems like an endless string of bad news relating to Sydney venues, it’s often up to musicians to “be creative” in finding or creating new spaces to play at. “It’s always been like that ever since we’ve been playing,” Adam explains.
“There’s always been this crisis of venues closing and problems with licenses and stuff like that, so for us it’s familiar territory. I mean, The Annandale’s officially closing now or at least changing hands, which sounds like it could be a sad thing, but at the same time great new venues are popping up – the renovations they’ve done on the Sandringham Hotel are awesome and the launches we’re doing are at a new venue that’s owned by fBI which sounds like an awesome idea – we haven’t actually been there yet, but fBI’s an awesome force for Sydney music, and the fact that they have their own venue now is also going to be awesome.”
So it’s not all bad news, thankfully. How to describe Megastick Fanfare is a bit of a task, with their music sort of exploding with melody and colour all over the place. You have to wait until your brain stops ringing before you can think about genre and those kinds of words. The artwork of the releases reflects this – abstract artworks that are beautiful and aesthetically appealing but somewhat indefinable and esoteric. “That’s [band member Adam] Zwi – he did the cover of our seven inch as well,” Connelly explains enthusiastically. “He was working in a library and he took the inner sleeve of this old thesis that had these ink blots and he just cut them and copied them – that was for the seven inch. With our music, we like to think of it as being focused on the textural. More the shape of sounds rather than the chords and things like that. I feel like it was good to instead of having a photo, to have a texture. So we kind of tore up some photos and copied that idea, but I think it worked out well.”
Sounds synesthetic – as if Megastick Fanfare’s artwork is literally visualizing the colour of their sounds. “You always can [see music in colours and shapes in music],” Connelly says matter-of-factly, as if we’re all able to. “I mean synesthesia is a condition, but I think we are all so similar, our brains are so similar, that we all have that within us, that crossing of wires, whether it’s a failure or success of the brain. I wouldn’t put particular colours…” he trails off, “although the seven inch and the album cover, we’ve picked those colours because we think that they’re what parts of the album look like, at least. We like to think that our music moves across the spectrum rather than staying in one colour.”
