“Our drummer [Joe Hammond] won a recording studio in a magazine competition. We were like, ‘Awesome. We get to record ourselves.’ And anyone who has their own studio will tell you that’s probably the worst idea in the world for actually finishing music, because you just end up tinkering with stuff,” says vocalist/songwriter Marcus Teague.
“We wrote and recorded and mixed all these songs, and then we came up with I, Lummox – which was markedly different from the other stuff we were doing – and we were like, ‘This is the kind of music that we should be playing.’ So we rejected all the stuff that we’d done and set off on that path. Essentially we had a career in a recording studio in Hawthorn for quite a few years.”
The band’s creative agenda became much clearer in the wake of I, Lummox, and they’ve subsequently recorded and mastered a full-length album. However, their self-understanding will inevitably shift after performing in front of a live audience.
“We have been playing in our studio for years – we just haven’t done it in front of anyone,” says Teague. “We’ll do it and be like ‘That guitar tone sounds like shit’ or something. You know, those little discoveries you make when you’re actually playing in front of people. But I think it’ll be a bit of a rush as well.”
Teague himself has been onstage often enough over the last few years, playing shows with his acoustic folk solo project, Single Twin. In contrast to his self-sufficient solo work, Near Myth is crucially reliant on the input of all four members. When sculpting the forthcoming release, they endeavoured to have the songs’ constituent parts contribute to a dynamically balanced whole.
“Talking Heads did it really well, and bands like that, where every instrument is an element of what’s going on, rather than everyone playing a G chord at the same time,” Teague says. “We started getting really excited about the interplay and dynamics. So they’re songs that you can’t just sit down and play on an acoustic guitar – which I get to do in Single Twin, so I didn’t want to do that in writing this kind of music. It has to be band stuff and it has to have that rhythmical element and that interlocking thing for it to exist. Like, we all need to be playing the song for it to actually be a song.”
Despite spending such an extensive period in the shadows, Teague’s not too worried about the transition to the live arena. He won’t discount the possibility of everything falling to pieces, but major fuck-ups often lead to useful discoveries.
“I’m definitely not precious about it. I know that some of it is quite specific – the sounds and the parts – but if it all falls apart then that would be just as fun.”
Near Myth plan to hit the ground running after the live debut, relatively speaking at least. “We’ll have a video soon. We’ll probably put out some of [the album] songs as an EP.” The two songs currently available online – I, Lummox and Hero Have a House – will feature on the full-length release. But despite I, Lummox catalysing a creative breakthrough for the band, these songs aren’t the greatest depiction of what’s to come.
“We have a bunch of much more electronically-minded songs on there. We don’t want a laptop onstage – it’s a band – but there is a lot of electronic samply bits in there as well. But it all needs to be played live, which is also a really great way to fall apart.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
