This one’s for you, Melbourne… According to ex-Adelaide dark-psychedelia brothers Society Of Beggars, brand new album Exit Soul simply couldn’t have been written and recorded anywhere else, nor at any other time in their lives.
This one’s for you, Melbourne… According to ex-Adelaide dark-psychedelia brothers Society Of Beggars, brand new album Exit Soul simply couldn’t have been written and recorded anywhere else, nor at any other time in their lives. As a reflection of the boys’ life and career-changing relocation from the ‘city of churches’ to one of the most multicultural towns in the world, Yianni Michalopoulos and Dibi claim Exit Soul is not unlike a diary of a very personal journey.
“The story behind the album is that we were moving from Adelaide as group,” says Michalopoulos. “There were nine of us that got this house and we were all living together. When you move from one place to another, you often get the feeling of isolation, but when you’re lucky enough to move away with a big group of people, you sort of tend to stick to each other. The album just grew out of that – of living together and of writing songs together.”
As Dibi continues, “This album is the heart and the soul of this band. What you get is basically us just putting everything we’ve got into it, in every sense. Emotionally, we’ve poured our hearts and souls into it. In other aspects too, like, all the cash that went into the recording, it was all financed by ourselves. It’s not like we just went into the studio and got everything done in just two weeks. We worked in the studio a little bit here and there, but most of the time we recorded in our house in Brunswick. This really is a very personal record in lots of different ways.”
And while Dibi adds that Adelaide will always be the band’s home in terms of family ties, spiritually it is in Melbourne where Society Of Beggars have found a real sense of belonging. With the change in scenery also came a change in sound, as Michalopoulos explains. No longer aiming to replicate their idols and childhood influences, Society Of Beggars have turned a new leaf in their musical book, opting for a deeper, more darker sonic direction on Exit Soul.
“We’re probably no different than other bands in that respect,” says Michalopoulos. “I think most bands start out trying to imitate people they love or bands they’ve grown up listening to. Our first [self-titled, 2007] EP was pretty much just us basically trying to be The Dandy Warhols and old-school rock ‘n’ roll like Creedence. With this album, we are definitely finally putting our own stamp on our sound. Some people have said there seems to be an exotic element to it, and I think that could be because there aren’t a lot of Australian bands coming from the same kind of background that we have. We are first-generation kids that have been really Australian-ised from immigrant families, so maybe that puts a different angle on everything. We are all Greek so maybe our background does influence the fact that we like adding some ethnic melodies into our band.”
However, this does not make Society Of Beggars are world music band by any means – ifanything, it makes them even more illusive to categorise.
“Having said that,” Dibi adds, “it’s more a case of the ethnic influence serving as a bit of a shtick, if you wish. It doesn’t make us an ethnic band, but that slight bit of influence just helps to distinguish us, I guess. We definitely do not want to be locked into any style of music. Our main mission is to just write music from the bottom of our hearts – whatever style that may be.”
SOCIETY OF BEGGARS are releasing Exit Soul at Cherry Bar this Saturday March 26. For more info, head to societyofbeggars.com.
