Geelong locals Levi Anderson, Liam Brennan and Kane Sherriff drive The Kite Machine.
“What sort of a machine is it?” you may well ask. While the attributive noun in the title may suggest a breezy afternoon in the park, ‘The Kite Machine’ evoked by the band’s music is a wind turbine so large and powerful that a single rotation would produce enough power to light the MCG up for a week.
Their new single ‘Sinister Sound’ begins with Anderson a capella in a serpentine sweet falsetto – ‘There’s just a tiny little tick in your left eye’ and on the ‘tick’ a powerful kick drum begins to beat and a 16th later is then propelled by a thick bass line into a powerfully syncopate chorus. One could describe it as The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ with a gothic attitude.
The band is indirectly asked to describe their influences via a question as to what songs The Kite Machine warm-up by playing at soundcheck or rehearsal.
“We tend to play a lot of Muse riffs and Rage Against Machine,” Anderson begins before Sheriff provides, “Audioslave.”
“Tom Morello is a big influence, but there’s a bit of everything thrown in there. Kane’s more into prog-metal stuff, and I’m straight up rock influenced, and Liam the bass player is into indie punk,” Anderson says.
As Anderson and Sherriff continue to explain the musical components of ‘Sinister Machine’. the input is equal and complementary, intimating that creatively all three members are on the same musical page. ‘Sinister Sound’ was recorded in a studio session that also included other songs that will all be presented as an album early next year with the quality of sound and songwriting at an elite level across the board.
“The main differences between these songs and the ones we recorded for our 2015 EP Lunatics is that there was a lot more of an emphasis on the pre-production. We put a lot more effort into exactly how we wanted each part of the song to sound before we even thought about recording it. On Lunatics, we had a whole bunch of songs sitting around and we needed an EP so we just recorded what we had,” Anderson says.
The band relished the opportunity to write a song with the preconceived constraint that it was going to be a single, so anything over three and a half minutes would be too long. “This was the first song that we had approached with the intention of it being a single. We set out to write a song that wasn’t exactly a pop song but a song that focused on hooks and was guided by the kinds of limitations that come with writing a song you hope to hear on the radio.”
The external guidelines imposed by the song’s purpose resulted in the band finding a new creative depth. “We chopped a lot out of it and were forced to pick the best sections of the song, whereas previously we may not have pushed ourselves to evaluate every single second of the song.”
However, the high benchmark that the three members of The Kite Machine set for the impending album extended beyond just what was done in the studio, with the film clip for ‘Sinister Sound’ hugely impactful – especially considering it was done on a minimal budget and shot on the family farm.
“We asked my cousin Robbie if we could borrow one of his paddocks and set up camp in,” Anderson says. The reason for the camp is that to capture the contrasts in ‘Sinister Sounds’, the clip cuts between light and dark, day and night.
“We were really lucky with the weather considering we were doing it in the middle of winter, I reckon if there had even been the slightest breeze and a bit of rain we would have all frozen to death,” Anderson says.
