Sydney band The Laurels are not those guys. The Laurels have been active for the better part of the last decade, at first distinguishing themselves with a ridiculously loud wall-of-guitars live show. But on their 2012 debut LP Plains, the band pared things back to reveal lucid songcraft.
“We thought, considering everyone sees us so much basically being loud idiots on stage, we should actually try to do something that is slightly different,” says co-frontman Piers Cornelius. “We’ve always been interested in the idea of having records that are a different experience to what you would see live.”
Once the record was out, the band toured like madaround Australia and the US. However, for the last three years they’ve kept quiet on the release front. “We put quite a lot of effort and a fair bit of our band funds into [the US tour], so we needed to have a bit of a break when we got back from that,” Cornelius says. “We started working on our next batch of songs shortly after that and they were all pretty different to what we already had. The only way we could foresee ourselves being able to afford to record was to do it ourselves and build the recordings up from the ground – not rehearse the songs for ages and then try to capture a performance of them.”
In spite of the gung-ho enthusiasm coming from Cornelius and The Laurels’ co-leader Luke O’Farrell, the new writing method didn’t appeal to the band’s drummer Kate Wilson. “She was more of a fan of working on songs in a live environment or whatever,” says Cornelius. “There was a little bit of time there where we weren’t really sure what we were going to do and then Kate eventually left. We got a new drummer in called Jasper [Fenton] who’s totally into just experimenting with the band, having the recording part of it be separate from the live part. It seemed to click a bit better and we got back into the swing of things.”
In May The Laurels released the new single Zodiac K, which clearly represents their songwriting overhaul. While the guitars are still in use, Zodiac K is a groove-based number, where Fenton’s drumming and Conor Hannan’s bass playing interact with a philosophically engaging spoken word sample. The track recalls the likes of Massive Attack and DJ Premier as much as it does the spacey rock of Spiritualized and The Jesus and Mary Chain.
“I’d always been interested in hearing songs that have weird audio quotes in them,” says Cornelius. “After we got back from the US and while we were in the US, Luke and I were listening to a lot of golden age hip hop and just things with so many samples and weird spoken word parts. We’re just trying to find something that can transport a listener rather than just trying to blast their head off with guitars.”
The Laurels are hard at work on their second album, which is slated for release in early 2016. We’ll get to hear a few new songs when they head down to the John Curtin Bandroom this weekend. Though, they’ve yet to develop a method for transferring the altered studio approach into their live show.
“We’re still recording the album and because we’re doing it a different way, none of us have really learnt the songs we’re working on before the final recordings,” Cornelius says. “So we’ll just put all these ideas down and then sample the best ones and make the song that way. At this stage it’s just us with a synth and guitars.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
