On the second erroneous attempt to call Kenny-Smith, the voice is tinged with paranoia, and I get the sense the guy is about to report my unsolicited calls to the relevant authorities.
Thankfully – interesting, after eschewing the phone card details and dialling Kenny-Smith direct, I experience a moment of superficial joy when I finally get through to him. Later in the week I ponder the serendipity of the juxtaposition of the aforementioned emotions, viz. Paranoid Joy, the first single from The Murlocs’ new album, Loopholes. But in the moment of the interview, the association was neither present nor relevant.
Like my phone call, Loopholes had its own messy gestation when some of Kenny-Smith’s early recordings were lost after a laptop belonging to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Stu MacKenzie was stolen from MacKenzie’s car in Carlton.
“I can’t really remember when we started writing the songs originally,” Kenny-Smith says, “because we’d been in and out of other projects, like King Gizzard [in which Kenny-Smith plays harmonica]. We put out Rattle the Chain a while back, and we recorded some others and as time went on we got a bit obsessive and stuffing around a bit more than we wanted to.”
Just under a year ago those fledgling recordings went missing after MacKenzie’s car was burgled. “He’d only left it for a minute while he went to drop off a friend,” Kenny-Smith says. “We’d just started the vocals on the record, but at the time no-one had a hard drive, so it just went with all the other recordings, include Gizzard stuff.”
From there it was a case of making up for lost time. The members of The Murlocs decided to use whatever opportunities they had to re-record the songs and finish off the album.
“We’ve always been a bit of a scrappy band, never really taken things too seriously,” Kenny-Smith says. “I’ve always tried to hold the reins steady. It was a bit of a struggle and frustrating at times. We’d have our own stuff, but at the end of the day it was only when we came together that we agreed on the songs. That’s probably why it took so long to finish the album because we were pretty picky with the arrangements.”
While the band’s surreal lyrics are consistent with the band’s psychedelic musical atmosphere, Kenny-Smith doesn’t spend a lot of time pondering the interplay of text and melody. “I sort of have a weird thing about re-using the same words,” Kenny-Smith says. “Ideally I don’t get too repetitive, but at the same time I don’t want it to get too out of hand. I try and write what comes to mind at the time with some vague idea of what the song is about. But I don’t really think too much about the content – just see where the song takes me. It’s hard to explain!”
While Kenny-Smith isn’t sure where the lyrics are coming from – or going – he does concede that there is a surrealistic element consistent with the band’s psychedelic aesthetic. “For sure – I tend to think song lyrics should rhyme a lot in a hip hop sense,” Kenny-Smith says. “I like the thought of different and peculiar ways different words and meanings can work together.”
The band’s psychedelic sound ensures The Murlocs doesn’t devolve into just another blues band. “From the beginning I always wanted to start a blues band that wasn’t too cheesy,” Kenny-Smith says. “If we can avoid just doing Bo Diddley covers or becoming some wedding band, that should be enough,” he laughs.
BY PATRICK EMERY
