Portland-based, New Zealand-exports Unknown Mortal Orchestra have produced four stellar albums in the past eight years, the most recent – Sex & Food – gaining mounting critical acclaim.
With the band currently in the midst of a worldwide tour, it’s undeniably jarring to hear frontman Ruban Nielson’s account of a random attack outside a gig in the States.
“It was a bit weird, I got jumped. I was sitting on the road having a cigarette and then this guy came up behind me and punched me in the back of the head. Then all these guys beat the crap out of me, so I had to do the final three shows – two were the biggest shows of the tour – with a fat lip, a black eye and a puffy face. They were some of the best shows we’ve ever played, though, so it went well in the end.”
Despite this minor setback, the tour is going well. The band are currently working their way through Europe, and have Australian and New Zealand dates ahead. Though they’ve blown up Down Under in recent years, it took a while for UMO to get a foot in New Zealand’s door.
“We’re always really excited to tour Australia, especially with this new band lineup. Australia embraced us much earlier than New Zealand did; we weren’t doing well at home until the end of the Multi-Love cycle,” Nielson says.
“Now we’re treated like hometown heroes when we play New Zealand, and we have some of our biggest shows there this tour.”
Nielson’s love for Australia and New Zealand is hardly spread thin, but he reserves a strange relationship with his mother’s homeland, America, which crept into the new LP. The sixth track, ‘American Guilt’, is an exploration of Nielson’s attitude to living in the US, and how it relates to his own moral perspectives in light of recent questionable political and social decisions.
That being said, Nielson rejects the inherent politicisation of his music. The politically-charged atmosphere of the world is just background noise when it comes to the making of the music. However, he admits that politics always seems to find a way to seep into the lyrics.
“I don’t see [Sex & Food] as political, but I think the theme of the album is watching the way that things are playing out in this era. It’s a challenge to do that without letting it ruin my music,” Nielson says.
“I think politics is ultimately pretty boring, and I think politicians are just bureaucrats that try to grab power and attention by positioning themselves in ways we can’t ignore. In the end, their jobs are boring and they’re boring people and I didn’t have much to write about politics, but seeing as the world is soaked in all this political stuff it seeped into the music.”
With recording completed across the world – in places such as Vietnam, South Korea, Portland, and his home studio – the self-sufficiency that Nielson learned during his time as a punk guitarist payed off in buckets. Nielson’s artistic past – he initially wanted to become a painter but was “sidetracked into music” – also prevailed in this album, with his choice of cover art fundamentally linked to the musical aspect of Sex & Food.
“I wanted [Neil Krug] to finish the cover and then try to figure out what the album would feel like. It would be like, ‘Oh, I wonder what this album sounds like’, and then work backwards. He didn’t finish the cover in time, but we had so many conversations before I recorded that it felt like we worked backwards anyway.
“While I was making the album, he was sending me all of these pictures he was taking, until one of the images grabbed me and I thought, ‘This is exactly it,’ and that ended up being the cover. It’s exactly what I was hoping for; the image and music convey exactly what I wanted the album to say.
