Plastic Fantastic

"Sonically, I really like them because they never seem to be as prone to excessive mastering as CDs do,” Belles Will Ring's Liam Judson says in explaining the decision to release a crowd-funded limited edition run of their third album, Crystal Theatre, on 130 gram vinyl. “Songs really bloom and loud bits jump out. You've got more dynamics than most modern CDs where loudness seems to be such an important thing for people – they want it to be as loud as possible – and you sacrifice a lot of the dynamics in that case.

“For me, I don't know, it sounds better. And of course the artwork, you know, that's the other thing. It's a beautiful gatefold and it brings justice to… I mean, we really like what Sonny [Day] and Biddy [Maroney at webuyyourkids] did with the artwork. It looked great on CD, but on vinyl it's a totally new level of awesome,” Judson laughs.

As it was conceived and recorded, Crystal Theatre is a sprawling, epic sonic experience of a record in both scope and length. That inevitably meant that, with a running time of almost an hour, transferring it to vinyl – with its own run-time limits – was no easy matter. “We didn't really want to cut any songs from it because it would actually disrupt the flow quite considerably, just 'cause of the kind of record we make, and we felt it was probably a better idea to slightly abridge it,” Judson chuckles again. “So compared to the CD version, it's slightly abridged – there are moments that have been kind of, I wouldn't say trimming the fat because I like the fat, but it's nice because it plays a little bit shorter and it's a bit of a snappier version of the record. But all the crucial elements are still there. So it's a slightly different experience to the CD, which I think is a good thing.”

As it happens, there's also a natural break that allows for the album to organically fall into two sides. “In my head, even on CD, there's 'A' and 'B'. The last tune on side A is Do You Know What I See?, because there's that sneaky little vocal right at the end of that song, which says, I think, 'You can't stop when we're halfway there', totally covered in reverb,” Judson explains. “And then it goes into side B, which is Come North With Me Baby, Wow, which has a slightly different vibe, and that's the way it was always intended.”

In launching the album, the band will for the first and only time perform Crystal Theatre in its entirety. “There are probably four songs off the record that have never seen the stage before, like Voice In The Wind and things like that, that we were not game enough to try,” Judson admits with a laugh. “That's maybe because we had just created a set that we liked out of the majority of the songs and we just kind of stuck with it 'cause we enjoyed it.”

The launch will also be your last chance to see Belles Will Ring for the foreseeable future. “[Fellow songwriter, guitarist and founding member] Aiden [Roberts] is really going to be out of the picture for quite a while, due to other projects he's got going, which are really great opportunities for him. That gives us all an opportunity to see what else we might want to do for a while. Obviously I'll continue recording other groups, but I'll be creating music as well. But we're not announcing a break-up or anything like that – I really do think there'll be future Belles Will Ring releases.”

Belles Will Ring will be playing a one-off Sydney show:

Saturday 20 October - The Vanguard, Newtown NSW