Hell Hath No Fury

"Hell yeah [there's one], but I'd never ever name them,” drawls May over an espresso martini (her second by the time of our interview). “'Cause I think there's a lack of class in naming somebody who inspired a song especially if it's a nasty song like Karmageddon. And y'know as much as they deserved it – they deserved to have that song written about them – they don't deserve their name bandied about in the media”.  

Certainly, weaponised lyrics are a staple of songwriting. To an outsider, a listener or an interviewer, the barbs of Kiss My Apocalypse are transparent as glass splinters, but they are undeniably vectored one way or another, and May deftly avoids crystallising that ambiguity. “No, it's a fairly obvious song,” May confirms of Karmageddon. “They know it, I know it and also I don't need to make it any harder on anybody to be naming names y'know. It was a cathartic song that I needed to write, because it hurt so much when the relationship ended, but I'm not so bitter that I have to continually stick the knife in. So Karmageddon is definitely about one person in particular, and I guess in a way it's flattering perhaps to them because of the intensity of the song and the fact that I could be bothered writing a song about it and releasing it,” she rationalises.

On first listen, Apocalypse seems an album of vengeance; the record's prismatic elements – sex, acclaim, popular music, success – focus the baser emotions that solicit retribution, vengeance, and catharsis – catharsis, cathartic; the word and its derivatives become familiar over the course of our interview. “There was a lot of bitterness and a lot of anger, and if I hadn't written the songs I would still be bitter and angry, and so it's like a cathartic exercise and it's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than getting psychotherapy, so make a record get it out there and you know, then nobody has to pay for it afterward, I'm fine now, I'm sure everybody else who was involved is fine too, and nobody had to pay ten thousand dollars to a psychotherapist to actually work through these issues,” she enthuses.

May herself hails from Bunbury, and she spends by volume the bulk of her time in and around the west Her debut album Howl And Moan was recorded over the summer of 2007, emerging from post-production aether in 2008. May's most recent long-player, Design Desire, surfaced in 2011: raging, guitar-anchored in a heat-haze and very much distinct from the baroque and cosmopolitan Apocalypse, Desire snatched itself The Australian Music Prize. May spent the interregnum between the two records touring heavily on a sabbatical that has seen her sound stretch in almost every direction simultaneously. 

The record seethes with the heat and fury of a lover's claustrophobia; at the least, a fear of the confinement within the kind-of social terrarium a big town or small city grows into. On face value, Apocalypse's track Perth Girls seemed to suggest the latter, but May dismisses the comparison.“I live a very internal world, y'know, I don't really care where I am I'm always existing within this space y'know, it's an internal space,” she explains. “I don't go out that much, I'm quite a hermit; I have my core group of friends [and] we all meet up wherever we can so I don't feel that claustrophobic here, I think it's a wonderful place, I have no problem with Perth like that. But Perth Girls is more just about the literal 'Perth' 'girls'…” she asserts.

Ergo, every listener is in a sense their own author: each individual puts their own flesh and bone to every lyric in a track. It's a concept May is familiar with, and evidently, she wraps meaning inside meaning tightly within each of her records. For all the growling and hissing about matters close to the proverbial heart, a musical record is for the most part a 45-minute conversation with strangers pulled from the anonymity of the record store or the online download. Yet it's this intimacy, this interplay between the obvious target that remains veiled to the anonymous listener, that seems the dynamo behind May's songwriting. She's singing to someone in particular, so clearly, sometimes wistfully, sometimes vengefully, but that target remains veiled. 

“That's what I love about making records,” says May. “It's like every time you release something, that's why it's so cathartic because you write a song about a personal experience, a personal pain and you release it and then everybody interprets it in their own way, so it becomes their album not mine and that's when you get your release because suddenly your pain doesn't matter anymore, it belongs to everybody who listens and it takes away from... you know you feel like your pain is so big and massive when really it's quite minuscule in the grand scale of things, especially as you can see how every person who listens to it translates it into their own life and… actually that's why it's such great therapy because it suddenly diminishes your pain because everyone else has their own to deal with and if they can guide it through your music then you're lucky, y'know? You realise how small your pain is compared to everybody else's.”

Apocalypse sees May depart from the briny guitar-drone of Desire, and she's blunt about the reasons for her departure. “I'd done it to death. I've played it so much like I still love guitar and I possibly will go back to it but I'm also like, very very reluctant to continue doing the same old thing just because people like it, I'm not actually making music to please people, I'm doing it for catharsis and I wasn't getting any kind of catharsis out of just making rock tunes so and I think once I make stuff out of what I like, and based on what I enjoy and what I'm listening to at the time,” she concludes.

That said, Apocalypse worms itself comfortably into the moody, lumpen, sensual landscape shaped by the likes of St. Vincent, Cat Power and Nick Cave. May's been fuelling her sound with “quite a lot of like Beaches, Beach House… I love Kanye West, like I love Cocteau Twins – that kind of thing when it becomes less about that like grinding guitar riff which I've done for ten years… you just kind of get over it and you're like, 'Well, let's try something new'. It's the same thing as saying to an accountant or a journalist, 'Do this job over and over again; please do these accounts over and over again' – it makes no sense,” she argues. ''Please write this article over and over again'... say to a musician, 'Write that song ten times over', it makes no sense. You want to evolve, right, like in whatever profession you're in, so I'm listening to different stuff and I wanna make different stuff so fuck you if you're offended by the lack o' guitars in this new album, I really don't care.”

Abbe May will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 1 June - Prince Of Wales, Bunbury WA
Sunday 2 June - State Of The Art Festival, Perth WA
Thursday 13 June - Eatons Hill Hotel, Eatons Hill QLD
Friday 14 June - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Saturday 15 June - The Gov, Adelaide SA
Friday 21 June - Ding Dong Lounge, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 22 June - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS