Think Music

The Drones' songwriter-frontman Gareth Liddiard says that his band don't stop in Wollongong when touring Australia. It's no direct slur on the Illawarra town, more a general statement about the lack of popularity of the band outside the main centres in this country. It's strange, given the band have spent years as perpetual world tourers, frequent All Tomorrow's Parties contributors (and recent curators) and global festival mainstays, that their spleens don't bleed much beyond the suburbs in their home country. But it doesn't bother Liddiard much. “I would say that little towns are just like ten or 15 years behind the cities,” he says. “They're not as savvy as other people. It's not like anyone in a country town has ever heard of fuckin' Die Antwoord or Lightning Bolt, you know what I mean?”

I See Seaweed, the band's sixth 'proper' album – they've amassed a fair collection of live recordings and compilations for those willing to dig – in many ways is, sound-wise, not a lot different to their breakthrough 2005 Australian Music Prize-winning album Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By. Liddiard's bent guitar lines and always spat, sometimes awkward, vocals have maintained the spine of the band through multiple line-up shuffles and all of their recorded work. Theirs is a sound that takes time to transfuse into the bloodstream. As much as their singles Shark Fin Blues, The Minotaur and How To See Through Fog permeate the clag and find the band in almost radio-playable territory, their secreted and obscure opuses – the title track off The Miller's Daughter, Locust off Wait Long..., I'm Here Now and Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce off Gala Mill, and Nine Eyes and Laika off I See Seaweed, to name a few of many – reject this notion of accessibility and challenge the listener to stay on board.

“We wanted something that was ours,” says Liddiard of the inception of The Drones' sound. And, love or hate it, from the outset they have laid claim to and owned a patch of sonic real estate like no other. As a follower of the band playing I See Seaweed for the first time, the songs felt familiar; but not in a tired and uninventive sense, more like reopening an old book that was read to you a long way back and now experiencing it with fresh eyes.

“We wanted to have our own voice, but it's really fuckin' hard to be like Sonic Youth or Suicide or someone who's just really, really, really fuckin' original,” continues Liddiard. “So we were happy to sound a bit like this or a bit like that because, y'know, someone like Nick Cave sounds like Johnny Cash – if we sound like Neil Young then Nick Cave sounds like Johnny Cash... I couldn't do anything else if I tried, really. The way I sound is the way I sound, you know, whether I'm playing guitar or singing. [It's] the same with Fiona [Kitschin – bass], she can't play songs on the bass, what you hear is what it is, that's all she can do; and same with Mike [Noga – drums]. Dan [Luscombe – guitar], he's a bit more flexible – he's actually like a really good Hawaiian guitarist, he can play the proper traditional Hawaiian shit. But I could never do that, like, I can only do what I do. And that's good because we can try and do different shit and try and take the whole thing forwards into areas we've never explored and we'll always sound like us because we can't help it.”

Their approach brings classical methods to blues-rock guitars and drums to deliberately subvert the rock song. “It's as simple as it's pretty much a standard blues guitar – if you're talkin' about it as an object, into an amp, the way it's set up – but it's playing full-tone scales that, y'know, Stravinsky would do, and that's the bit that makes people think that it's weird,” Liddiard says. “That's a conscious decision. If you know what a full-tone scale is, you really have to commit to it because it gets fuckin' odd. So in that sense, yeah totally, we're tryin' to be weird.” And this weirdness still perpetuates weirdness with slow-burning ballads coiling, shrinking and bursting into full-blown brain snaps and Liddiard's lyrics stumbling drunk with grazed knees to reach their often bitter conclusions.

The line-up of Liddiard, Kitschin, Noga and Luscombe has been solid for a couple of albums now, though Liddiard, as chief songwriter, can be held largely responsible for the misshapen blues or rock that spews forth. They enlisted keyboardist Steve Hesketh for I See Seaweed and his presence, more than anything else, subtly injects more oddity to an already off-kilter sound. Hesketh's brief, according to Liddiard, was: “Pretty much, 'You know that Rolling Stones piano, and you know that rock'n'roll piano, major/minor chords? Don't do it'. So then I just gave him a bunch of classical stuff and said, 'Do that!' If you can't do that major/minor stuff then you've got no option except to do all this augmented-diminished stuff.

“After punk rock, you weren't allowed to do all that shit. What's fucked up about punk rock is that it made everything stupid and you had to be thick, sorta small minded... Now, if [I] say I listen to classical music and I put it in my music, my rock'n'roll, people will go, 'Wow, that's fuckin' weird and you're fucked in the head. You think that you're smarter than everyone else'. It's like, 'fuck you!' You're not allowed to be smart, is that the new rule? You're not allowed to use the brain nature gave you?”

The subjects and themes explored on the album are broad. Liddiard revisits a remembered past in Nine Eyes – the song opens with tweaked strings and Hesketh's distorted keys and via Liddiard's drawl we amble down streets transformed through time. Laika treads more abstract territory – a lament for a dog shot into orbit and to its doom. On closing track, Why Write A Letter That You'll Never Send, Liddiard 'reads' an email – “more impotent than important” – from a friend, which steadily veers from its path into train wreck. The songs are as disparate and disjointed as the instrumentation that carries them. If there's anything to be gleaned it's probably that the world is fucked, we are all alone yet united by the guilt of knowing we are leaving the planet a less healthy place than we found it – thematically challenging, standard Drones fare.

“What you see is what you get, y'know,” says Liddiard of bringing together this bunch of songs for the album. Typically, he says, most Drones songs are pretty well ready to go when the band converge for recording sessions, it's no democratic process. “It's not like Laika goes through this process where we decide whether or not it's gonna go here or there. The song is written and beggars can't be choosers, it's not like we have a million songs kickin' around...”

The Drones will now tour to release one of the more energetic songs on the album: A Moat You Can Stand In. It's as musically discordant as anything Liddiard has recently conjured and is chockers with jabs at the rich, the church and our leaders – it's a mud-fight that allows each component of the band to get loose. “We had a nice big break in between [albums] and we needed it 'cause we'd been living with each other for a long time and, y'know, I think we overdid it with the touring,” Liddiard says. “I think there's sort of a fuel tank full of inspiration... We were on empty there for a while so it's good to refill it.

“Some songs I don't look forward to playing live but with all these ones I do. They're full-on, but they're easier to play than you'd think. Some songs are, like, you've gotta put a lot of effort in and you don't get a lot out of them and, some songs: they just play themselves and they sound amazing... These are the latter.”