Tradition And Change

19 August 2014 | 10:27 pm | Steve Bell

“It’s kind of like The Mighty Ducks where they’ve all found themselves at college but everything’s changed,”

It’s been a long and hedonistic road to the release of Brisbane party-garage collective Velociraptor’s eponymous debut album. A stream of hook-laden singles and 2012’s epic mini-LP
The World Warriors
introduced them to the music world, but it was on stage where they made the most impact with their wild and unruly live show and  propensity to bring more guitarists than there usually were amps in any given city.

Velociraptor, on the other hand, shows a new and – dare we say – mature side to the shape-shifting outfit. It’s still clearly Velociraptor – defined by the cruisy vocals and penmanship of frontman and mainstay Jeremy Neale – but it’s a slightly less raucous affair, both musically and lyrically. It’s sure not grown-up, but is heading that way, and this enhances rather than detracts from the facets that make the Raptors such a fabulous proposition.

“It was kind of like we couldn’t release the same album again, so we needed to find a way to have enough familiarity while taking it somewhere else. I didn’t really know what the logical conclusion of ‘party-garage’ was, and I was in a pretty sad writing place, so a lot of it’s got a lot of sad tones. We kept the BPMs at about 150, but it’s a pretty mellow record overall. It’s a dark beast,” Neale laughs heartily. “I think I was just processing a lot of stuff. The bulk of that record was written maybe a year or 18 months prior, so about seven of the songs that I wrote [out of nine] work together very much as a timepiece. I was just finding my way in the world post-some disasters.

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“We tried to go for a more overall ‘80s vibe on this record, so it was like we were focusing the writing in that direction slightly. Just grabbing that Ramones kinda stuff and taking it for a bit of a walk I guess. Initially when I was dreaming about the record and I wanted to make it way tougher and I wanted to make it a super-Ramones-y record, but I just wasn’t writing that way. I guess it’s got a Ramones-y vibe in places, but it got lost along the way a bit in that regard even though I started with good intentions.”

Velociraptor was always meant to be a fluid entity comprising a pool of players more vast than required on any given night, but in the last couple of years a stream of members moved overseas and one even went off-grid, meaning that there have been plenty of line-up changes of late. They even flew the Europe-based members to Berlin to record with expat producer Simon Berkfinger, resulting in two non-Australian tracks for the album.

“It’s kind of like The Mighty Ducks where they’ve all found themselves at college but everything’s changed,” Neale grins. “We’ve still got an internal Facebook group and the communication is still all there, but it will probably be more apparent than ever before on this tour that this is ‘the next Generation’, like on Degrassi Junior High.

“We would have had more from [the Euro] contingent too because they actually tracked six songs over in Berlin, but then we ran out of money to actually polish them all up so we just had to go with the two that were ready to go. They were the pick of the litter as it was, but the other songs would have been great on the record too.

“We definitely still wanted to keep the vibe. The thing about Velociraptor anyway is that everybody in the band is a songwriter, but I think the reason it works [with the European contingent] and they were all really keen is that they no longer have outlets to play. I wanted everybody in Raptors to write for this record, but everyone has their own band – or multiple bands – that they write for already, whereas all the guys in Europe don’t have active projects so they were really keen to get back in the studio and reconnect. They’ve been in that environment for a year now.”

To compound things logistically two of the remaining Raptors – Shane Parsons and Simon Ridley – have been kicking goals left, right and centre with their duo DZ Deathrays, meaning that they had to schedule their input around other band commitments as well.

“They actually smashed it in the studio,” Neale enthuses. “A lot of the guitar work that you hear – a lot of the lead work – on the record is actually Shane, and Si’s got a little bit of lead in there as well. Shane just came in one day and brought this ridiculous pedal board that a Velociraptor recording has never seen before in its life, and just had a crack at adding some stuff and came up with some really dark and interesting riffs. In the track on there called One Last Serenade – where we got in Sweetie Zamora from Bloods – he does this awesomely dark guitar line that sounds like a synth line. He’s got so many nice parts on the record like that.

“I hadn’t been in a studio environment with Shane for like four years or something, and I was, like, ‘Shit Shane, you’ve got really good!’ It’s like he’s been playing guitar every week for the last four years, because he has! And then Si hardly ever gets to play guitar, but you put him in the studio and he’s a gun! He’s such a weapon! No one understands how much of a weapon Simon is – he’s a mad drummer but he’s a great guitarist, he can play everything. He’s a genius.”