The Little Time And Money Behind Their Acoustic EP

As a huge supporter of the band's output, this scribe is all too keen to let the frontman know about it at risk of sounding like a fanboy. Dead Letter Circus released their first, self-titled EP in 2007 after uploading some of the tracks up to MySpace throughout the year prior. Discussing that with Benzie, he chuckles and begins to reflect. “We did The Mile, Lines, and Are We Closer? [from the first EP] in one mob. We were rehearsing at the time next door to our good friends The Butterfly Effect and we showed them, and they totally knocked out our confidence, like, 'Oh man, that's just too full on, you're trying to do too much' kind of thing, like, it's just an assault to the senses. That was The Mile, and it yeah, it really dented us and we were like, 'Man, maybe we suck'. We showed our parents and they had that same look of, like an atom bomb had just gone off in their face. So we went, 'Fuck it, we'll just put it up on MySpace', and The Butterfly Effect shared it or whatever it is you used to do on there; they put us in their top friends, and I got a call from our guitarist saying, 'Dude, get on the internet, we've had like 400 plays today!' and I was just like, 'Fuck off, what? It must be broken'. Then we just watched the play-count go up and every day we were sitting on 800-900 plays a day. We were just going, 'What the fuck is going on?' It was a really interesting experience.”

The rest is history. The prog-rockers have released two full length records since then (2010's This Is The Warning and 2013's The Catalyst Fire), signed with UNFD in 2013 and toured around the world playing festivals and as support acts for bands such as Animals As Leaders in the US, and Linkin Park, Karnivool, and more on home soil. This year saw the band drop a surprise EP; a stripped-back, acoustic play on a selection of songs from the latest full-length record. After playing an acoustic version of Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine, which polarised listeners, they decided to continue meddling. “We did that Like A Version with triple j, and we always muck around with ideas in rehearsal and that cover was a vague idea of stuff we wanted to try. We got such a reaction from people, we've never copped any major criticism for songwriting before, so we had people who were like that and people who loved it, and it sort of spurned the idea of maybe we should put our money where our mouth was. So we did it with one, inverted it and changed vocal melodies and changed guitar bits and all that stuff and we were like, 'Yeah, that was pretty fun', so we hit the label up with the idea and they were like, 'Well, we don't really have any money to throw at it', so they gave us a ridiculously short amount of time to get in there and do it. I think we did it in about a day. We recorded some grand piano at a school the day after and then spent a week trying to piece it together. It was a very stressful week but it came out well in the end.”

And how did it feel touring with a bunch of acoustic songs around the east coast? “We feel like it was the best thing we've ever done. We performed each song the same as we did it on the EP, which took a lot of work over ten songs, but I don't think people had any idea what we were going to do when we started. We played the first song and people would be like, 'Oh yeah', and we decided to pick the song that was the least different to start with, to just ease people into it, and then we just started dropping song after song of just completely inverted tracks. It was like a 'guess the song' kind of thing, we'd get to the chorus and people would be like, 'Whoa' – every one of those shows was just the best show I've ever done. We're gonna do it again on a larger scale after the next album cycle, bring in a string section and really make it bigger, more bells and whistles.

As the EP is discussed further, Benzie reveals it wasn't simply about mucking around and trying different things. A heavy music fan, Benzie the group have played a lot of shows with heavier bands over the last couple of years, and it forced him into thinking that perhaps there was less room for Dead Letter Circus in trying to break into the heavier side of things. As such, he needed an escape.

“Music is that magical kind of thing where you are the vessel for it. I knew what I didn't want to do – I didn't want to do a heavy album. We've spent so much time touring with heavy bands over the year, and it's not that I don't like the bands – some of those bands have the most amazing virtuoso musicians you've ever seen – I just saw everything we could do if we decided to go down that path. We like complex music, and me, I'm probably the heaviest music fan in the band, I like real technical drum beats and all the tricky stuff, and on that tour I saw so many people doing that stuff so much better than what we could do, I just felt like there was no more space for us, and it nearly ruined heavy music for me. My music pedigree was Sepultura, Morbid Angel, all that sort of thing when I was a grommet – I was the heavy metal kid, an outcast, I wore that Sepultura t-shirt, the Chaos AD one until it had holes in it that you could see body parts through. It was like being force-fed my favourite music night after night after night. With the acoustic thing, I really enjoyed the space. The style we crafted when we popped out was telling an intense story in a super melodic way but in quite an upbeat, fast and frantic environment. And the challenging stuff is trying to tell that same story with the same feeling in a stripped back format. A lot of the stuff at the moment, it's not mellow, but there's a lot more space. We love it and it sounds really fresh. There's zero chance of a Meshuggah riff coming in [laughs]”.

The band are gearing up for their final tour of the year, which sees them hitting up all the major cities in the country. They’re currently running a one-on-one competition on their Facebook page to decide which songs to play. “[We love the old songs] as much as the new ones, so when it's time to get a set together, we're going, 'Yeah, we wanna play some of these old ones', but then that means you have to cut Cage or something. We're going to do this shoot-off for a couple of days and see what happens.” Excitingly, they're also working on a new record. “We don't want to waste three years again, there was a massive gap between the last record [2010's This Is The Warning] and the latest record [2013's The Catalyst Fire] because of touring, but we didn't really jump back into things straight away. It takes a little while; that writing muscle takes a little while to awaken, so for the first few days you're kind of just screwing around, just trying to get the ball rolling. What we did this time between every tour was just rehearsing, and we'd all be working on ideas backstage. We just wanted to bring it forward a year as opposed to having three years between albums. We're writing a new album for next year; we'll be hitting the studio at the start of February and we'll have it done by March, so we've got this pretty intense timeline. I kind of just set it, and the others kind of looked at me like, 'You're a dickhead', but yeah, we've been kicking some goals, we've had some good ideas going and we're on a bit of a roll at the moment.”