Why Their Third Album Is The Best Thing They've Done In 17 Years

Not too many bands can lay credible claim to releasing their best album after some 17 years at the musical coalface, but Brisbane-bred indie rockers Dollar Bar now find themselves in that enviable position with the release of their third long-player, Hot Ones. Obviously irrespective of their journey, every band claims that each of their releases is their ‘best to date’, but in this case Hot Ones actually possesses the tunes to back up the hyperbole — not a bad effort given that their 2004 eponymous debut is rated by many pundits as one of the most underrated Australian independent releases of recent times. Both albums are jam-packed with brief but bountiful indie-rock nuggets, songs which are at their core effortlessly laconic and imminently catchy but possessing enough self-awareness, lo-fi sensibilities and tinges of humour — plus the raft of slower numbers and song segments linking the upbeat tracks — to elevate them far beyond the realms of outright pop.

“I reckon it’s the best thing we’ve done,” marvels bassist/vocalist Patrick McCabe of the new collection. “Listening back to it now with a little bit of perspective on it, I think it’s one of those records that encapsulates well all of the stuff that a band has done so far. Sometimes three or four albums in, a band somehow manages to pick the very best of what they’ve done so far and fuse those best elements and manages to capture it all at one time. I feel like that’s what we’ve done this time around —  at least I hope so.”

Dollar Bar started out in the Brisbane underground scene way back in 1998, initially based around the home-recordings of frontman Dale Peachey, before the current four-piece line-up — also featuring Chris Yates on guitar/vocals and Brendan Rosenstengel on drums — coalesced around him. They became fixtures on the local live scene and released a string of strong EPs, having some success with the aforementioned debut album — whose chief single, Cute Gurls Have The Best Diseases, scored heavy triple j rotation and topped 4ZZZ’s Hot 100 poll in 2003 — before calling it a day not too long after the record’s release. Eventually they reformed for a social occasion in 2010 and enjoyed it enough that the one-off reunion prompted a gradual full-scale reformation — even though the members were now scattered along the eastern seaboard — which has in turn birthed two long-players (Hot Ones follows 2013’s Paddington Workers Club). McCabe explains that this time around they had no agenda for the album’s sound, and just let the songs take them where they would.

"With Dale’s songs, some are newer but some of them stretch right back to the early days of the band; Wayne & Schuster and The Imposters date back to right around the time that our first album came out but we just hadn’t recorded them yet."

“It’s just how it panned out, I think,” he reflects of the record’s vibe. “It was certainly intentional to bring back the more lo-fi, solo-ish recordings, and take a dip back into that water — it was something that was a big part of the band in the early days — but this time around try to imbue those songs with a bit more overdubs and try to get most of the band involved on those ones. So there’s a solo-ish one from me and a couple from Dale, but they’ve all got little embellishments from the other guys in the band, and I think it works well. That was certainly intentional.

“And I guess that just the style of songs that we were writing were quite similar to the last record — the newer songs like Drawbacks and Legside have a bit of the feel of mine and Chris’s contributions to Paddington Workers Club. Then with Dale’s songs, some are newer but some of them stretch right back to the early days of the band; Wayne & Schuster and The Imposters date back to right around the time that our first album came out but we just hadn’t recorded them yet, then we had a hiatus for a while and they just never got recorded at the time. It was great to get good recordings of those ones down.”

There’s a noticeably more even spread of songwriting credits on Hot Ones, but McCabe denies there being any deals struck like those that The Go-Betweens favoured to ensure parity of creative contributions.

“Again, it just kind of panned out that way — I was writing heaps and I just kind of forced them onto the band until they had enough and went, ‘Agh, that’s enough McCabe! Stop it!’” he laughs. “I just have little creative patches here and there — it comes and goes in bursts, it all just depends on how busy I am with other work. Like, lately, I haven’t written a song this year really, but sometimes I’ll get enough downtime in-between jobs and I’ll just kick into gear and consult the ‘lyrical ideas notepad’ and jump on it.

“I always find that I get inspired when some new record comes along that I really like; when I discovered [2012 Guided By Voices album] Bears For Lunch I went, ‘Yeah! Shit, Guided By Voices are still writing heaps of great songs and they just do it with ease, so why don’t I have a crack and just write a few now?’ Sometimes it happens like that where you get caught up in a record and find inspiration from that.”

The Dollar Bar aesthetic is one of those unique chemistries where the disparate styles of each writer complement each other perfectly, long one of their key strengths.

“Yeah, it’s definitely something we’re aware of,” McCabe concurs. “Especially for me as I’ve progressed as a songwriter with those guys — I’ve just learned so much from Dale and Chris — so it’s kind of been a natural progression in that we would all move forward together, and all write in a style where we know that the other guys can contribute something else positive, something that’s often greater than my original idea alone. I think that really works in our favour.”

There are a couple of moments on Hot Ones where they tap into what can only be described as a ‘classic Dollar Bar sound’ — does McCabe believe that there’s a unique vibe created when the four of them get together?

"In the last few years when we’ve had to do some gigs with a different drummer it’s really kind of shown me how integral the drummer can be. In a way, the drummer can end up being 50% of a band’s sound."

“Yeah, I think so,” he offers. “I think the closest thing to it on the record is probably Wayne & Schuster — it’s got that thing that the Peach does so well, that kind of ‘wink and a nudge’ style songwriting in both the songwriting and delivery. There’s a lot of fun in there. There’s cool riffs and Brendan’s on fire on the drum kit and Chris and I get to do the backing vocals on the chorus — I think that’s the closest song to that ‘classic sound’ from the early EPs, like the [2003] Journey To The Centre Of Attention EP.

“[When it comes to that ‘Dollar Bar’ sound] I think Dale took the lead and we just jumped onboard with that sound, really. A lot of it’s his vocal but a lot of it’s also his guitar approach and his scratchy guitar sound — that’s a big part of it. And Brendan’s drum sound is a big part of it too — in the last few years when we’ve had to do some gigs with a different drummer it’s really kind of shown me how integral the drummer can be. In a way, the drummer can end up being 50% of a band’s sound, just through the style and propulsion that Brendo has on the kit. We just sound so different with anyone else behind the drum kit.”

While Dollar Bar is still steadfastly a Brisbane band — if you’re unsure, check out the choir on Drawbacks featuring guest vocals from members of Brisbane indie royalty such as HITS, Dick Nasty, Velociraptor, Undead Apes and Extra Foxx, to name but a few — the four-piece are still spread far and wide these days. But while having band members residing in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane might be a creative barrier for many bands, apparently Dollar Bar’s chemistry is strong enough to overcome even the tyranny of distance.

“We’ve got a lot of songs — we’ve had a lot of songs released — but there’s a core amount of songs that we all know pretty well, then each time we get together for the limited amount of rehearsal that we get, which is usually just one rehearsal before each show, then we try to sneak in a couple of the new ones and add them into the set if we can,” McCabe tells.

“It comes back pretty naturally — I think we all know what to expect with each other, so it’s just like putting on an old pair of pants or something. You just hope there’s no hole in the ass when you put them back on.”

And while technology has obviously been imperative in helping them create from afar, McCabe explains that it hasn’t been as difficult as you’d imagine without his band mates there to bounce things off during the creative phase.

"We did stuff around with these ones a fair bit, and me and Chris were pretty burnt out on them by the end — we couldn’t really listen to them anymore, just because we’d been working on them so much."

“It’s been time-consuming, but not difficult,” he explains. “I think, with this record, me and Chris really took the reins — especially Chris, he mixed the whole thing and I helped, or at least commented on them during the process. A couple of them we passed the mixes back and forth over the internet and I did dome actual work on the mixes, using the same software. So it hasn’t been more difficult, just a bit more time-consuming.

"Previously we’ve gone with the engineer that we’ve recorded with and gotten them to mix it, and then you get to have a couple of rounds of feedback — which is fine — but when you do it yourself you tend to just keep working on it and working on it until eventually you have to say ‘enough’s enough’ and put a deadline on it. Otherwise you could just keep fucking around with it forever and put nothing out, and there’s just no point in that. If you’ve got songs that you like and everyone in the band likes them just get them on the record and get them the fuck out there! Don’t spend forever fart-arsing about with them — that’s my attitude to it.

“But we did stuff around with these ones a fair bit, and me and Chris were pretty burnt out on them by the end — we couldn’t really listen to them anymore, just because we’d been working on them so much. You just have to keep remembering how much you liked a song the first time you heard it, or did something new to the mix and thought it was great — you just have to keep harking back to that moment, because hopefully that’s how the audience is going to hear it with fresh ears. Certainly when we gave it to Mikey [Young] to master he had good feedback for us — he did a great job and a quick job on it, and he said the same thing about spending too long on mixing and not being able to ever listen to your album again.”

Former Eddy Current Suppression Ring guitarist Mikey Young is these days the ‘go-to engineer’ for the underground Australian indie scene, and McCabe admits that it cool getting positive feedback from someone of his undeniable stature.

“Yeah, it was great,” he admits. “It was really fortunate that I got onto Mikey actually — I worked with him on a film job, this film called The Mule. He was doing some of the composing work on it, so I kinda got a bit lucky in that I got to know him outside the music world a bit, so it just felt a bit easier to send him the Dollar Bar stuff to master because I could kinda say, ‘I’m a big fan of the work you do’ — it was good to that connection already without having to schmooze at a gig or something. That’s something I’m just not good at all at doing!

“But it was nice to have Mikey’s approach to the mastering on there, which I think is different from someone who wants to make it sound ‘radio’. His approach is to try and make great-sounding vinyl, and that’s what we wanted.”

"We're too old now to be an ambitious band."

Indeed, McCabe attests that Dollar Bar’s entire second career phase has found them more creatively ambitious than commercially motivated, worrying more about the song itself rather than who might eventually play it or like it.

“It’s nice to get played on the radio, obviously, because it’s nice to open up the potential for more people to hear your music — of course — but we’re too old now to be an ambitious band,” he smiles. “And the older I get, the quicker I get turned off when I hear bands who are obviously ambitious and want to be on the radio and want to be popular — more and more I find that a real turn-off, and certainly I don’t want to be making that kind of music myself. I just don’t think it’s worth the time.

“We’re getting older and a couple of us have got kids, and spare time is a precious resource so let’s just do it because we love it and let’s just make the best music that we can that everyone in the band really likes, and the fans that we have really like as well. That’s basically the approach at the moment, certainly for me. I think I can speak for the other guys as well on that front.”

But ambitious or not, McCabe believes that we certainly haven’t seen the back of Dollar Bar just yet.

“I think there will be more records — I think we’ve struck a pace that we’re happy with,” he enthuses. “We’ve all hit a bit of a purple patch and been able to release a couple of things in pretty quick succession — two albums in 18 months is pretty good. We’ve been offered to do a new split-LP with a Canadian band on a new US label, and we’ve got enough stuff recorded to fill one side of an album, so I’m 99% sure that’s a goer. The label is called Some Weird Sin — it’s a reference to an old Iggy Pop song I believe — and they’ve put out some cool stuff so far, with more cool stuff in the works. They’re a Texan label. So we’ll definitely do that and then see what comes from there.”