How French Apartments And London Pubs Birthed 'Love Army'

We’ve only been back for a couple of weeks,” singer, songwriter, guitarist and frontwoman of her eponymous trio, Dallas Frasca begins. “We went all around France, touring with a [Belgian] band called Triggerfinger, who were awesome, really, really great and a great way to launch the album over there.”

 

Their French label, Verycords, pushed to get that crowd-funded album, Love Army, released earlier in Europe in order to take advantage of the tour, so Dallas Frasca spent much of March and April in France, even performing five songs on a TV show there with an audience of a quarter of a million – so not a bad introduction to Europe indeed. As it happens, the album they’ve now released at home isn’t quite the one Frasca had started out recording.

 

“There were a lot of challenges the band faced last year,” the Wangaratta-raised Frasca, who in her teen years won awards for burnouts on motorbikes, explains. “At the start of last year, we went into the studio to start recording and got to the end of it and went, ‘Wow, this is not it.’ I just felt like we didn’t hit the mark, and there were a lot of contributing factors but we went and spoke to our label in France and they agreed and I said I was going to go back and start again.

 

“In this time, we also had our drummer leave, due to family commitments, which totally had our blessing, so we ended up going back into the studio with another drummer, Danny Leo, from King Of The North. Looking back at it now, it just fuelled the fire. There was just so much stuff going on around the second time we went into the studio that there was just something driving it. Because our fans and supporters raised $22,000 for us and because we hadn’t hit the mark, I felt personally that I wanted to deliver something kind of next level for them and the band in terms of songwriting and what we were able to do.”

 

On top of that Dallas Frasca did three European tours last year, writing songs along the way, in apartments in France, on trains and in dirty old pubs in London, all of which naturally fed back into what became Love Army.

 

“We 100% challenged ourselves as musicians,” she continues. “We’re only a three-piece – there’s no bass! There were quite a few songs that didn’t make the cut, and then we re-recorded a lot of songs, and everything was completely remixed. There were two tracks that we used from the original recording that were also remixed. It is a very diverse album” – the title track clocks in at a whopping ten minutes – “and it goes through the shades and emotional phases that we captured right at that time, because of the 18 months that we’d had – it actually has been really wild.”