Rail's Way

For an experimental musician, Apricot Rail's guitarist Ambrose Nock is refreshingly humble and pragmatic. As we talk over a pint at The Flying Scotsman, barely a comparison or genre allusion escapes without Nock insisting on some form of qualification or moderation. “Don't write this down, I'm going to be as honest as possible... because I don't know how to phrase stuff, but I'm a little bit self-conscious… It'll take a few listens for people to understand the songs, because there's no… there's not a lot of beats,” Nock insists. It's difficult to tell exactly what beats Nock is referring to: Quarrels, Apricot Rail's second record in almost four years, is a pulsing, fragile, invertebrate of an album, but Nock feels the need to qualify further.

“We've got no singing, some of the songs go for a long time. I think they're interesting, but I don't know if anybody else will think they're interesting… I'm trying to give you something to use here…” he says, ironically apologising for his humility. “I think our better stuff is the more kind-of poppy, not-rocky stuff. There's no denying the first song is a post-rock song, isn't it? It's got that heavy ending, and stuff. It turns me off,” Nock qualifies, perhaps pre-empting unfavorable comparisons between Quarrels and other records that hardly seem forthcoming.

Certainly, Apricot Rail's sound parallels by an accident of coincidence the honeycombed intricacy of Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Ros, or Mogwai. Whether or not these similarities are the result of intention or accident, they prompt the moribund but nonetheless inevitable question of genre expectations – does Ambrose consider Rail as belonging to a genre like post-rock? Are these expectations he actually considers outside the contrivance of an interview? “I hate the term [post-rock],” Nock affirms. “Because it's… I think of post-rock and I think of Mogwai and Explosions; big guitar bands that use a lot of reverb and effects. I don't use reverb, I use my delay pedal in like two songs… we let ourselves down every now and again by having these big moments, but they're probably the exception.

“The stuff that I have on a pedestal and that I'm personally trying to emulate, if you will, is… I really like obscure pop stuff, like Stereolab, Lacto Ovo, Sandpit, Mum…” he says. “I personally feel like we fit in more with that kind of stuff, but that might just be the songs that I write. We'd have to be a bit more weird to fit in with that stuff, but that's the stuff that I try and emulate when I write a song.”

As for the experience Nock hopes a listener can take from Rail's music? “Pleasure. Yeah. I've got no idea how to answer that. Erm, you know, if people listen to this, and it reveals over a few listens, and they… I think our music is best suited to being linked with vision. Some people email us and say they listen to it before they go to bed, and close their eyes. We get a lot of request for using our songs in independent films,” says Nock.

Certainly, independent Perth director Chad Peacock's video adaptation Surry Hills is a transient and engrossing, albeit brief, cinematic experience. Despite the title, it was shot in Cambodia – a fairly marked departure from the inner-city Sydney suburb, but it makes for an enthralling video nonetheless. Acquiescing to Nock's modesty, I ask how he might convince a hypothetical skeptical uncle from his rural West Australian hometown of Yorkrakine to put Quarrels into a ute's CD player. “That's a good question, because I'm always in this position, you know, with people that wouldn't know my 50 favorite bands… and they're like, 'oh, you're in a band? What is it? Country? AC/DC covers?' And so I guess the kind of terms I use is that it's a bit like a soundtrack,” Nock says.

At this point, Rail's flautist Mayuka arrives at The Scotsman, and the chain of conversation is broken. “I'm hell tanking at this, aye,” Nock tells Mayuka. For the first time in the interview, he's wrong – Nock is a gentleman, and Quarrels is a spectral, fractured record from a band Western Australia is richer for having.