Out Of The Ruins

Brisbane has always maintained a high pedigree when it's come to guitar-driven pop bands, and when June July, the debut record from The Bell Divers, came out in 2007, it seemed that another name was to be added to the list. Yet although the band hasn't necessarily slipped out of the spotlight since then, it comes as a shock that the incumbent follow-up Ruins has taken so long to make the light of day.

“Clearly it isn't the prime way to go about things, but it's hard to focus on the things we love when there's so much else that fills your life,” Clinton Toghill explains. “Besides our jobs and study, we had two line-up changes which set us back because we had to rehearse and get good again after some time apart (Toghill and Matthew Lobb are the only original members left). But there wasn't any question that we'd keep doing this in some form, it just took a little longer to sort things out than anticipated.”

Ruins certainly benefits from the percolation, with the ten tracks culminating in a record that underscores the band's penchant for sunny, warm tonal aesthetics with ruminations on the minutiae of life. Sonically The Bell Divers have never sounded better, with the warmth emanating from the recordings evident of a renewed energy, and while there are fewer propensities for the lyrics to spiral off on a surreal tangent, the off-the-cuff storytelling is still very much at the fore.

“I've often tried to write songs with a preconceived idea in mind that I want to write about, yet it never works for me; those songs have always come out as duds,” Toghill concedes. “The best way for me is to not think at all. Sometimes the music I'm listening to at the time creeps into the writing process, but preconceived notions are avoided. We had to record the album in five days, so all of the songs we played together as a performance out of necessity yet it lent to what we wanted the songs to sound like. Matt bought these two old vintage Fender amps that sound magic; the tone and reverb sounds like nothing you hear on today's amps. When he set them up and played his first chord everyone gasped, it was so beautiful, and that really unlocked the sound we'd been searching for on the album.”

Lead single Nine Times Out Of Ten is the perfect statement of intent for the band, and its genesis is emblematic for their incumbent resurgence.

“Although we were happy with June July we wanted Ruins to have a more distinct sound,” Toghill asserts. “When I wrote the song I was listening to a lot of XTC and I wanted to have that upbeat English pop sound echoing through it. The lyrics are about a handicapped woman being looked after by her husband, from a documentary I saw many years ago when I was around eight. The lyrics came from the beautiful memory of that, and really resonated with me all this time.”