Just Keep Swimming

Our plans were to get it out but we'd run out of money,” Zeahorse frontman Morgan Anthony says in earnest. “Our guitarist moved to Tasmania and that put a huge stump in the road. So we stopped playing shows, stopped rehearsing and stuff like that. We were trying to save money and we eventually got enough.”

“We had enough to get a run of 250 vinyl pressed, that was it, so we were going to do that, and that was it, us putting it out,” continues bassist Ben Howell. “But then Morgan sent it around to some labels, which was just as we were planning everything, and a couple of them got back to us. One of them wanted to put it out, and that brings us to now,” – in a pub, with beer on someone else's money, and deep-fried pickles on the way.

This scene seems pretty indicative of the Zeahorse story so far – charmingly ignorant of the way things 'should be done', the band have just focused on the music, playing shows relentlessly (at least, when geography allows), as the rest has pleasantly and haphazardly fallen into place.

Anthony recounts his surprise that even after finding a label, Pools still took another year or so to release as they had to take into account the business side of things: “They were like, 'Well, we need to bring a single out'. We were just going to drop the album and move on and do another one.”

Their education continued with a recent trip north for BigSound, perhaps a strange move from a band who seem to have no trouble landing some enviable gigs – Jello Biafra, Mark Of Cain, some little band called Them Crooked Vultures.

“BigSound is really different,” Howell insists. “We're used to just playing shows around here where 90 per cent of the crowd are our girlfriends' parents or drunk friends that feel obligated to come to shows. So it's weird to go up there and play where the crowd is all industry people. Everyone there was lovely and great.”

“But we just thought we played awful,” interjects Anthony. “It's hit and miss with us. We can play an amazing show and the next show we play is terrible, but people tell us that as well; that's what makes it real, you know? It's not just an orchestrated set, time after time.”

It's this kind of malleable, jam-oriented punk that makes up Pools, a mix of acid sludge and fury, the majority of which was recorded live to one-inch tape with Steve Law. Anthony and Howell are eager to point out that Pools is only part of the picture of Zeahorse.

“With our records, there are always some songs that we won't play live,” says Anthony. “When a band play a whole record, some songs just don't translate into a live setting. Especially if you've got a bunch of sweaty people that are all pissed – they're not really going to want to listen to a down-tempo song that goes for six minutes,” he continues, perhaps a reference to the vacuum of vacuousness that is Kathie's Makeover, a spaced-out epic that comes late in Pools.

“We learned that the hard way,” Howell sheepishly chimes in.

“We learned that after the Crooked Vultures show,” clarifies Anthony. Back in 2010 Zeahorse were still in their infancy when they landed the lauded support.
“We played some seven-minute slow epic Lord Of The Rings song in front of about 5,000 people who didn't pay to see us,” Howell laughs.

“It's good though,” Anthony muses, “because people can listen to the record and get a more introverted idea of the band and then they go to a live show and see an extroverted version of our band. At that time when we were writing the songs, we'd play them fast and then we'd slow them down. We were probably listening to lots of Slint, and we just slowed all those jams down and they became kind of sluggish and sink into themselves a bit.”

“If we'd recorded them in some awful little studio somewhere in the city, they would've come out a lot faster and aggressive,” Howell counters. “But because the place [where] we recorded was like an old farmhouse in the middle of a macadamia plantation, and we were camping in the backyard, so we're trying to be aggressive but we're just too damn relaxed.”

Once again, a pretty good indication of the Zeahorse story thus far. Any other band gearing up to release a three-year-old album may seem a little perturbed, but pickles having arrived, and Anthony and Howell just seem too damn relaxed. When the time comes to play it live they'll speed it up, slow it down, fuck it up, keep it fresh.