Sircus In Town

"Yes, I am excited about its release,” James Lees begins positively, though it's clear thereafter that that sentiment comes laden with a hefty caveat. “I've been really lucky in the past couple of years. My history with releasing stuff has been limited to singles and EPs for quite a while with Silver Sircus. But in the last few years I've got to do The Good Ship album, and also an album with Thirteen Seventy. And then there's this one – the most important one to me, because this one's all mine.”

Having shaped the album as both a producer and player, the Sircus' debut means a lot of things to Lees.

“Oh, it's been a long time coming,” he agrees. “The whole process started around March last year, and it took us until now to [finish] it. You have to go through so many phases that are dictated by so many things. One of them is money, how quickly you can work, time, life, blah blah blah. When you actually get around to doing those last little things that enable it to be publically consumable, they just seem to be the hit of a button.”

Lees seems wracked with post-album exhaustion: a bittersweet kind've depressed. He's a man struck with the exquisite deflation that comes with finally getting the thing you've for so long wanted.

“It takes over your mind for a year-and-a-half, and then, eventually, it boils down to 44 minutes,” he adds.

But these feeling are unsurprising, given how much he admits he's obsessed over the record. The very first time he listened to a rough mix of the album, in fact, it ended up terrifying him.

“I had to drive through the Sunshine Coast hinterlands, in the dark,” he recounts, “from Fernvale to Coloundra, and I listened to the album, driving through the country as the sun was setting, and I got to my destination and I was completely freaked out. I had some really massive doubts. I was going, 'Oh, fucking hell, what have we done?' It's so dark!

“I came back by [asking myself], 'What are the original reasons that we made all these choices?' Knowing me, there was weeks of thought behind every single little choice. Maybe another reason that it's been a while coming is that I tend to agonise over things a bit. But hey, Kate Bush made us wait twelve years!”

And the sound of band's new album has indeed retained lot of that obsessiveness. It listens like a vision squeezed screaming from the very pores of the germ it was born; something so acutely realised that it's hard to grasp all at once. A little like Dead Can Dance, and a little like Diamanda Galas, and a lot like nothing you've ever heard before – much less from our musical corner of the woods – Silver Sircus' To The Place That Is Home sounds like hard, passionate work.

“We unwittingly wrote a record about moving everything in your whole life,” Lees divulges. “We realised what we were going through in our personal lives was shining through the music, without us realising. It was totally one of those little penny drop moments. From that point on, to get from there to the finished record now, I feel like I've downloaded it out of my head, and it sounds exactly like what I thought it would.

“But now it's out,” he adds, “I'm too close to it. I don't know what it sounds like anymore, I don't know what it's like to hear it. I need to leave it alone for a long time, I think. Apart from playing it this week from start to finish, we'll be moving towards other material after this.”