Black Magic

Line-up changes can really screw a band. It messes with their chemistry, stuffs up their sound and pisses off a lot of fans. But for Melbourne rockers Blackchords, the swaps were a vital element in their evolution as a band.

“We've had a few line-ups across the years and, you know, you get new people in and they might have a new direction they want the music to go in and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't,” muses the band's guitarist Damian Cazaly.

The group, who've been around since 2005, have gone through three drummers and three bassists, but Cazaly remains philosophical about the chopping and changing. “Even those who don't work out, they pave the way for people who do. Nick [Milwright, frontman] and I have been playing since 2004/5 and the most inspiring thing is that the same music and the same people keep influencing us.”

Although they've been around for nine years now, A Thin Line is only the band's second album and, as Cazaly tells, somewhat of a miracle conception. The group had been scrambling to raise funds but kept falling short and finally ended up taking their cause to altruistic fan funding website Pozible. “It was a really big psychological thing to ask fans for money – but we realised that we simply had to do to get the album out,” Cazaly says.

Luckily, fans harboured the same desire as the band to get the album out and forked out the cash. “It was amazing,” Cazaly says of the support. “I mean, we didn't suspect we had that many generous fans out there that would be willing to help out.”

Funds raised, the band were still on struggle street, thanks in part to a collective creative writer's block. “Writing A Thin Line was a really hard process because we had been touring and we kind of had to come back down to earth from that. We ended up having to turn the phone and the internet off. Then we went to a couple of little country retreats – we even did a B&B and moved the bed out of the main room to set up the amps.”

Then, as fate would have it, Red Room's Mark Stanley intervened and the band decided to go bush. “They found us at just the right time,” Cazaly sighs. “It really was the perfect studio for what we wanted. Recording in a shed, you know – a shed – you really become part of the atmosphere.”

The album was produced by the mercurial David Odlum, a former guitarist with Glen Hansard's heartbreakingly beautiful Irish band The Frames, who later turned his attention to producing, working with the likes of indie songstress Gemma Hayes and Josh Ritter. Upon mention of Odlum, Cazaly gasps like an eager fan. “I remember being so excited and so scared about working with him all at the same time. Also this feeling of knowing he's a great guitarist and just wanting to get inside his head.”

Odlum's fingerprints are all over the album. The band's sound is more mature, linear and controlled. Gone are the jarring riffs that chewed into their eponymous debut way back in '09. Instead, this time the sound is a perfect a marriage of synths and riffs cradle Milwright's haunting vocals. This time, there's heart.

“Yeah look, Dave was amazing. He was a real alchemist with sounds and knowing how to bring those sounds into the recording process.”

And thank god for that.

Blackchords will be playing the following dates:

Friday April 26 - Brighton Up Bar, Sydney NSW