Bleeding For The Craft

It's been over three years since the last Blackchords record, a time the band have spent touring Europe and Australia and, more recently, working on the follow-up, A Thin Line. Eager to improve on their well-regarded debut and to define their own unique style, they repaired to a converted barn in the Yarra Valley and started writing. With time to work, Cazaly and his bandmates set about refining their sound. “I think a lot of the time, you can think of the 'it will do' scenario,” he says, “where you come up with something and you really like it and you're like, 'that will do' for that part. But you haven't really pushed yourself, or excelled yourself. And it's like anything in life – it might be a conversation with someone at a party, but you go to those safe zones. And no one likes to be out of their comfort zone, but that's the only way you learn.

“So I think it's that constant reminder to make something better. It doesn't necessarily have to be more complicated, but I think you know when it works or when it shifts from just being a part to when it becomes tight and woven into a song. That process can be really long. It does take a lot of rehearsals and I think for us, getaways are really good. Just getting out to the country and turning your phone off and not having to be a certain place at six at night, but just playing the music for four days straight. It kind of meant that you immerse yourself a lot more in the songwriting process, and from there I was definitely able to elaborate and reinvent the kind of guitar parts that I had. There were parts that I had thought were fizzing and were really good, but over the course of the songwriting, something that I'd written six months earlier was now redundant – which can be full on to kind of keep writing something around it, but it's great to see the progression of the song as well.”

After six months of writing and recording demos off and on with Mark Stanley [Red Room Studios], the final recording process was just 11 days. “That was really just game day,” Cazaly recalls. “There wasn't any time to come up with a lot of new guitar sounds. I remember at one point, knowing that I had my parts recording the next day for a song, and walking around the bush with a mini-Marshall strapped to my belt coming up with guitar parts. That was pretty funny. [When the mixes came back] I just remember having the most fantastic moods and emotions run through me listening to them on the big speakers for the first time and just thinking that we'd really achieved something that we hadn't before. It was quite chilling.”

Having just returned from a short tour of North America, travelling from SXSW [in Austin] to Toronto, Cazaly is running out of superlatives. “You start using words continually like fantastic and amazing and realise that you need a Thesaurus to go on tour with you,” he says, laughing. “The highlights were varied, but one that comes to mind is Nick [Milwright, vocalist] bleeding on stage during one of the last songs of a set because he'd gotten into the song so much that he cut his head open on the roof ceiling ducts, which I loved. Because I love seeing people bleeding for their craft, so it was pretty amazing to witness. The moves he made after bleeding all over his face were just incredible. We're just having a lot of fun doing it, above all, at the moment, so I'm really excited to get the album out there and play the gigs around Australia.”

Blackchords will be playing the following dates:

Saturday April 20 - The Hideaway, Brisbane QLD
Friday April 26 - Brighton Up Bar, Sydney NSW