Bodyjar: Drunk Rock.

Bodyjar

Bodyjar play the Waterloo Hotel on July 6. Plastic Skies is in stores now.

In a genre overrun with cheesy So-Cal pretenders and their conformist acolytes, Melbourne’s Bodyjar are a band who genuinely strive to make their raucous melodic punk tunes as interesting and diverse as possible. Their new album Plastic Skies weds a formidable melodic sense to surprisingly sophisticated song structures, making a hell of a glorious racket in doing so. One of the things that sets Plastic Skies apart from the group’s previous albums is its bone-crunching, live-sounding production. Singer/guitarist Cam Baines explains that capturing the group’s live sound was a priority from the outset.

“We recorded all the drums in this huge room and we hired this PA and put all the drums through that and miked up the PA. Yeah, we just sort of thought we’ve got to get more of our live sound on our albums; the last one (How It Works) was probably a bit too slick maybe, a little too structured, so this one’s a bit of a looser sort of feel.”

So what’s your feeling on the album now you’ve had time to get a bit of perspective on it, do you rate it as the best thing you’ve done so far?

“Yeah it’s always the way, it’s always the one you’ve just finished that you think is the best, but for the first time I think everyone is happy with it musically. We’ve done what we set out to do, sort of thing, so I think everyone’s really happy with it this time.”

Do I detect that you perhaps may have been dissatisfied with some of your previous releases?

“Not so much the last one, but the one before that, No Touch Red, we recorded it in Canada after we’d been touring for about six months and we were just playing really fast, you could tell we were on tour before that. We rushed it in the studio, we hardly had any time. You know, our drummer Ross has only just started playing with a click track (during recording); before that it was just whatever mood Ross was in, like if he’d had a few coffees it might end up being a bit fast, and if he’d had a few drinks he might slow it down a bit,” Cam chuckles.

One of the standout tracks on Plastic Skies is the ferocious Too Drunk To Drive, which features none other than Magic Dirt’s Adalita on vocals. I ask Cam how the collaboration came about.

“We had a side project, me and this guy Phil (Rose, former Nursery Crimes frontman) who helps us write songs, and right after How it Works came out we started on that and we wrote these songs and that was one of them,” Cam recalls. “We thought maybe we should keep this for Bodyjar ‘cause no one will ever hear it in the side project, and we really wanted to do something different with it and (EMI’s) Tony Harlow suggested we give it to Adalita. We’d never met her or anything before so we were kind of a bit, I don’t know if she’d be into it, sort of thing. But we sent her the song and she really liked it and she said yeah, she’d love to do some singing on it. We were gonna get her to do the chorus but she ended up doing the verse, the chorus, the outro, we pretty much got her to do the whole thing! She was cool though, she recorded it herself on this little eight track with a drum machine and all these harmonies and stuff and brought the eight track in with her and just said have a listen to this, you know… I put the headphones on and there was like a whole choir of Adalitas! So I thought cool, you know, she really knew the song back to front.”

So how are you going to perform it live, who’s going to cover Adalita’s parts?

“Well I was thinking, it used to have just me singing the verses, we could do it like that, or we could just get a girl out of the crowd to yell it out, you know. It’d be cool if we went on tour with Magic Dirt, you know, then Adalita could do it or she could do the Melbourne shows maybe.”

In terms of sales and recognition, The ‘Jar’s previous album How It Works was definitely a step up compared to the band’s other releases, and the new album looks set to increase their profile even more. Are Bodyjar are at the stage of being able to make a living solely from music?

“We got of the dole probably about a year ago, so we’re earning enough to pay the rent,” Cam muses. “We all do little part time jobs, but yeah, the band’s the main thing. We’re always available to tour whenever we want, and that’s the way we wanted it. We didn’t want to have to… like I worked at JB Hi-Fi for years and they put up with me going away and coming back when I felt like it for years. You know, you don’t make enough money really to live (doing music), but you can’t have a job either. So, you know, the dole is sponsoring so many bands in Australia!”