Why City Calm Down Had A Much Harder Time With Their Album Than Their EP

It's almost bizarre to pick up the phone and hear the Aussie twang that comes out of Jack Bourke's mouth as talks down the phone line. Seeing and hearing him up on stage a week prior to this call as part of City Calm Down's national tour promoting their new album In A Restless House, you could have sworn you were witnessing a Jim Kerr/Bernard Sumner hybrid — switching between the low baritone vocals one moment and soaring tones the next, coupled with the mic-behind-the-back move as he grooved his way across the stage, Bourke was an absolute joy to watch. Is the whole act a natural process? "I don't know how much I want to admit to you," he begins, "but when I was very young I was a huge fan of Midnight Oil, and I'm not trying to pull any Peter Garrett dance moves, but I've always enjoyed seeing bands play where there's movement involved. I always felt like it freed me up to participate in the performance as an audience member, and it's also because I feel inclined to move around a bit, trying to distract everyone from the shortcomings," he chuckles.

Not afraid to admit their influences, City Calm Down was conceived back when its members were at uni and there were some big Aussie names dominating the scene. "When we started out — Sam [Mullaly], Jeremy [Sonnenberg] and I — we were in our first, second year of uni and Cut Copy and The Presets were all the rage at the time, just exceptionally fun to play, so we headed a bit down that road. We were jamming and we sort of had no idea what we were doing, we'd just get into my bedroom and try electronic dance music with a full band; it was pretty rough, I reckon." The lack of restraint which undoubtedly came from being students allowed the group to eventually find their feet in a musical sense. "Because we were at uni we were just kicking it around for a long time, and I guess we maybe found a bit of our own style. We adopted things we liked but then sort of took on other influences outside of that narrow sphere — like Joy Division and New Order, as you can probably tell from the music," Bourke laughs, "along with that sort of contemporary influence. It's enabled us to spread ourselves a bit. For instance, on a track like Son [from In A Restless House], we were basically just trying to nail the drum sound that Grizzly Bear used on, ahhh, what's that song?" he pauses, "Yet Again, that's it. That's where we've been heading with that, and it's taken us a while to get there, but we've not been in a hurry."

"I always felt like it freed me up to participate in the performance as an audience member, and it's also because I feel inclined to move around a bit, trying to distract everyone from the shortcomings."

Despite that element of nostalgia in their live performance and studio sound, City Calm Down stand tall in their own right, and have burst onto the scene with their new single Rabbit Run, which is currently enjoying a strong run on the airwaves. It's a fairly big leap from their older work, namely the band's 2012 EP Movements, which was a body of work the band always knew they were going to do. Taking the next step, however, wasn't as straightforward. "When we signed with I OH YOU, the intention was to put an EP out and then commence working on an album, but when we begun writing for the album we were a bit slow and we weren't sure if that's what we wanted to do. We ended up releasing two tracks over 2013 and 2014, Speak To No End and Pavement. We quite liked what we were doing with those, but it was just a slow and cumbersome process, so yes, when we finished the EP the plan was to get going on the album, but we had such little idea as to what we were doing, because it's one of those things where you kinda piece five songs for an EP and they kind of sit there and they work because they're just next to each other, and it's not long enough to pick up that maybe they're a bit all over the shop. But when we came to doing the album, we wanted a bit more of a cohesive framework, not necessarily where each song runs into one another and it sounds like ten of the same song, but we were looking for that and a way to write in such a brief period that we could get that. That was one of the things we really struggled with; writing slowly, where we liked what we were doing, but then through that came, like," Bourke rephrases, "You transition so quickly, your influences change, you get bored of doing certain things and it becomes repetitive quickly. We found that was happening — you get one song done and then a few others will pop out in that vein and then you get bored of it."

Given the slower process, there were a lot of tracks considered for In A Restless House, and that in itself presented its own challenges. "There was a bit of to-and-froing going on between people being more in favour of one song over another, but it really kind of came down to about 13 or 14 songs, and I think you just know when some songs are better than others. At the end of the day, and it kind of sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but once we had all the songs together, we preferred to have better songs on the album than maybe a song that was more cohesive with the other songs around it. We felt like they could all be incorporated into the same mix at the end of the day, and that gave us the flexibility to pick the songs that we like the most rather than the songs that 'fitted' the best."

Are there, then, any plans to salvage the songs that didn't make it? "I know Johann [Ponniah], our label manager, would like us to revisit some because he was particularly enthusiastic about a few songs that didn't end up on the record. I don't know if he holds a grudge, I hope he doesn't, because we had to say no on a couple of occasions and he was pretty good, he backed us the whole way."

There were, however, a number of times where the individuals in the band found themselves at odds about elements of particular songs, and it got to a stage where they had to devise a democratic system in order to set the record straight, so to speak. "When there was someone who was a bit iffy about a song or a section of a song, but the other three were exceptionally enthusiastic about it, which happened on a few of the songs which ended up on the record, then it was that person's responsibility to work out why they didn't like the song and figure out an alternative route that the other people liked just as much. So if it was three against one, the three would force the other person to stick the song on the album. They could protest or kick up enough stink that we would give up, but it was like, 'Don't do it, please.'"

Thankfully, the band's producer, Malcolm Besley, who was also with them through the EP, was a voice of reason. "[He] said to us as we were doing this, 'You do need to trust one another, and maybe you don't like something, but at the end of the day, three people are really enthusiastic about it, and that should be a good sign because you work with each other because you have similar tastes and ambitions, and because you already do trust one another with those tastes and decisions, so put that trust into practice and let go a bit.' That was the message that helped us through towards the end and it actually enabled us to get a lot done. Once we got to that stage, people became a lot more relaxed about what they wanted. It's an album of compromise, but we wouldn't have an album without that and it's a better album because of it, because it makes people really back their decisions — if you really like something, you gotta go for it."