City Calm DownOn a warmer, sunnier morning than you'd typically associate with the band's shadowy sound, Jack Bourke and Lee Armstrong of City Calm Down sit sipping coffee and juice and discussing the long-awaited release of their new album, Echoes In Blue. Six months have passed since the band finished work on their second album, recorded sporadically between February and September last year.
"I feel so detached from it," says Armstrong, the band's drummer. "It's so long ago that we finished it. I had to listen to it last week to make sure I knew what was going on."
So what did he think?
"I liked it!" says Armstrong. "Which is a good result. I think it's pretty different from the first [album] in some ways, but quite similar in others, which is what we set out to achieve." Bourke, the band's frontman, elaborates: "We didn't want to take a complete left turn, but we wanted to highlight some new avenues."
Bourke says the band felt relatively free of expectation while recording the follow-up to their debut, 2015's In A Restless House. "We didn't really have enough time between records to get stuck in our own heads about what the next record should be," Bourke continues. "We just started writing again and everything moved quickly. It seems to me that the first record was successful enough that we're able to build off it, but it wasn't so successful that we spent two years touring, not writing songs and had to go back and think, 'What are we doing as a band again? We've got to change because we're sick of all our songs.'"
The process of writing and recording Echoes In Blue was a lot more enjoyable than the band's debut, Armstrong says, which was largely due to a renewed focus on songcraft rather than extraneous sonic details. Bourke says, "We've just got to write good songs, which seems obvious, but you can get really caught up in having production ideas and putting the cart before the horse. So going through that process this time we were like, 'Ok, let's get the songs. We'll work out how it should sound afterwards.' You can tell from the really basic elements whether it's a good song."
This emphasis on the bigger picture was aided by producer Malcolm Besley, who helped the band maintain perspective with some occasional tough love. "When we were in the studio arguing over the smallest things," Armstrong remembers, "Malcolm would say, 'This doesn't matter - just shut up and get on with it,'" he laughs.
Bourke reckons it was important, this time around, to not give the expectations of fans too much credence, or let those who latched onto their early work influence creative decisions as the band moves forward. "I think there's an element of not being beholden to fans of your old stuff," he says. "I'm making it for myself and if I don't put that first I just won't make music. I want to make songs that make me feel good. It's not that I don't appreciate the people who like our music. You just can't let that dictate what the band does, because then you've lost the reason [why] you're doing it to begin with."
"If you don't put yourself first and satisfy what you need," Armstrong adds, "are you going to want to do it? Why would you? Then you're just working a nine-to-five job."
A common topic in Bourke's lyrics, working a nine-to-five job is something the members of City Calm Down know all about. "The lyrics are my way of working out what's going on in my life," Bourke says, "which I think in some ways is what's going on in a lot of people's lives. A lot of the things I'm singing about are just common experiences: working a job, going home, eating dinner. I'm just exploring the way I feel about my life."
The band members all work full-time and are acutely aware of the difficulties of juggling jobs, the demands of the band and other relationships. City Calm Down are more frank than most about the financial realities of playing in an independent rock band in 2018.
"We're managing ourselves at the moment," Bourke says, "and we've just been looking at the budget for the upcoming tour. I think when you're starting out as a band you think you'll get to a certain level and be able to play music full time and it'll be great. But when everything is said and done, there isn't a whole lot left over, which is quite confronting sometimes. We've been doing this for ten years now, and getting to a point where you can dedicate all your energy to making music full time is a dot on the horizon that keeps moving. It's like a mirage."
In those ten years, City Calm Down have seen a lot of different musical movements and genres enjoy their moment in the sun, but Bourke says he's never felt his band has fit into any of those scenes. "I would not think of us as being hip in any way," he says. "There are definitely sounds that pop up and are 'in' for four or five years. A few years ago when Tame Impala was blowing up, everyone was making psychedelic music. Now it's that three-piece garage rock, which is great - I like a lot of the bands doing that. But there's never really been the new new wave. When's that coming? Because we're ready [laughs]. We've been ready for years for the Australian new new wave."
City Calm Down are now ready to release Echoes In Blue. The album is a major statement, one that may inspire others to take up the cause and join the frontline of the Australian new new wave. The album's striking black-and-white cover, depicting waves crashing into basalt columns at Bombo Quarry, an hour south of Sydney, was shot by photographer Mclean Stephenson.
"It's quite visceral," says Bourke of the photograph. "The ocean is smashing against the rocks and then past that you've got this calm, because you can't see the horizon meet the skyline. It has this really nice contrast where it's just this grey, bland background with this intense imagery at the front. It just feels to me like there's something grand about it."
Regarding the album's equally grand and classic-feeling title, Echoes In Blue, Bourke says, "It just felt intentionally ambiguous. The 'blue', I guess, has an element of sadness to it and the 'echoes' is about having trouble discerning what that is. It's trying to capture that ambiguity of sadness, the sense of feeling lost without knowing why. That was the idea behind the lyric and it rings true across the album in many respects."
Echoes In Blue is full of ideas, lyrics and grand musical moments that ring true for the listener. The band is proud of the new album and rightly so. "It's the first time I've ever felt proud of anything in my life," says Bourke. "Obviously I have criticisms of it and there are things I don't like about it, but it's the first time I feel like I've accomplished something that's meaningful to me. It's a good feeling."
