Phil Slabber Shares Why Crooked Colours Struggled To Get 'Vera' Released

This coming October sees Perth-based indie electronic outfit Crooked Colours embark upon their first true overseas tour. They play a whole gamut of dates across the month throughout Central Europe, with just one of those dates falling in an English-speaking nation. Phil Slabber is a little nervous about their first full-blown jaunt abroad, with the latter point causing him the most consternation.

"Yeah, I definitely am [nervous]," he admits, "I'm a bit worried about the language barrier. We'll see how we go, it should be okay."

Do you have anyone in the band or touring party who speaks any of those middle-European languages? "No, but I speak Afrikaans, so that's a little bit Dutch, right?" Slabber laughs, "hopefully that'll help a bit."

Prior to that however, the band head off on a ten-date tour of their homeland - which takes in every mainland state - in celebration of the release of their new album Vera, which came out in late-June. While their sound on record is a little low-key, Slabber promises punters that they pep things up a little bit in a live setting.

"We're going to bring it pretty high energy," he describes, "the record, when you sit down and listen to it, it's pretty chilled, but we're going to ramp it up for the live show. I'm going to try to get a bit of interaction happening with the crowd, and we like to keep it nice and sweaty in the live shows. We want to see people up and dancing."

The band return from Europe in late October, but they are far from done for the year at that point - early 2018 is looking pretty busy for the band too. "We're going to try to do a few festivals come summer," he reveals, "we've got a couple of yet-to-be-announced festies over the break. Then we're in the process of organising a North American run for March.

"So we're all engines firing at the moment, we're looking at a pretty big six-to-eight months."

This is in marked contrast to the 18-month period leading up to the release of Vera, when the band struggled a little with the writing process and with some personal and collective demons that existed within their ranks. "We kinda [got] bogged down with the writing," he recalls, "and there was a bit of self-doubt, and questioning what we wanted to do. Then we all moved states, and a whole bunch of other stuff, we got really sidetracked for a while. But we got back on track and we're completely focused now."

So much so that they now feel super confident in setting medium to longer term goals for themselves and the band's career. "Yeah, definitely," he confirms, "we're going to try and knock out this album's touring schedule, and then we're going to knuckle down and get the next record written and finished so that it's not another two-year process between releases.

"We want to follow it up pretty quickly."