Mahala: Beat It.

Mahala play the B Lounge at the Dome Nightclub on Thursday and the National Hotel in Toowoomba on Friday.

Many of you would have spent last Thursday’s public holiday with your feet up, beer in one hand, remote control in the other. Not local band Mahala. The quartet spent their time getting ready for some time in the recording studio, putting together their third set of demo material. Fortunately frontman Michael and guitarist Dan were able to tale a bit of time to head down the pub for a chat. As good an excuse as any to get that holiday started early…

“We’re doing four songs,” Michael explains. “It’s kind of a pre production demo that we can use to get gigs and use to get some help to do another EP. It will be interesting to see how things will go because it’s there’s a lot of layers.”

Having already strut their stuff at a swag of local venues including The Alley, The Zoo and the Orient Hotel, Mahala will follow up their recording time with a gig at the newly opened B Lounge. For a four-piece band, Mahala work a lot of influences into their sound, and the mixture you hear in their live performances has continued to evolve as the band has grown.

“Our earlier stuff was probably closer linked to thinks like Pearl Jam or Jeff Buckley, The Tea Party,” Michael explains on the evolution of the bands sound. “It’s pretty eclectic stuff, lots of mellow things as well. Things are just sounding a lot more current now, you know. It’s a lot fatter”

“The riffs are more driving,” Dan concurs. “When I first joined the band I saw Mick play, and they had two percussionists. It was kind of world music-y.”

Michael: “I guess it was kind of like The Tea Party. That’s how I got into The Tea Party originally. People would say ‘you sound like The Tea Party’, so I though I should check out those dudes. I’m into things like Indian scales and things that make the music sound more interesting.”

While the line up has evolved since the band’s inception a couple of years back, it’s only in recent months with the addition of new drummer Todd that Mahala’s sound has become as focused and polished as it is in it’s current form.

“I joined the band about 18 months ago,” Dan explains. “Just after new years in 2001. A mutual friend got me to go down and see them and I was just totally bombarded by this huge percussion section.”

“It was so inefficient,” Michael laughs. “I was the only guitarist playing this guitar based rock, and there was just too much drums. It was all too much. It’s better now. We’ve got a solid drummer who can do the shit and play tight. Now we’re down to four from five there’s room to get people in to play some percussion on other instruments.”

“Todd’s only been in the band for two months now. We’ve been doing some gigs, a bit of recording, all the work we did last year has been good. When we were looking for a drummer we went for eight weeks of auditions. We did two months without missing a rehearsal. We expected it to be time to prepare for a six-month hiatus. We rehearse every Monday, and we didn’t miss a week”

“The songs kept evolving while we were looking for people,” Dan muses. “We actually wrote two more songs while we were looking, because the rest of us actually got our sit together on a couple more songs. One of the song’s we’re recording, Todd actually helped write it during his audition. It was an instinctual thing.”