Greased Lightning

Matt Johnson, aka Matt from Matt & Kim, is talking from a tour bus moving across the states. In between trips from Seattle to San Francisco, he begins by dreaming of somewhere a little warmer. “Out of any territory, we love coming to Australia. We've been three times I believe, and even though it's basically as far as way as we can go, there's always something about the vibe and the culture that we just love, so we always request that we get to go there. Unfortunately we didn't make it last year because we were making an album, but before that it was every year for a few years …. We did Big Day Out festival, and on a very small scale we'd come through and done some of our own club shows. This time we're on another festival, Groovin' The Moo, and a few sideshows … but I love festivals, people always come so open-minded and that's where we get 'em! We grab 'em and we hold on tight and don't let them go.”

Being grabbed by Matt & Kim is not a difficult experience, as the upbeat, no-nonsense toe-tappers make themselves pretty easy to love. Johnson and Kim Schifino make music that walks a dance/pop line and relies on hooky simpleness, but they do so knowing how hard that form can be. “We think, 'how can we be as simple and effective as we can make it, and that will be the purist form of it'? Meanwhile, some haters like to say, 'that's something like what my little nephew could do'. But that's not the thing, it's about taking a risk,” Johnson explains. “I always find with music, it feels really safe to really layer things up and add lots of stuff because then there's nothing hanging out there, but I think a good example right now, and I know it's popular in Australia too, is that Thrift Shop song  [by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis]. For the most part there's like three elements happening – a clap, a kick drum and that horn line – and they just work in perfect harmony, and that's where something special happens. I think it's very risky to go simple but I think the reward is worth it.”

To date, Matt & Kim's three albums have taken this motto to heart, with singles Daylight and Lessons Learned (2008/9), Good For Great (2011), Let's Go (2012) and It's Alright (2013) all particularly showing the pair's talent for doing lots with a few simple tools. A strong hook to build around, some basic arrangements, and somehow an earworm that leaves the listener, well, grabbed tight. The pair add to their sounds some particularly curious images, too, with Lessons Learned featuring them stripping down to nothing as they walked through Times Square (for no good reason), Let's Go letting them create some awesome '80s hair and kit for a fake family portrait, and most recently, It's Alright featuring some highly choreographed, and very funny, horizontal hokey pokey. It's a touch of the Ok Go effect with just one shot and one great idea, totally made the commitment of the band.

“That video was an idea I had years ago, but it just never really happened. And then we were making the It's Alright song and we were dancing around in the studio and we thought, 'now's the time, we've gotta make a video with dancing in it',” Johnson says. “And then as we were shooting it and choreographing it, Tanisha Scott helped us choreograph it, and she's done lots of other videos, all the Sean Paul videos and she's been in Beyonce's videos, and that's what we were looking for. We didn't want someone who was 'modern dance', we wanted the real booty shaking kinda stuff. And I forget how it even came up that we were decided to do stills of sex moves right in the middle, but I don't know, we thought it would be funny. When we ended up shooting it we ended up shooting about 40 or 50 different positions in the day, and it was like 15 people in the crew watching us, I started becoming very uncomfortable thinking 'is this what it's like shooting porn? I don't know, I just want to get this done!'”

Music video karma sutra aside, the single, which comes from latest album Lightning, was also an excuse for the band to finally record at home. “As a band that identifies with where we're from, which is New York, it's the first album we ever made in New York. The first album we made we Los Angeles, the second in Vermont, the third in Atlanta, Georgia, and this is the first album we've actually made in New York, and we made it in the apartment, and it was the last album we made in Grand Street, that we refer to in all our albums, we made it before we moved out of there. And it was sort of, I don't know, I feel like it was great because we kept normal life going. We'd work on music in the day and then we'd see friends and what not at night, so we didn't feel so isolated and I think in that way it just kept things a little more natural rather than being single-minded and deserted in some other town.”

Matt & Kim's home recording ended up being something of a farewell to their past too, as the pair get ready to move out and perhaps even grow up a little. “We've bought a house after living in this tiny, tiny railroad apartment for the last eight years, which was like living in the hallway. It was cold in the winter and cold in the summer and it had rats, and had no gas, and it was just 'a real New York experience',” Johnson laughs. However, the 'experience' is also something he was clearly fond of, too. “We were ready to move on … but we had so much history in there. It's funny, there's a highway called the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and I always called it 'my ocean' because you just hear the cars whooshing past, for like eight years it sounded like waves going by. And that was probably captured in the background of vocal tracks is kinda cool.”

Matt & Kim will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 27 April - Groovin' The Moo, Maitland Showground, Maitland NSW
Sunday 28 April - Groovin' The Moo, University of Canberra, Canberra ACT
Wednesday 1 May - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Friday 3 May - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 4 May - Groovin' The Moo; Prince Of Wales Showground, Bendigo VIC
Sunday 5 May - Groovin' The Moo, Townsville Cricket Grounds, Townsville QLD
Thursday 9 May - The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 11 May - Groovin' The Moo, Hay Park, Bunbury WA