Why It Never Occurred To Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever To Shorten Their Name

According to Fran Keaney, who at the time of our call is frantically trying to set down lyrics for a new song, there's "no real answer" behind the choice of the band's verbose title. "It's supposed to be a vague feeling. We used to just be called Rolling Blackouts but we had to change that because there was a band overseas with the same name and it wasn't gonna work. It didn't occur to us to shorten the name from Rolling Blackouts," he laughs. "One of our earlier songs was called Rolling Blackouts and it was about Tom [Russo - guitarist] holed up sick in a hostel in Cambodia, so it's informed by that. But also a lot of our themes have a connection to the idea of home and away - being somewhere and wanting to be somewhere else. Disconnected from someone else. Inland versus coastal. We just like the vibe and the audacity and the melodrama and the vagueness."

The Melbourne quintet have undergone numerous transformations since their inception as high school garage band Aura in 2003. After working in separate bands for a few years, the current set-up features Tom Russo and brother Joe, Joe White, Marcel Tussie and, of course, Keaney. "We never really gave it a tilt with the older ones and I don't think we really needed to," Keaney comments on the band's evolution. "We recorded something and put it out on MySpace, but other than that we didn't even put things into community radio; it wasn't quite up to the standard... But from those first bands you can probably trace our band. We've always played a similar type of music - jangly pop - since 2003, but we weren't very disciplined about it and only now in this third iteration have we tired to execute it a bit better. We're playing shows now where as before you'd play as the supporting band on a Tuesday night and then have a rest for two months," he laughs.

Keaney says their latest drop, The French Press EP, was approached in more or less the same way as their previous releases. "It's sort of a collection of songs from the three songwriters in the band; two from me, two from Joe, two from Tom. It's always been a communal thing, it's never been a case of 'I'll be the singer, I'll take all the credit for your song.' That's a song that you wrote, so it works if you sing it. It's an organic thing, it's a collective.

On the EP's title track, Keaney states, "We went about writing our different verses separately. Tom knew that his would be about being overseas having cast everything aside, adrift, and my one was gonna be back home: similarly lost, but trapped in a mundane day to day office life. We had the idea for a motif - French press - the idea of a coffee pot versus the French media. We thrashed out the song just jamming - we call these jams 'impossible waterfalls', like that picture of a waterfall that shouldn't exist the way that it is, that just doesn't stop flowing... It's probably our favourite song to date."