Damns Arms: Second Time Lucky

Damn Arms are happy to be heard and not scene.

“The way things are going, we could be on this tour for fucking months,” muses Damn Arms bassist and vocalist Tim Sullivan, as he sits huddled with his bandmates in the front bar of Melbourne’s Corner Hotel. It is the fourth night of the band’s national tour supporting Midnight Juggernauts, and given the circumstances, Damn Arms could be forgiven for baring some frustration. “They added an extra show in Melbourne because the first two sold out so quickly,” Sullivan explains, “and the two shows in Sydney sold out just as quick. They are at The Metro, which is a massive place.”

The near universal critical salivation that greeted Midnight Juggernauts debut album, Dystopia, is still warm, and The Corner is as full as it’s ever been tonight. What began as a reasonably modest touring schedule now looks set to swell into the kind of itinerary usually reserved for circuses or musical theatre. The addition of several shows looks certain, but Damn Arms are surprisingly stoical about the increasingly hectic month awaiting them. “We thought this might happen anyway,” says drummer Simon Parker, “especially after the press Midnight Juggernauts have been getting.

“It’s nice to play in front of big audiences like this,” Sullivan adds, “and this is how we enjoy spending our time after all.”

Despite such optimism, Damn Arms cannot help but look a touch exhausted tonight. Slouched in a quiet corner of the bar, nobody even mentions the possibility of alcohol. “We said we were going to go out after the show tonight, but then last night happened,” Parker explains.

“Last night always seems to happen,” vocalist and keyboardist Yama Indra points out.

“And tonight will probably happen too,” Sullivan adds.

Indra reclines and pulls his hood over his head, while newly recruited guitarist Ben Browning lurches casually over a table. Sullivan and Parker are equally sedate, and as a whole, Damn Arms look a little like a family which just consumed a very large meal.

But while their lethargy is palpable, Sullivan, Parker, Indra and Browning are far from sluggish. Young & Restless are sound checking in the next room, and the band’s eyes brighten every time a broken melody escapes through a separating door. Damn Arms speak with utter conviction, concentration and sincerity, covering everything from their upcoming tour with Klaxons, to their recent visit to Japan and Europe and their soon to be released debut album, The Live Artex. There are many exhaustive journeys behind this Melbourne four-piece, and even more wait ahead. So for now, it seems, they are saving themselves.

Damn Arms are a band many critics will find easy to categorise, generalise about, or summarily dismiss. With their distorted and monotone vocals, bottom heavy synthesisers, and high-hat driven rhythms, Damn Arms have already found themselves routinely shelved alongside The Rapture, Klaxons and LCD Soundsystem. When The Live Artex arrives in October, it will undoubtedly be filed under such fraught genre classifications as disco-punk, electro-clash, and perhaps the most troublesome of all, new-rave. Some will deem it too punk, or not punk enough, while others will accuse the band of cashing in on 1980s new-wave’s protracted rebirth. Buzzwords will abound, allegations of unchecked irony will proliferate, and in the process, the band’s achievements may well be overlooked. But in front of tonight’s capacity crowd, Damn Arms prove that they are, without doubt, one of the tightest bands in the country.

“It is really important to have music scenes, but they can become really irrelevant,” Sullivan says. “Life gets a lot happier when you realise that, because you find it reaches a point in a scene where nothing can happen until everyone agrees on a decision.”

On stage, Damn Arms’ ebullience comes to the fore. With hoodies removed and drinks neatly lined on their amplifiers, Sullivan, Indra and Parker burst into The Live Artex’s highly danceable opener, ‘Edie’. As the crowd surges forward, Browning joins in, and the next best thing to a dance floor materialises before him. Their vigour finally unfettered, Damn Arms spend the next 45 minutes not simply playing, but consciously entertaining. With his knees bent and arms thrust forward, Sullivan dances robotically across the stage, clapping his wrists. Indra stands with right shoulder pointed towards the audience, and swings his head in a figure-eight rotation.

The set is cautious and calculated, with every beat, note and lyric arriving precisely and punctually. Their taut performance is surely a product of frequent rehearsing, but there is something uniquely deliberate about what Damn Arms do. Much like the set, The Live Artex is perhaps most striking for its sense of purpose and clarity. Damn Arms have certainly figured out what works, but it is clear they have spent a long time learning what doesn’t.

Damn Arms formed in 2004 following the disintegration of Melbourne punk innovators, Snap! Crakk! “That band went for ages and had a heap of line-up changes,” Indra recalls, “then it just imploded after two years and six months of the same lineup, which included Tim and Simon. The two others in Snap! Crakk! said, ‘we’ve had enough’, so we just had to end it.”

“So then three of us started another band,” Sullivan adds.

“Yeah, when things when a bit haywire with Snap! Crakk! we called each other and decided to get together and play again. We wrote a few songs and the next thing we knew Damn Arms had formed,” Indra says.

With the addition of recently departed guitarist Iain Jackson, Damn Arms’ momentum developed swiftly, and within months they had secured support spots with the likes of The (International) Noise Conspiracy, The Kills and Something for Kate. In late 2006 they were invited to tour Europe with the English band Forward Russia – a visit which took them all the way from Paris to the Scottish highlands and Northern Ireland.

“We played 32 shows over six weeks in seven countries,” Sullivan says. “We never thought we would ever go to places like Belfast or Aberdeen, and it was amazing. It was snowing outside, and it was clear people appreciated the effort we made to get there.”

“The Europeans were all extremely hospitable, especially the French,” Parker says. “One night in Paris we were presented with two rooms of food. They gave us a three course meal and plied us with champagne.”

“I had a quail,” Sullivan observes.

And by the sound of things, the hospitality extended beyond the Urals. Sullivan describes the band’s recent visit to Japan as the best week of his life. “We were there for six days, and we played three shows,” he says. “So it was day on, day off, day on, day off, so we got get out and see lots of things like the Golden Temple in Kyoto, Mount Fuji theme park. Heaps of stuff.”

Jackson left the band soon after Damn Arms’ return, and his former band mates are somewhat reluctant to explain the motives behind his departure. “Iain is still in Melbourne,” Parker offers, “and he has a few prospects with other bands.”

Of course, the lessons learned during Indra, Sullivan and Parker’s time in Snap! Crakk! may go some way to explaining Jackson’s hasty exit. “When you start up new band after an old one has fallen apart, you don’t necessarily know exactly what you want, but you do know what you don’t want”, Sullivan says.

“There’s a good clean slate with this band,” Indra says. “I guess Snap! Crakk! was the first proper band for Tim and I, in a way, and it was a real learning curve. You learn about needing to get the line-up right before really putting anything into it.” Indra believes Damn Arms’ success rides the decisions they make, and forethought, careful planning and patience would seem to constitute something of a mantra for the band. Almost everything that Damn Arms do – both on stage and off – seems managed, to elude the fate of its predecessor.

For Sullivan, such prudence is the only real difference between Damn Arms and Snap! Crakk! “Label-wise, we’re still independent, and everything has been done the same, except we’ve just made better choices,” he says. “You always get those dickhead ‘punks’ who are like, ‘Damn Arms are making shitloads of money’, but I’m probably more broke now than when I was in Snap! Crakk!”

“This band has actually made us poorer,” Parker laughs.

“Yeah, I can’t even get the dole,” Indra says.

So is there resentment about Damn Arms’ direction among former followers of Snap! Crakk!? “You always get the cynical bastards who say we’re doing it to make loads of money, and we’ve got it easy,” Sullivan says. “But no, the last time I heard my band on Triple J I was scrubbing a fucking pot. I wash dishes for a living, and it’s not fun.”

“We toured with Something For Kate, and there was a lot people saying, ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’ But they started out as an über-indie band,” Parker says. “We like playing with different kinds of bands and in front different kinds of people. It’s good being outside of a scene.”

This is a point on which all members of Damn Arms would seem to agree, and transcending – or at least moving beyond – the scene that fostered Snap! Crakk!’s success would appear to be a conscious pursuit. “It is really important to have music scenes, but they can become really irrelevant,” Sullivan says. “Life gets a lot happier when you realise that, because you find it reaches a point in a scene where nothing can happen until everyone agrees on a decision.”

“And people really do take it all very seriously,” Parker says. “I was like that when I was younger, and I took it really seriously. Three of us are from Adelaide, which is a really cliquey place. So we’ve been really keen to move away from that.”

And with the release of The Live Artex looming, Damn Arms don’t seem particularly concerned with how it will be received by the “scene”, or anybody else for that matter. They are clearly proud of what they have achieved on the album, and rightly so. Somewhat unsurprisingly, The Live Artex was recorded live, in a few short sessions with veteran producer Kevin Shirley. It neatly captures Damn Arms’ faultless live performance, and aside from one extra vocal recording, it features no overdubs.

“At the time it was one of the most frustrating things ever to try and do it like that, but it came out sounding great. It has a great live feel. A lot of the other bands he’s done are really cut and paste kind of bands. You know, really clean kinds of bands, who play things once and then can put it in again,” Sullivan says, referring to Shirley’s predominantly studio artist discography which includes Iron Maiden, Tina Arena, Journey and Dream Theatre.

“Yeah, he was used to bands who can only play something once,” Indra says, “but he still got us to play everything live until we got it all together.”

“And I think at the start we kinda hated him a lot for that, just because he was making us play everything 50 times,” Sullivan adds, “but in the end we managed to do some of them in just one take.”

Damn Arms decline to predict how The Live Artex will be received by the music press, but they have a pretty clear idea of critics have come to treat bands of their ilk. Their first EP, Patterns, received international attention, and according to Parker, “a lot of reviewers reaction to us was, ‘Well this is more of the same old shit.’”

“We’ve had some reviews in NME, and they have made absolutely no sense. They don’t even say anything about our music. This one review just spent the whole time talking about Fall Out Boy,” Sullivan says.

“Yeah,” Indra adds, “Apparent Fall Out Boy say ‘Damn Arms’ in one of their songs, so the reviewer wrote something clever about a ‘goddamn arms race’ and then wrote one sentence saying, ‘But it’s pretty good, 8/10’. What a pointless review.”

“There’s no perfect way to describe music, so it’s always going to be hard,” Browning astutely points out. “Most of the street press seem to use a lot of buzzwords. If somebody comes up with a band new buzzword that nobody has ever used before, then that’s fine, but there are so many comparisons that just seem so irrelevant to me. Every band sounds like a bunch of bands and sometimes that’s a good way to indicate what a band sounds like, but it’s mostly inaccurate.”

Buzzwords seem to have already caused problems for Damn Arms, and following their tour with Klaxons – the band which jokingly invented the term “new-rave” – things look set to worsen. But luckily, they have retained some perspective. “The whole new-rave is completely out of hand, especially in England,” Sullivan says. “When we were over there we saw a fucking new-rave show on MTV! According to NME, The Rapture are the godfathers of new-rave, even though their first album came out years before the term was invented.”

“First there’s a buzzword, which leads to a buzz-scene, and then there’s a backlash against the scene,” Indra says. “Then something else comes along and it starts all over again. Let’s hope we don’t have to be a part of either.”

Whether or not Damn Arms will be caught up in the new-rave craze, or its imminent backlash, remains to be seen. But some might say that if they were truly keen to avoid it, perhaps they shouldn’t have named their album something so allusively hallucinatory as The Live Artex.

“We don’t really know what it means, but you should think of as something very beyond,” Sullivan says sardonically. “It’s anything you want it to be.”

“Well actually, not really. It was just one of those situations where we just said, ‘that’s what we’re going to call the album’,” Indra interjects.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Aztecs, does it?” Browning asks.

“My sister thought because we recorded our album live, so thought it was a play on the words ‘the live artist’. Which means this is going to be something much more looked into than we thought,” Sullivan says.

“There are going to be so many interpretations of it, when in reality it’s just this little circumstantial thing,” Indra says.

“I thought maybe it was something geometric,” Browning muses.

By the time Midnight Juggernauts take the stage, Damn Arms have found their position in the crowd, and resumed their slightly weary appearance. “That was fun,” Sullivan says simply, “but we’ve a way to go yet.” He is, of course, referring to rest of this particular tour, but Sullivan’s words could also apply the next 12 months – or even longer. Damn Arms are planning a national tour for their album in November, and another Japan tour will follow soon thereafter. A possible US visit waits on the horizon, but for the next few hours at least, Damn Arms are saving themselves.

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