Features
Track By Track: No Anchor
By Ian Rogers
No Anchor’s fourth album, ‘The Golden Bridge’, is stocked with plundered ideas and withering vocal nihilism, says singer/bassist (and M+N contributor) IAN ROGERS.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
‘FTB’
A love song dedication to the late MCA and a hate song dedication to just about everything else we could think of, including ourselves. I’m a huge fan of Paul’s Boutique by The Beastie Boys, and the idea of biting on it to start the record had been brewing for a while. The end result is ridiculous. The only reason I think the other guys let me keep this is that when we sequenced the record, having this track run first brought the mood of the whole album up. It’s very ‘Hey everyone, we’re just kidding around!’ but really that’s a lie and we hate everyone, especially people who wear boat shoes.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] FTB by No Anchor
‘Slack Sabbath’
That fucking riff! What have you done with your life recently? [Bassist/vocalist] Donovan [Miller] will go to his grave being the guy who wrote this riff and he wins now. The bulk of this song was written super quick in one rehearsal and demoed that night. On completion Innez Tulloch (of Pastel Blaze and Tiny Spiders) described this as part of a new genre called ‘Slack Sabbath’ and, well, that’s the greatest thing anyone has ever said about anything so we staked a claim to it. We will pretty much steal any good idea.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Slack Sabbath by No Anchor
‘Anna’
Many a true word is said in jest and all that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written songs for this band and told myself it was all a big funny joke and then six months later I’m onstage screaming about the worst possible thing I can imagine, thinking, ‘Yeah, who’s laughing now fuckhead.’ So of course my sludge ‘ballad about a girl’ gets turned into a song about the worst human I’ve ever met. This girl’s real name is not Anna; that just sounded better. PS: In my opinion, Alex [Gillies]’s drumming has never been better than it is here. It’s exactly right, not a beat either side of perfect.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Anna by No Anchor
‘Loose Gravel’
A song about how the band is a colostomy bag for our lives. Our lives are fine, by the way. There’s nothing we sing about that everyone else hasn’t gone through. It’s just that everyone else’s stuff isn’t collected all in the one place like ours. I love Donnie’s bass solo. It sounds impressive and sloppy at the same time. That’s our mission: impressively sloppy, since 2008.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Loose Gravel by No Anchor
‘One Means’
Hopefully the only song ever written that owes equal debts to ‘The Dice Man’ by Dr Luke Rhinehardt and ‘Clientele Kidd’ by Raekwon. I’m way too straight to get into dice-living but that book is a personal favourite; it’s kind of appalling but a great read. I give it to people for their birthdays. The riff at 4:28 minutes is stupidly fun to play for some reason. We can teach it to you if you like?
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] One Means by No Anchor
‘Electricity’
Donovan’s sensitive side plus the now mandatory mention of his cats Grub and Big Boi. The album collapses into this song’s what’s-the-fucking-point blues and then gets shitty at itself and cheers up. We used to be a noise band and I think you can hear a bit of that in the background of this.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Electricity by No Anchor
‘Woodman’
Donovan’s insensitive side. He loves the US band Autolux and you can hear it in the lyrics here. Who else sings so lovingly about disappearing into a void of nothingness? I should also take a moment to mention that Donovan recorded the entirety of this album in a 4x4 bedroom in his house and mixed it in his living room. A tremendous amount of work. This is a large part of why the band is so productive: our records are cheap to make thanks to Mr. Miller.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Woodman by No Anchor
‘Oh Kill’
Can’t wait to play this on Australia Day at the Big Day Out. I used to live next door to Ben Thompson from The Rational Academy and there’s a track on their last album called ‘Oak Hill’. He’s telling me about it one day and I immediately think that this is a pretty brutal song title. Who is so passé about killing things to call a song ‘Oh Kill’? Whoops. Anyway the title was too good to throw away.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Oh Kill by No Anchor
‘Slabs’
This song was nearly on the last album. What’s there to say? It’s a bunch of riffs and the kind of withering vocal nihilism that – on playback – spooks me as much as the next person. This aspect of my personality appears absolutely nowhere else in my day-to-day life. Maybe we’re all walking around with this stuff?
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Slabs by No Anchor
‘Shut Yr Mouth’
Ferdinand von Schirach’s collections of short stories about various real-life criminals he’s defended in court makes for harrowing – and strangely uplifting – reading. This is where the title of the album comes from as well. I can’t do it justice but ‘The Golden Bridge’ is a weird legal terminology that acknowledges that human good and evil is a continuum, not a black-and-white state of being. This seemed like an apt title for a record that contained so many conflicting aspects of the same three otherwise ordinary, polite, boring Brisbane dudes.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Shut Yr Mouth by No Anchor
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