Track By Track: Clubfeet

Melbourne-based South African transplants Clubfeet bottle both late-night euphoria and nagging melancholy on their second album, ‘Heirs & Graces’.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘My Shadow’

Sebastian Cohen (vocals/guitar): This track started off having more of a Ceremony-era New Order vibe, with the synth and strings on top of the running guitar line – but when we changed the bass line, the feel of the song also changed completely. Now it’s probably the most ‘band-y’ sounding track on the LP. We found this happened quite a bit through the making of this record – we built songs up in demo mode and then broke them down to their core elements and often took them to a different place. I stole the idea for the lyrics from my girlfriend, who was describing a night bike ride through a park near our house with the streetlights casting a double shadow: “I was chasing my shadow while it was chasing me...” It seemed a good description for how I was feeling.

‘Cold Rain’

Sebastian: This song was based on a demo written by Yves. Peter Gabriel’s So was on our record player a lot around then, and the last Twin Shadow record, and this song reminds me of both. I remember being really blown away when Yves first played it to me and I found the thought of singing it quite daunting. It was my first attempt at that style of vocal delivery, so I was very relieved/surprised it turned out so well. The original pre-chorus on the demo sung by Yves made me feel very emotional, so I really wanted to make sure the final version of the song kept the connection. I also got to dust off my sax for the first time in years to blow the post-chorus lead lines. Victor [Van Vugt], who mixed the record, really nailed the mix on this one and cleaned up our home production – he has created a great sense of space for the groove to shine through.

‘Heartbreak’

Yves Roberts (bass): We wrote and recorded this song over a few hot nights last summer at our house in Brunswick. We’d come back from a bunch of touring here and overseas so after playing live so much more, the stripped-back sound seemed like a natural progression from some of our previous material. We tracked live drums at the Sydney Road Community School and we just used the instruments that were there – the kit was a really crusty old Ludwig and we pulled out our limited recording tricks to pull a really dead snare sound with tea towels and electrical tape, trying to nail a ’70s MOR vibe. We wanted a female vocal and [Chela] was a friend of ours, so she came over to our house one night and tracked the vocal in our lounge room in 20 minutes. The call-and-response vocal wasn’t planned; it just happened and we used these demo takes on the final version. I think we even had to edit out background sounds of cooking and housemates talking from the takes we ended up using.

‘Acapulco & LA’

Montgomery Cooper (keys/synths/programming): This track is a bit of an LP favourite for us. The original demo started as a letter to my sister, who was having a rough time, and then over time it morphed into a song about wanting to disappear to somewhere that isn’t going to chew you up and spit you out. I think everyone felt the melancholic underpinning, because as the lyrics changed and we tracked drums and new musical parts, it still maintained this feeling. None of us have been to Acapulco, but we were looking at photos of it a book called Poolside that gave it a mythical quality in our minds … kind of like a Russian kid dreaming of Hollywood.

‘Cape Town’

Sebastian: Yves started this one as an ode to the stomping ground of our late teenage years, and we all actually spent a bit of time there writing for this record. Cape Town is one of those amazing places, a crazy clash of the first and third world. Some call it the ‘Monaco of Africa’. It’s a really conflicted place – inspiring and jaw-droppingly beautiful, but also with a lot of violence and sadness.

‘Get Loose’

Montgomery: This was one of the last tracks we wrote for the record – we wanted a real slow-jam track to round it out. I like that the sticky groove makes the whole thing feel sweaty and late-night. The lyrics were based on a night out in Cape Town being really high and seeing a beautiful girl in a summer dress on the other side of a party and going over to dance with her and asking her for her number.

‘Everything you Wanted’

Yves: This was another of the last songs written for the record and started from a demo of Sebastian’s. The song is about growing up in Kimberley, South Africa, which because of a De Beers diamond mine had the world’s biggest man-made hole right on the edge of town. It was the opposite place to Cape Town – in the middle of the country, very backward, with a hole where a mountain was supposed to go – but still with the violence and poverty. I like that Sebastian and I played music in my dad’s garage as kids and that we’re still in a band together. Because of the embargos in South Africa when we were kids, we were starved of international music and anything you could get your hands on was prized. I guess this song captures both sides of growing up there: on the one hand it’s nostalgic and a bit sad, and on the other it’s about the promise of what we believed could happen and what was ahead of us when we left.

‘Follow me Down’

Bennington Le Bruce (programming/synths/percussion): This was an early demo from Sebastian and one of the first tracks we went to work on. It’s interesting because at the time he was writing pretty deep electronica in the vein of The Field and Underworld, so when we heard this it was quite a surprise. It still has the chugging arpeggiators as the glue, but there is a real African dancehall vibe to this that really stood out from the get-go. Victor smashed the compressors on the drums at the end and it gives the track that real manic euphoria, which is a standout moment on the record for us.

‘Nastassja’

Yves: This track is probably deepest and most electronic on the album. It was always on the verge of something, but we couldn’t quite find the sweet spot. Then Bennington took hold of it and re-worked it – he really pushed it to that warm ‘late-night’ place that it wanted and needed to go. A lot of the record has quite traditional song structures, but these last two tracks are built on repetition rather than melodic progressions. The big synth wash ending is my favourite; it reminds me of the sun coming up at NYE raves in the early 2000s, that last moment of euphoria before you realised your shoes were ruined and the girl you kissed earlier had left with someone else.

‘Kinski’

Bennington: We toyed with opening the album with this track, but in the end it seemed to fit better alongside ‘Nastassja’ at the end of the party – definitely the record is more electronically skewed as it progresses. It wasn’t premeditated, but we like how the album begins organically with a bare bass guitar on ‘My Shadow’ and ends here with a delayed arpeggiator. For the record, Nastassja Kinski is a major babe.

‘Heirs & Graces’ is out today (Jan 18) through Illusive. Tour dates below.

Fri, Feb 8 – Star Bar, Bendigo, VIC [w/Collarbones]
Sat, Feb 9 – Ding Dong, Melbourne, VIC [w/Collarbones + Chela]
Thurs, Feb 14 – Transit Bar, Canberra, ACT
Sat, Feb 16 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, NSW [w/Collarbones + Chela]
Thurs, Feb 21 – Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane, QLD [w/Collarbones + Chela]
Fri, Feb 22 – Elsewhere, Gold Coast, QLD [w/The Belligerents]
Sat, Feb 23 – Speakeasy @ Villa, Perth, WA
Wed, Feb 27 – Rebublic Bar, Hobart, TAS
Fri, Mar 1 – Ed Castle, Adelaide, SA [w/Collarbones]