Track By Track: Buried Feather

The self-titled debut album from Melbourne quartet Buried Feather spans stoner-rock sludge, synth drones, wide-panned guitar noodling and mega-compressed drums. Singer-guitarist STEVE McLENNAN sifts through it all.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Plates’

We’d been playing most of the songs on the album for a while, and most evolved slowly over time. ‘Plates’ was one of the few that came together quickly. We had the “motorik stoner-rock” part and the “dreamy star-gazing” part and we just needed to find a way to bring it all together.

We tracked most of the instruments all together in the same room, apart from the vocals, synths and some guitar bits. All the bed tracks were done to tape at Head Gap with Neil Thomason. Neil and Simon [Little, drummer] spent most of the first day at the studio getting the drums sounding right, and listening to the end of ‘Plates’ it was definitely worth the effort.

‘Sinks to the Bottom’

This song took ages to come together structurally, even though the whole thing is like three chords. I found a four-track demo of an earlier version and didn’t even recognise it as the same song, we’d made so many changes. There’s a fair bit of fuzz-heavy stuff on the record and we wanted this one to wash over you gently. We had to find a different way to build it up towards the end, which the synths definitely helped with. I think this one ended up being my favourite track on the record.

‘Magnetized’

This was the first song that really clicked for us as a band and I think we’ve played it at every show. We finished writing it before Josh [Moult, keyboardist] joined Buried Feather but his Hammond organ part fits really nicely. Also, Jim [Grimwade, bassist] wrote this walking bass line under the verses, which is a kind of counter melody to the vocal. I like that the song is this sludgy drone thing, but there’s also some nice melodic stuff going on. We recorded the whole thing in one take with no drop-ins, and you can totally tell by the fluffed notes and general sloppiness. Anyway, it’s all about the vibe, maaan.

Also, we wanted some synth drone to sit underneath the guitars at the start, so Josh recorded a few different ideas to choose from. It all sounded great so we layered them together and used the lot. It’s a nice little change of pace from all the guitar rock.

‘Weekends’

At one point this song wasn’t going to be on the album. I’d recorded these heavy doom-metal guitar parts which sounded hilariously bad. We kind of went back to the drawing board during mixing and decided to really turn the song on its head. So we scrapped all the guitars from the first half of the song, turned the synth parts up loud and distorted the drums. Then we added flanger to the vocals. It was the end of the day and we were clearly getting a bit stir-crazy from being in the studio too long and had stopped caring about whether we were making sensible decisions. It was definitely the most fun to mix, and the song turned out OK I think.

‘In the Sun’

This song is short and up-tempo, which is not really what we’re about, but it always gets a good response live. It was hard trying to figure out how to make it work on the record though. We ended up stripping a heap of parts out and leaving each section with only the essential bits. Through the first half of the song, we killed all the drum tracks except the kick and snare and compressed the hell out of those. I wanted it to sound like a drum machine. It did end up pretty punchy, but it’s still really warm sounding.

Most of the vocals on the record were run through an old Roland Space Echo. With this one, we were riding the intensity control while we recorded to get the right amount of out-of-control vocal feedback. It’s kind of fiddly, but sounds better than a Pro Tools plug-in. You also get weird stuff like repeats bending out of tune, which is kind of cool.

‘Time it Takes’

I remember hearing Wooden Shjips and really digging how they lock into a groove and let it ride out forever. We tend to have these big dynamic shifts in our songs and we wanted to get away from that a bit with this one, just to see how far we could take this one riff. This one is really dense, and I like the wide-panned guitar noodling and string synth at the end, especially listening with headphones.

This is the first song we worked on with Malcolm McDowell. We were in a hurry to get a couple of songs mixed for a 7” release on our friend [and M+N contributor] Wes Holland’s new label Slightly Delic. I’m pretty sure we mixed this one and the album closer ‘Maybe’ in a four-hour session. We were stoked with how that single came up, so Mal was the only person we wanted to mix the album. He really understood the sound we were going for.

‘Drowning Man’

I realised when writing up all the album lyrics that this was the third song that references drowning, which was completely unintentional. I really hate writing lyrics, so most of it is stream-of-consciousness garbage that I edit and try to make sense of later. Anyway, feel free to psychoanalyse as you wish.

Also: Clay from Thornbury Records lent Jim his Rickenbacker bass to play on this tune, so thanks Clay!

‘Maybe’

I wrote this song a week before we went in to record the album and we’d only played it the whole way through once before we recorded it. We wanted to have something on the record without drums, just to break things up. Jim played this nice little bass melody, and Josh ran the Wurlitzer through an old wah pedal and it all just clicked on the first take. So the version that ended up on the record was the second time we’d played the song.

As soon as this one was recorded, we knew it had to be the last song. It’s sweet and gentle and a bit melancholy. I wished we’d had a full orchestra and choir so we could turn it into a full-on Spiritualized thing, but it’s still pretty nice.

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‘Buried Feather’ is out now independently on CD and digitally.