Track By Track: Golden Blonde

Sydney quartet Golden Blonde’s radiant debut album ‘Gwen’ marries the germ of hip-hop production and Warp Records electronics to art-pop songwriting. Think of it as a warped parallel to ‘Hollaback Girl’, suggest band members ADAM GUZOWSKI, HUGH DEACON, JOSHUA BECKER and AUSTIN BUCKETT.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Lint’

‘Lint’ is all about drums and wall-of-sound guitar loops (mainly drums). It has an element of our older side to it (the math-rock/Kasha/Ke$ha side), but it brings in some of the new ideas that we’re having fun with now. As much as it feels like we’re all obsessed with hip hop, footwork and so many other things, the classic prog undertones creep in on this song. The working title for this song was ‘Autechre’. When we saw Autechre in Melbourne it was one of the most strange and inspiring performances we’ve seen. Maybe that was the feeling we were going for.

‘Birch Bark’

The clapping leading into this is a recording of a classroom of kids doing a drum workshop. Adam introduces a really simple and beautiful dual-guitar-vocal melody and harmonic progression. Like the rest of the album, instruments were recorded in many different rooms/situations. It is amazing how an environment can change sounds, so we explored that a great deal. It is really fun to mess around with recordings from several different places and times on top of each other. For instance, this track has a bass drum recorded in a large hall, a junior percussion class playing marimbas while it was raining outside, and cymbals close-miked on the floor.

‘You Lead Me’

This one comes from a beat Austin played at home on his drums, and then Hugh and Austin got in their double-drummer zone. We are pretty addicted to the sound of two drums in unison morphing into something that is displaced, or the other way around. For instance, the end of this song sees that displacement kick in. There are a also quite a few sound bites and repeated loops from the very first scrappy recorded demos of this track, now in the final mix.

‘Teeth in Open’

One of the nicest things about this track for us was the result of a simple combination of voices. The vocal blend of Adam and Amy [Wilson of Mere Women] in unison was really effective in creating a certain choir atmosphere. A really innocent Aphex Twin-esque tone (but maybe less creepy…). There was a sub kick mic that was bugging out when we recorded the drum kit. The resultant crunch ended up featuring in the bass drum mix all the way to the song’s end. One of those clichéd moments of a rock band where something breaks or there is an ‘accident’ and it sounds good. A Spinal Tap production moment.

‘We Begin’

This is one of the early tracks we released off the record. It is a song we had been playing live for little while before even recording the album. It has a Battles vibe – a fairly energised band sound that loops as one kind of body. We all found ourselves in a pretty serious juju fog, particularly in the second half, driven by Hugh’s playing in this one.

‘Oak’

There are a couple of extras added here and there in this one, but most of it is really just that cute little jam at Coconut Lodge (Adam’s house) that splits the album before it kicks in again with ‘Joan’. In hindsight it could have been a bit shorter, as could the sentence before this. These realisations always happen and we could have done lots of things differently. Oak is our respect for wood.

‘Joan’

‘Joan’ was our first single/video. The beginning sound comes from a recording Austin made of this incredible draught in a door of a university practice room. It has this almost synth-like quality, wavering around a fundamental pitch. You can also vaguely hear someone practicing in the next room, which is nice. The song just seemed to naturally swell its way up and down like a gentle all in brawl. Adam’s vocals in this use this fairly creepy yet interesting quarter-tone-based melody.

‘Triage’

Josh Becker wrote this entire song, end of story. It was really great to have Amy’s voice on this as well. We love TV On The Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain. It uses male/female vocal melody doubling in a really cool way. For layering, some extra cymbals were recorded in our second studio, the Kurrajong Shed – some really shiny and bright hi-hats, unused since the high school metal bands of the past. Austin cut up recordings of a melodica placed on top of the wires of a snare drum, resulting in a natural grainy sound. Our friend Thomas William has made a pretty great remix of this track using the bells. That’s on the way after this release. It will be part of a collection of remixes.

‘Clarinet’

We had a day at the Shed recording Adam playing clarinet. Austin did some work with that, layering and things. We were really fortunate to be able to record studio 301’s beautiful Hammond B-3 organ through a Leslie speaker, playing the bass line and some chords. These were later roughly chopped up and reassembled amongst the clarinet. It’s a breakup song and it’s actually become a really fun song to play live.

‘Fuji’

Austin brought back a great little Fujitone keyboard from some markets in Berlin. It often needs to be whacked a few times before it is convinced to make sound. Even then it can give up on life. Temperamental instruments are the best. You’re never certain of the outcome. When miked properly the Fujitone oscillates in some really great ways and has some really high overtones, and a full sound. This track is just cuttings made from a short session of the Fujitone and Adam singing a really soft, fragile melody. It may have been a result of the flu.

‘Gwen’

The title of this song (and the album) does indeed come from Gwen Stefani. Perhaps we should have called it ‘The Neptunes’ because it’s the production that really gets us. Ideally, we imagine the album to be a warped parallel to Stefani’s super-hyped, super-blonde, marching-drum ‘Hollaback Girl’ universe.

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‘Gwen’ is out now through Tenzenmen. Golden Blonde play next at Black Wire Records in Sydney on Friday, September 20 with Fourteen Nights at Sea and Devotional.