Track By Track: perth

Members JUSTIN MANZANO, JACK QUIRK, MICHAEL DOLAN and MATT SAVILLE take us through ‘What’s Your Utopia?’, the second album by perth.

‘Drank and Kites and Tomorrow’

Jack: This track was written in an extremely higgledy-piggledy fashion and went through several incarnations before it reached its current form. It originally started out as a dark electronica number by Matt; the drums at the start had this sort of industrial IDM feel which was cool, but didn’t really work as a band tune. Endeavours to make it into a song that the whole band could play failed initially. Dolan came up with a bass line and I came up with a sort of Vampire-Weekend-cum-Christmas-carol guitar part that went down horribly.

When we went down south of Perth to a house in Peppermint Grove Beach (affectionately known as ‘Blue Horizon’) we took a different approach, letting the recording run for hours and adding all sorts of percussion like twisted beer cans, Chinese meditation balls, a wooden chair and pots and pans, with some ocarina, bass and drums inspired largely by Dan Snaith [Caribou, Daphni]. The title refers to nothing but the good times: Lil Wayne’s favourite drink, flying our kites (Marcia and Phileas) and an idyllic beach with whiter-than-white sand.

‘Quantum Chronological’

Jack: The title for this song comes from Alasdair Gray’s novel, Lanark, which is one of my favourites. It’s about buying yourself more time when you can afford it. The sentiment of the tune is meant to reflect this. It started off with a simple acoustic guitar dyad progression and segues into a Casiotone-backed jaunty ride.

A film clip will be released for ‘Quantum Chronological’ soon after the album. Our good friend James, who spent a fair bit of time at Blue Horizon with us while we wrote and recorded, produced it. We think it sums up that week’s antics magnificently.

‘Saw Promenade’

Michael: We have always particularly enjoyed the atmosphere at the University of Western Australia. It's a little oasis full of gardens, civic spaces, pleasant libraries and unique antiquated buildings throughout which peacocks roam and squawk as they please. One of the main walkways is called Saw Promenade. The song is half-inspired by our affection for some of the spaces there, and half (for me at least) by a lament for the cold rationality that can be instilled within that space.

Justin: The recording of this track was also infamous at Blue Horizon for being consistently interrupted by ‘soccer-pong’ – a game we invented in order to make full use of the beach house’s vast patio. Literally a cross between soccer and Pong, it was highly conducive to intra-band round robin tournaments, but reached fever pitch on the day we allocated to recording parts for this song. I’ll think of the verse’s glockenspiel melody every time I’m searching for a missing ball in a sand dune.

‘Old at Heart’

Matt: This started with an experiment on my little monophonic Casio keyboard, layering two of the same parts slightly syncopated with each other. Then I built the beats by processing an 808 a whole lot, bumping it out as audio and then effecting them some more later on. I thought it had a bit of an Apricot Rail feel to it (the other band that three of the four guys from perth are in) so I asked fellow Apricot Rail bandmate Ambrose Nock to add some of his unique guitar over the top, and I was astonished at how great it sounded.

It really makes the track I think; he has an uncanny knack for beautiful pop guitar hooks which sit perfectly within this fairly melancholic track. The final touches came in the form of an intro that I sat down and recorded on my detuned piano in one take, and drums, which were taken from a few random loops that we recorded whilst down at the beach house. Justin added some lovely vibraphone late in the game that created the final melodic textures.

‘Greasy Moon’

Michael: This track was an attempt at crafting an anxious melancholy within a sort of mechanical pop song structure. After exploring the conceptual ideas evoked by the album title (i.e. utopia), I wanted to provide a contrast and offset some of the more triumphant feelings of the other tracks with their counterpoint: that hopeless, night-time despair we all feel sometimes.

Its smacked-out and hazy production came to follow that mood during the mixing stage, as we looked to create as dank an aesthetic as possible. Justin's overdriven and delayed melodica line murkily floating above the mix is perhaps my favourite part of the song.

‘Sunday Stroll’

Matt: I sampled an old bell that my grandfather gave me when I was about five, and then played with re-pitching it because I really liked the character it had, but it took ages to find the right tone for it and I based the whole song around the insistent nature of looping something like a bell. I wanted the song to feel like a soundtrack to a stroll in my local park with lots of ambient noises all coming together to create a rolling, consistent song.

The percussive samples are actually some impromptu samples I recorded of my son playing on his mini drum kit at his mum’s house some time ago. Mike added a great guitar lick that really brings the climax at the end of the song to its logical conclusion – which is something I generally find quite difficult; getting a song to that ‘finished’ point. As with ‘Old at Heart’, we added in some live drum samples that we recorded down south at the beach house.

‘Lazy Boy’

Michael: Sitting in a Buenos Aires guesthouse, my flight back to a turbulent time in Perth had been delayed by volcanic ash. Passing time, I’d pulled out my little keyboard and come up with three simple chords that now underpin the main hook (if you could call it one). Originally the song was going to be a sorrowful nursery-rhyme-cum-ballad number, but since returning we gradually transformed it into a bombastic, almost prog-like electronic number. The lyrics and title of the song refer to the idea that sometimes the feeling of comfort can be the biggest discomfort of all, whether in terms of relationships or other things. The always-shifting structure of the song reflects that yearning to always be moving. There is a very strange assortment of instruments in the song, including organ, a broken distorted Casio keyboard, electric sitar, Matt’s live drums and absolutely warped organic samples in the build at the beginning.

‘Collapsible Lung’

Matt: This song is a metaphor for a person being like a collapsible lung in your life. Your lungs are a necessity to breathe and hence to live, but when it collapses it hurts, and it makes it hard to breath, and it needs to be fixed but often can reoccur later on. I have had two collapsed lungs and one pleurodesis in the last couple of years. Musically this song started with chords I wrote when we were on a farm recording the second Apricot Rail album, and I was having a hard time mentally, and the chords reflect my sadness but also the hope that things will get better.

I wrote the lyrics at that time, but I really don’t like my songs to have no hope – no matter how sad the sentiment, I always want them to point to a better day by the end. Again, I recorded the intro last by recording my son screaming and playing harmonica at me whilst I was on the toilet, and repeating it and creating a distant feeling of something that you can see, but can’t quite touch.

‘Viewmaster’

Michael: ‘Viewmaster’ was written in two parts (or three parts if you include the hidden track beyond it written by Saville), and so in a way it’s a medley. Jack and Justin had worked on the second section, the part that sounds somewhat like a more elegiac version of something from Yann Tiersen’s Amelie soundtrack. We had always loved its mood and wanted to turn it into a song, but we couldn't figure out how to build on the part because of its grandiose, distinctly outro vibe. I thought a sparse, emotionally ambiguous acoustic guitar line could instead precede the build-up so we put that down and then resampled an arpeggio line from another of our recordings to form a bridge between the two parts.

The mood of the first section turned out differently to how I had first envisaged because at the time of writing the lyrics and singing them (the vocal take we used was originally a demo take I’d done for someone else to sing), a few strange things were going on. As a result some of the lyrics became autobiographical. The original subject matter of lyrics was this Perth figure commonly referred to as ‘the highway walker’. He has walked a highway in Perth incessantly for years and we want to write more about Perth folklore figures, as there are plenty of really interesting characters everywhere. The songwriting of this track is completely shared. It’s almost like a medley comprised by all four of us in different parts.

‘Wrip’ (hidden track)

Matt: This track, hidden a few minutes after ‘Viewmaster’, is comprised of two piano parts that I played and played and played over and over again to myself for an hour, trying to pull myself through one of my ‘moods’, and then decided to record it on the spot. That recording is the final one on the album. Not a whole lot has changed; I added a few ethereal vocal tracks and a subtle bass synth to fill out the sound and Justin tweaked it a bit during the mixing stage.

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‘What’s Your Utopia?’ is out now through Hidden Shoal. perth play the Slanted & Enchanted festival at the Astor Theatre in Perth on Saturday, December 7. They also play Bonny & Clyde’s Alia Art House in Melbourne on Saturday, November 30 and The Public Bar in Melbourne on Sunday, December 1.