Track By Track: Face Command

Sydney’s iconoclastic Face Command populate their debut album with stabs at doom metal, polyrhythms, rockabilly, self-devouring riffs and – according to vocalist TYLER BROYLES – tales of mass graves, stalkers, jail time and murderous housemates.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Bullet in the Sky’

If you’re not scared of going to prison, you’ve got a screw loose. I did a night in the drunk tank in San Francisco and I’ve been a goody-two-shoes ever since. A dozen shit-canned dudes in a fluoro-lit cell shitting in a hole in the floor and getting fed government cheese? I was thinking jailbreak after an hour. Anyway, this song is about a bumblefucked crime spree with the love of your life and the fallout of her getting away with it while you end up in the pen.

The chorus is based on a relaxation technique I used when I was a kid. I don’t know if it’s because I was raised in gun-mad America but it used to make me fall asleep if I pictured in my mind a bullet being shot straight up in the air and imagined it slowly running out of steam until it was motionless way up in the sky. That image fit the song perfectly. The video was filmed in the same room the song was recorded.

‘Joan Norma Ginn’

Joan was an 11-year-old girl who got strangled in Camperdown Memorial Park in Newtown in 1946. Her cardigan had been reversed and used as a straitjacket. Pretty grim tale, but at least they caught the bastard who did it. Nowadays this park is full of families during the day and folks drinking longnecks and rolling ciggies at night. I love this park. Everybody loves this park. But it’s time people realise that it’s haunted by little Joanie Gin. People also don’t know that there’s 18,000 bodies underneath their picnic blanket. It was a colonial-era mass grave and they moved the tombstones to make the park, but they left the coffins.

The song is about partying amongst death and corpses in Newtown.

‘I Slipped In’

This song has a finger in a rockabilly pie but still smells like Face Command. Lyrically I stole the concept from a short story my wife wrote about what happens when your stalker comes through your window and hides under your bed. He’s a harmless stalker but a harmless stalker is like a harmless huntsman … creepy.

‘RPA’

I love a song that tells a story. Take the songs ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’, ‘Fuck Tha Police’ and ‘Sixteen Straws’. Radically different tunes, to say the least, but I love these tracks because they take you on an escapist journey. Well, this song is about smoke, blood, unhealthy attraction and a journey to the hospital. Sometimes I think there’s way too much esoteric crap in Australian music and I want to hear good tale like you’d hear over a beer at the pub. If you speak in riddles and metaphors at the pub, you’ll be drinking on your lonesome.

‘Japanese Knife Set’

Once I lived in a nauseating Seattle sharehouse with two guys that got into a knife fight because one guy’s dog had eaten the other guy’s Cheerios. One guy was trying to kill the dog and the other guy was trying to kill the guy who was trying to kill his dog. The knives were fancy Japanese chef’s knives. One guy got cut and the other would have been strangled to death if I didn’t walk into the room and pry them apart. This song isn’t entirely about that night, but it is about how things can go wrong in the blink of an eye. You ever know anyone who laughs maniacally when they hurt themselves? There must be a word for it.

‘Francois’ Got a Bird in his Mouth’

French President François Mitterrand knew he was going to die of cancer and orchestrated a final meal. He planned every detail, including that last bite of food that would ever pass through his lips. It was a little endangered songbird called an ortolan cooked in liqueur and eaten whole (including head, beak and talons). He died 11 days later. The idea of choreographing every detail of your own death at the end of the road is inspiring. I had nothing to do with the 5-16 polyrhythm. All the talent lies in the band’s hands.

‘Cigarillo’

I always wanted a song with a repetitive riff that just eats away at itself until it breaks. This riff is perfect for drinking whisky and talking shit in Spanish. I grew up speaking Spanish like a Mexican in California, and performing this song live is the only time I get to break out my skills. It’s a surreal story of trying to a bum cigarette that is different every time we do it. I usually manage to mention Dolly Parton and Parramatta Road. I like saying Parramatta in Spanish because it sounds super exotic. In the take we caught for the album, I look for cigarettes in Juan (John) McEnroe’s angry mind, where I find Pedro Townsend in hiding.

Everyone in the band got to dust off every wacky-ass effects pedal in their collection for this one. It was great to flex doom muscles to wrap up the album.

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‘Face Command’ is out now on limited CD and name-your-price download through Art as Catharsis. Face Command play this Friday (June 20) at Gladstone Feeling Hotel in Chippendale with The Archaic Revival and Furious Penguin, and on Friday, August 8 at Red Collective Warehouse Party in Marrickville with I Am Duckeye and The Berkshire Hunting Club.