Features
Track By Track: Ceres
Contributions by Rhys Vleugel
Original page credit: Mess+Noise
Melbourne’s spacious and cathartic Ceres channel ’90s emo on their debut album, ‘I Don’t Want to Be Anywhere But Here’. Guitarist RHYS VLEUGEL weighs in on every song.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
‘Jam Song’
Like the name suggests, this song came about by just messing around. We played around with making it into a ‘real’ song, but it always seemed weird. So this is what we ended up with – short, sharp and noisy. An unconventional start to a debut record, but we like it.
‘Middle Names’
I love watching Frank [Morda, drums] almost pass out on his kit at the end of the intro roll – it kills him! For what is probably the simplest song on the record, we just couldn’t get it right while recording. It just didn’t kick like it should. So after re-recording it two more times, I think we got it! I have no idea what Tom [Lanyon, vocals] is talking about when he says “faith and pain and water,” but it gets me going. Sounds religious, doesn’t it? I don’t think it is though.
‘Half a Metre’
Tom uses 0.5mm picks. When he bought some off eBay way back when, I said, “Make sure they are half a millimetre, not half a metre thick” and he lost it. That’s the name out of the way. Whenever we play this live, people’s ears hurt. It’s too much for a basement or a back room. It was super fun to record and I am so happy with how it came out, the bridge especially.
‘I Feel Fine, I Feel Sick’
“My dad died when I was young, from the blood filling up his lungs.” That line is so fucking real I think. Tom’s a pretty real guy, I love it. We have a tendency for writing country songs and then speeding them up and adding instruments. The chorus has a pretty country-ish vibe to it, I think.
‘Three Times’
The last song written for the record, and probably the one that came the easiest too. When the band first started, we used to write cleaner songs. It seems to come pretty naturally to us. The simpler songs are the most fun to record; I think it’s because they leave a lot of room to put things in and mess around with. We all got to sing a little on this one, even our producer, [Aaron] Dobos. The last half of this song, I think, are Tom’s best lyrics. A homage to all the love in his life: family, friends, lovers. Right Tom? Homage?
‘Syllables’
This one could have gone either way! What originally started as a Britpop jamboree turned out pretty good in the end I think. It’s a song that had been kicking around basically from the start, was never shitty enough to ditch, but we were never totally happy with it either. Usually if it doesn’t work from the start, it doesn’t happen at all, but this one slipped through for some reason. You hear Grant [Young, bass] in the bridge? Cause I did!! That is pure, unfiltered, Australian goodness!
‘Barkly Garden Breakup Park’
This is my favourite song on the record. Tom gave me that riff, but I really nailed it! There is a park in Richmond that had a dark day – this is what the song’s about.
‘Try to Keep You’
Tom showed us this song he had just written: it was a slow, acoustic number, you would have loved it. We turned it into this! Frank is a really talented drummer: he somehow hits all the right drums in the right pattern every time. I think his drumming in the verses made this song. That, and the bend into the bridge. Gangbusters!
‘Upwey, Tecoma, Belgrave’
Another cleaner, simpler song. Again, this one came super easy as well. Tom grew up in the hills around Melbourne. Not in Upwey, Tecoma or Belgrave, but a sleepy little hollow known as Ferny Creek. I’ve driven through it; it’s beautiful. They get some nasty fires there though. This one feels like an ender but it’s also a downer, so it wasn’t going last.
‘Bless the Thief’
I like how there is no real structure to this song. It just kinda builds until it can no more. The voice you hear at the very end, and scattered throughout the whole record actually, is off this old tape recorder that Dobos brought in. The idea was to use it to record some parts, but when we started messing around with it, we heard the kid on there singing pop songs from way back. That kid is probably a middle-aged man with a kid voice now.
Thanks for listening, thanks for reading. We hope you liked it.
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