Wireheads: ‘I’d Like to Build a Back Catalogue’

Wireheads have made one of the year’s best Australian albums, according to DOUG WALLEN, who talks about the Adelaide band’s many idiosyncratic facets with leader Dom Trimboli.

The first album by Adelaide ensemble Wireheads is a hodgepodge in the best possible sense. The agitated rambling of frontman Dom Trimboli is set to shambolic backing that includes questing, hooky violin and the occasional flute solo. The closest you could come to a genre descriptor might be “slacker cowpunk,” but The Late Great Wireheads is all the more fascinating for its refusal to slot into tidy categorisation. It’s a ragtag realisation of musical – and lyrical – mood swings, from the hard-charging ‘Angels With Filthy Souls’ and Proust-citing ‘Cult Fiction’ to the catchy Adelaide valentine ‘Five Grand’ and the disarming dirge of a closer that is ‘Not Not Schizophrenia’.

Trimboli’s lyrics are a big draw, whether he’s talking about ways to “keep my mind off pushin’ up daisies” (‘Cult Fiction’) or venting, “You love everything except for me/Me, I hate everything except for you” (‘The Way It Is’). There’s something unguarded about his delivery that you don’t often see in music, and live he’s more likely to look down while pouring out those lyrics than meet your gaze. Since last year’s formative debut tape, which saw the band recording as a trio, Wireheads have swollen to twice that size. (The current line-up includes Trimboli on vocals and guitar, Dan Heath on guitar, Tim Richardson on bass, Lucy May on flute and keys, Liam Kenny on drums and Tom Spall on violin.) Seeing them live doesn’t make them make any more sense as a band, but it does confirm their askew collision of ideas as uniquely charismatic. By the same token, releasing the album through displaced local collective Format confirms them as a newfound Adelaide mainstay.

Following a piecemeal East Coast launch tour, Trimboli discussed the difficulties in getting his first band off the ground, and how it’s all just rock and roll to him.

What’s it like being on the road with all of the band? There’s a lot of people…
The tour we just did was a lot of fun. We had a really, really good time, particularly in Brisbane. Some of the guys up there showed us a very good time. Two of the people that came on the tour aren’t regulars in the live show – our regular violin and guitar players [Tom Spall and Dan Heath, respectively] couldn’t make the tour, so those guys [Pat Lockwood and Joe Griffith] just jumped on it at the last minute, with only about a week or so notice.

That must have been tricky, because the violin’s such an important part of the band.
Yeah, yeah. And I think the vibe was a bit different on this last tour because Pat [Lockwood] was just playing more subtle kind of things, whereas Tom Spall, who normally plays violin, has got more melodic lines that he plays. There was a few of those missing, but it still worked I think.

Was the violin always there, from the beginning of the band?
Pretty much. We played a handful of shows and then, when we recorded our first tape, we recorded it with Tom Spall because he just set up this little studio. I always thought it’d be cool to have a violin or a cello in the band, and he happened to be very good at playing the violin. So we originally got him just to play on some of the tracks, and we never used any of [those] on the tape. Then he joined the live band. So on the album he had to be a big part of it, because he had been a big part of the live band for 12 months prior to that.

“There’s something very distinct about a violin feeding back. It’s absolutely not what it was designed to do.”

The violin is interesting because it can conjure thoughts of folk or country, and it can be at odds with the rest of the music. And it often provides the hooks in the songs and takes the lead.
Yeah, it gets played a bit more like a lead guitar. Sometimes he’s just playing noise and really weird stuff and you probably wouldn’t even pick that it’s a violin, and then other times it’s just like straight-out country fiddle playing, and I think the dynamic of that is pretty cool. It’s not always the same thing.

I like how feedback is used too. The violin will have that screeching, abrasive quality, and then the feedback will kick in to just send it over the edge.
Yeah. It’s a pretty fine line between enjoyable feedback and just ear-piercing, really high-pitched noise. So there’s a bit of an art to getting that. There’s something very distinct about a violin feeding back. It’s absolutely not what it was designed to do. Maybe that’s why it’s so cool.

Between that and the flute, is it hard to mic live?
Not really. We have had a little trouble when we’ve gone interstate, because most of the time we find in Adelaide that we just like playing through our amps and not really having much stuff mic’ed up. We prefer to play like we would practise in a room or something. But different sound people will do different things, so that’s something we’ve got to get used to.

But no show ever seems to be the same. We never rehearse and be like, “You come in there and the violin should be this loud and the flute should be this loud and the guitar should be this loud.” It’s always different, and I guess that keeps it interesting.

Did you have many bands before this?
No, this is the first band I’ve been involved with.

So you just decided to start writing songs and then found other people?
Yeah. It was really hard, actually. I was into, y’know, alternative music I guess. I was listening to a lot of records. I never picked up a guitar until I was about 23. I always wanted to but never did it. One day I bought a guitar and started playing it and writing songs. It was really hard to find people to play with.

I mean, I went out to gigs and stuff, but I didn’t have heaps of mates that we were into playing in bands – or definitely not into the kind of music I was into. I even met up with some people that had ads online and were looking to start bands. It didn’t really work because we were into different things, but eventually I started going to more and more shows and I met the original drummer from the band, Callan [Visser], at a show and he was happy to play drums. So it went from there.

The band is very unique-sounding, and I’ve had trouble describing it to other people. The violin makes me think of Camper Van Beethoven, and a friend thought you sounded like Half Japanese. I think lots of people could hear it and not mention the same band [comparison] twice. Has that been your experience, that people don’t know what to make of it?
That has been a thing, yeah. And even myself … people ask what kind of music it is and I just say it’s a rock and roll band. I don’t really know what to say. It’s always hard describing your own music. I was just into so much different music and I never set out to try to sound like anyone or anything in particular. I just wrote songs and took little bits and pieces that I liked from different genres. I guess that’s a really cliché thing to say, but it’s what happened.

I don’t like to think of it as anything but a rock and roll band. But having all the other instruments gives it a different vibe all the time. I deliberately set out for it not to have to be put in a box, if that makes sense.

Your vocals seem like a real stream-of-consciousness pouring out of words. Is that the way you write lyrics, or are you more deliberate about it than that?
It’s varied a bit over time. I used to find that I really enjoyed writing about a subject in particular. I’d focus on something and just write about it very subjectively. But it’s still pretty cool to write cryptic things that don’t make any sense, or make lots of sense – it depends where you’re sitting. Even that doesn’t make sense. [Laughs] I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s cool to write things that could mean everything or could mean nothing as well.

Just looking at the song titles, you’ve got junkies, shock therapy and schizophrenia in there. Are you drawn to off-balance or damaged things?
I guess I am a little bit. There’s lots of that stuff in the world, and I guess I always like dark music and dark art. But some of that stuff’s pretty tongue-in-cheek as well. Sometimes I’m being really serious and sometimes I’m being really sarcastic.

“I think most bands in Adelaide want to have an Adelaide song.”

‘Five Grand’ really sticks out because it’s got the reference to Adelaide Central Market and the video has a bit of the market and the Metropolitan Hotel and you guys hanging out in Adelaide. What made you want to mention the market and make that a bit of an Adelaide song?
I think most bands in Adelaide want to have an Adelaide song, because it’s a funny little place. It’s isolated in that we won’t have a huge population and a huge scene, but I think the people that are from Adelaide are pretty passionate about being from here. There are lots of good things that happen in Adelaide but no one ever really talks about them [elsewhere]. And there are lots of good bands that come from Adelaide too, but it seems like, to get noticed, you’ve got to go somewhere else.

I just wanted to tip my hat to our way of life. I wanted to write something really obvious as well. It was really obviously about that, rather than have to have people decode the lyrics and work out that it’s about where you’re from.

It seems like more and more good bands are coming out of Adelaide. I know it comes in waves, but does it feel like a pretty good scene right now?
Yeah, it definitely does. There’s not heaps of people, so everyone’s in two or three bands and helping each other out. It’s a real community thing. You go to a show and you know everyone there, just about. No one else understands it, I guess. I feel like I’ve seen some of the most powerful shows I’ve ever seen in Adelaide, and there’s been like 20 people there. But they’re the ones I remember a lot.

And just going to shows, is that how you hooked up with Format?
Yeah. The first show we played at Format was when they got kicked out of their venue. We played their closing-down show [in March 2013]. They’ve put on some one-off shows in different venues since then and we’ve played them. They’re all really great guys trying to do something good.

I was curious what the story is with the album title.
Yeah, again it’s another one of those tongue-in-cheek things. There’s even more than two edges on the sword. Originally I wanted to name it after the Townes Van Zandt album, just because I think it’s pretty cool he named an album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. He died really early and it seems fitting, like he knew that he was gonna die early. Not that I’m hoping to die early: I’m hoping to live a really long time. But every band comes to an end eventually.

Also, the album was a bunch of older Wireheads songs. There’s a few newer ones on it too, but the line-up has changed a bit and that was definitely capturing a point in time for the band. So that’s like the old Wireheads and there’s probably gonna be some different stuff going on in the future with different people.

“I’d love to put out two albums a year.”

Have you worked on much new stuff since the album?
Yeah, we’ve actually recorded six songs that we’re keen to get moving on soon. So hopefully we can do something with that. Then we’ve got another three or four we’d like to start working on, towards another album. I’d love to put out two albums a year. I just wanna be constantly writing songs and recording them and putting them out. I’d like to build a back catalogue.

[And] hopefully in a few months we can go for another trip [on the road]. I love touring.

Yeah, the album seems to be getting a good word-of-mouth response, so I think every time you go out you’ll probably get more people materialising.
Yeah, hopefully. Lots of people said to me, “What are you doing putting out an album? You haven’t put out a 7” [first].” But we had lots of songs that I thought were good enough to do something with it. It’s hard because most people do put out a couple of singles over a period of time and kind of build a thing, but we didn’t really do it like that.

But hopefully people will start to notice it a bit more soon. That’d be cool.

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‘The Late Great Wireheads’ is out now through Format Records. Read Freya Zaknich’s review.