Lowtide: ‘We Certainly Didn’t Rush It’

Lowtide have evolved from a solo project to a two-bass quartet, anchoring shoegazing depth with strong pop songs. Following the release of their much-anticipated first album, ANTHONY CAREW traces that evolution with Gabriel Lewis and Lucy Buckeridge.

Of all the bands, bedroom projects and one-person isolationists that have summoned shoegaze’s endless horizons in the past two decades, none have done it like Lowtide. The band began, under the name Three Month Sunset, as the solo project of Gabriel Lewis, using an array of pedals to summon vast clouds of reverberating sound. But when the solo project turned four-piece band, Lewis framed his guitar sound with a matching pair of bassist/vocalists, Lucy Buckeridge and Giles Simon, who provide melodic, melancholy parts from an instrument usually employed for more rote, time-keeping purposes.

Four years after releasing their first EP, You Are My Good Light, Lowtide have finally released their debut, self-titled album on staple Melburnian label Lost & Lonesome. The nine-song set has something else on the hazy ranks of shoegaze-inspired outfits: instead of being a work of tasteful ambience obsessed with tone, they’ve delivered a set of sparkling pop songs, be they three minutes (‘Held’) or six minutes (‘Missing History’) long. It’s hard not to think of Pale Saints or Slowdive when listening to their music, but Lowtide never sound like revivalists. The fact that they aren’t just a sound in search of some songs is symbolic: in the unique interplay between members, they’re a band present in this moment, rather than one besotted with the past.

Hugh Owens [of Summer Cats] thinks your music should be called ‘roogaze’. How do you feel about that?
Lewis: [Laughs] I like it!

Buckeridge: I think we’re okay with that. Hugh said it to us one night at a gig, and Gabe went home and did a little roogaze logo with a kangaroo on it. It’s pretty funny.

Move over dolewave, let’s mint it. Has roogaze been trademarked? Is the URL still free?
Buckeridge: It will be trademarked by this afternoon. [Laughs]

What is it that draws you to those sounds so associated with classic shoegaze and dream-pop?
Lewis: It’s the idea of having a guitar that doesn’t sound anything like a guitar. The density of it is a bit more emotive than a plain, plinky guitar. The emotional response that I get from it has always been intense.

What kind of emotional response?
Lewis: Mostly just overwhelmed. There’s a real surge of feelings with no specific single one. It’s really melancholy, this feeling of happiness with real darkness underneath it.

Buckeridge: Because there’s movement in the notes – they’re not just clear-cut – it opens up a bit more scope. Same with the vocals, too: the way we have them sit a little deeper in the mix, the harmonies nestle in together with the sounds. It’s open to a bit more emotional interpretation. It’s not just one thing, one feeling. It’s not like a pop song that tells you to be ‘happy’ or ‘sad’; it’s a bit more ambiguous.

“I learnt violin from the age of five, so I was used to that more languid, drawn-out use of sound.”

It’s a sound that’s really more about decay than attack. Kevin Shields called it ‘the opposite of rock ’n’ roll’: instead of being about the note, it’s about everything else around the note.
Lewis: That’s true. I grew up listening to a lot of classical music, and learnt violin from the age of five, so I was used to that more languid, drawn-out use of sound. Mum and dad listened to Radio National, and their record collection was mostly classical. They left behind popular music in the ’60s. I never really saw them as conservative, but maybe they were.

Learning violin from five, were you a childhood prodigy?
Buckeridge: I reckon! You should see this guy play banjo as a teenager. It’s on YouTube, it’s amazing.

Lewis: Learning the violin so young, it definitely has given me an upper hand with other instruments. When I was about 10, I was really into blues – I had my favourite Memphis Slim tape that I listened to to death. When I was at some orchestra thing, I once heard someone playing ‘white blues’, something like Jerry Lee Lewis, then I went home and taught myself how to do that. Pretty sure I can’t do it anymore. Can’t remember anything! It’s always been autodidactic type shit, just teaching myself stuff, from a very early age.

Did you cut your teeth, then, in isolation? Or have you a whole history of rock bands before this one?
Lewis: In the mid-’90s I was in punk and powerviolence bands.

Um, ‘powerviolence’?
Lewis: It’s kind of like grindcore but more punk. I guess ‘crustcore’ would be the local terminology. I think powerviolence is the more American term, crust is the more British one, but not exclusively. It’s pretty sludgy, heavy stuff.

Did you see that as a way of retreating into simpler, more naïve music? Or is there a virtuosity that can be found as playing as fast as possible?
Lewis: And as drunk as possible, too. Absolutely, yeah. I remember the first few shows were horrible because we were a drunken mess. But then we worked out if we rehearsed when we were drunk, then we could play really tight sets. It was a real teenage thing: getting all your anger and everything out, trying something that your parents don’t approve of, all that shit.

I went up to Darwin for a bit and did a music course up there, learnt how to record and engineer. After that I could put my ideas down, and was starting to lean towards this sound that I had in my head. I think it came from listening to Slint in high school, wanting to make something beautiful and dark and sad at once. Then, when I came back to Melbourne, played with this band A-mo: kind of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, post-rock type stuff. But it was a pretty on-and-off sort of thing. It was never a consistent group, which I found pretty frustrating. That’s when I started concentrating on my own solo stuff. I started out in 2003 or ’04, played my first show in 2005. That was the start of Three Month Sunset. Same sort of idea as Lowtide: same guitar set-up, multiple amps, too many amps.

Buckeridge: And then Three Month Sunset started as a band in 2008 or 2009, and that then became Lowtide.

“The only kind of gigs I could get were experimental shows …. but I didn’t see it as experimental music.”

What motivated you to go from an isolationist side project to making it a band? What did you want the band to be, or to do differently?
Lewis: It was about making it more accessible to a wider audience. I was getting pretty frustrated at being considered an experimental musician. The only kind of gigs I could get were experimental shows. There was an experimental quality to what I was doing – it wasn’t a traditional guitar sound – but I didn’t see it as experimental music: there was harmony and melody and structure. It wasn’t just making improvised noise for the sake of making noise. I felt totally stuck in that scene. So, at that point, I had two choices: I could either just give it a miss, or turn this into a band.

Turning it into a band was great, it just felt really nice. I was getting pretty lonely playing solo. When you finish, that’s it, you just go home. There’s no debriefing, no social element to playing. Performing with other people, sharing ideas, having other people suggest different ways of playing a song, all those experiences were great. It was my slow transition from this out-of-control process that I had, where I didn't have to answer to anyone and can do whatever, to making it more inviting to audiences, and to your other band members.

When you came into the rock band, what did you feel like you could bring to it?
Buckeridge: The first time I saw Three Month Sunset, I was there as a friend and a punter. I remember turning to our friend Jeremy [Cole] who plays in The Zebras, saying, “Fucking hell, this is my favourite band in Melbourne!” Right then, Nick [Hoare], the original bass player, was leaving the band, so I talked to Gabe about me maybe filling that role. But then Giles was living with [drummer] Anton [Jakovljevic] at the time, so he just naturally fit right in. At that stage, there was a girl singing called Maryke [Bishop], and Gabe asked if I wanted to try singing.

I was terrified. I had never been in a band. I grew up singing, playing piano my whole childhood. I grew up listening to arias – and I think that really matches up with the sound [of the band], all these melodies and harmonies shifting around you – and I used to sing at a choir at my Anglican Girls School; we went to Italy and sang in churches there. I’d made music all my life, but this was something else.

Soon after that, Maryke left the band, and that’s when I went to Gabe and said: “I can’t just stand here and sing. It’s not really adding anything to the band’s dynamic.” We talked about what other instrument might add something to it. So I picked up the bass, which I’d never touched in my entire life, and I sucked so hard, it was really funny. As time has gone on, and I’ve stopped sucking so hard, I’ve definitely felt my role in the band grow. I could contribute immediately by singing and writing lyrics, but now it goes way beyond that. Giles and I have worked closely together the whole time, but now our conversations are much more about musical ideas and structures.

In the trad rock ’n’ roll setup, the bass player’s interaction is chiefly with the drummer as the locked-in rhythm section. But your place must naturally be so much different, having another bass player in the band.
Buckerdige: Giles and I work together really closely. We have to write all our bass parts together, to make sure that we’re not playing the same notes, that we’re complementing each other, and we then write all the lyrics and the vocal melodies and harmonies together. Of course we also have to be working along with what Gabe is doing, and what Anton is doing, but [Giles and I] have to try and make our relationship as strong as possible, and then it sits within the rest of the band.

It’s weird how completely rare and almost ‘crazy’ it is to have two bass players. Are you hyperaware of other bands that do, just because of that rarity?
Buckeridge: ‘Hyperaware’ is definitely the wrong term. We generally have no idea, unless someone tells us. Someone said to me that Sonic Youth had two at some stage. There was an Australian band, apparently, who had two bass players, but who was that? I’ve totally forgotten.

Lewis: For me, there’s Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, and that’s about it.

“Giles is really into noodling, up-the-neck, poppy-sounding [bass] stuff. That leaves a lot of bottom end free, which is where Lucy comes in.”

There were Girls Against Boys and Cop Shoot Cop in the ’90s. And Tortoise too, but that felt different; that was more about dudes swapping instruments. I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting but even still, off the top of our heads we’ve come up with, like, five, out of the world’s five million rock bands.
Buckeridge: We’ve never typed it into Google Search. [Laughs] But we were never doing it to be different,;we were doing it because it was clear it was the thing that worked in this band.

Lewis: I think it works because Giles is really into noodling, up-the-neck, poppy-sounding kind of stuff. That leaves a lot of bottom end free, which is where Lucy comes in.

Buckeridge: And that was great for me when we started playing, because I was really just sitting on those root notes, and that was a great way for me to learn. Now Giles and I move around each other a lot more than we used to. Now we can harmonise vocally and melodically both with our singing and our playing.

If the band has been a band since 2009, does that mean your LP has felt like a long time coming?
Lewis: Not really. We didn’t start recording until ... two years ago maybe?

Buckeridge: The first session was at the end of 2012: we did two days, recorded half the album. Then we came back six months later and did another two days, and recorded the rest of the album.

Lewis: [Laughs] OK! I totally forgot about the second recording.

Buckeridge: A lot of comments have been made about how it was a long time coming, but during that time Giles moved overseas for a year [and] I was away for six months. We weren’t plugging away the whole while: it was just time issues, just life. But, by the same token, we certainly didn’t rush it. We were still writing for the album before the second tracking session. We figured out there were some holes in how we wanted to album to run, so we wrote ‘Held’ a few weeks before we went back for the second recording, so we’d have another quick pop song.

So you spent a lot of time thinking and talking about how you wanted the album to play? Did you really have this specific idea, this model, of the definitive debut that you wanted to live up to?
Buckeridge: What was most important for us was to make an album. Not just tracks thrown on in some random order. We wanted a Side A and a Side B. We scrapped two songs at the end because the second side just wasn’t running properly. I don’t think we could ever let us think of it as our debut, as some statement piece. If anyone had ever made that suggestion, I think we probably would just laugh at each other about it. We just wanted to make a strong album, something that someone could sit and listen to through its entirety. And with two sides, because we all listen to vinyl.

How have you felt about the way that people have written about the record, talked about it, reacted to it?
Lewis: Pretty stoked! You get so consumed with just finishing the bloody thing, that you almost forget that there’s going to be other people listening to it. Then it comes and it’s like: “Oh, that's right! Now this is the fun part!” Well, hopefully it’s fun. I guess people could hate your album. But, luckily, people have been really supportive. It’s been great.

Buckeridge: It’s been really rewarding. And really surprising to us. Putting it out in the world was quite a scary thing, and we didn’t have any expectations. So far, the reaction has been awesome.

“No one seems to mind about any other genres being rehashed, but shoegaze gets such a hard time.”

Are you worried at all that people will perceive what you’re doing as just being a work of revivalism? Or, even worse, ’90s nostalgia?
Buckeridge: We’re not ashamed to say that those [shoegaze] bands mean so much to us. But we know we don’t sit down and set out to mimic or pay homage to any of them. There are elements on our album that have absolutely nothing to do with that sound. Obviously, the sound of what Gabe is doing with his pedals is deeply indebted to that, but in terms of the songs and the melodies and structures, it’s definitely not a heavy lift.

Lewis: I’ve been plodding along doing the same thing for years, so it doesn’t bother me. People are gonna think whatever they wanna think. But it’s funny, no one seems to mind about any other genres being rehashed, but shoegaze gets such a hard time.

I think, to lots of people, it’s a sound that died in 1991, and it’s entombed in this specific time and place in a way that other things aren’t. I always find it funny that every five years someone will talk about the garage-rock revival, but when at any point in the last 50 years has garage rock ever gone away?
Buckeridge: It’s the same with shoegaze, too. It’s lived on throughout the whole time since its beginnings; in so many bands, in so many different ways. It’s just been under the radar. I’ve noticed that there are lots of bands referred to, these days, as dream-pop and shoegaze, whereas 10 years ago people wouldn’t have used those terms. It’s like it’s been long enough that it’s OK again.

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‘Lowtide’ is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Lost & Lonesome. Read Edward Sharp-Paul’s review. The band will launch it in Brisbane next weekend.

Sat, Sept 6 – in-store @ Tym’s Guitars, Brisbane, QLD [2pm]
Sat, Sept 6 – Brightside, Brisbane, QLD [w/Roku Music, Cassette Cathedral + Kigo]