Posted by kluster on November 25, 2009
Here at Kluster we’re not shy about our affection for The Mess Hall, nor our constant delighting in their newest LP, the accomplished For The Birds. Rather than fan-magazineing out on the world we decided to let the band speak for themselves. Gushing is, after all, so very 2001. Kluster’s Kat Hartmann cornered frontman Jed Kurzel on a windy Sydney afternoon for a chat.
Covered: Twin Peaks fixations, cohesiveness in a record, empowering songs, slow growers and vertigo.
Kat Hartmann: There is a lot going on in the album. Would you label it a departure or a development on slightly less forgiving, ballsy sounds of Devils Elbow?
Jed Kurzel: I think probably a bit of both, I guess it’s a departure but it is not altogether conscious.
KH: What inspired the swing?
JK: We weren’t listening to a lot of that fall-on-the-floor rock’n’roll. For a lot of it we were listening to stuff where there was heaps of groove going on and we wanted to capture that. To make something swing for us now, as musicians at this point, it is a harder thing to do than just bashing something out. We wanted to challenge ourselves with that; the very simple ideas that are harder to execute.
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the mess hall, for the birds