the mess hall says...

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.

KH: Plenty of folks have been touting your new sound as experimental. Did it feel experimental in the creation and the recording? 

JK: It did in the sense that when we record, we don’t go in with a lot finished, we sort of let it happen so it is experimental in that way but when I think of experimental I think, God, if we really did go in there and experimented we would be left with something un-listenable [laughs]! So, it’s more [about] getting the songs to work in their own way.

KH: It’s been said - and this is an assertion that I agree with – that each of the songs on For The Birds functions as a rich, independent story as well as being a part of the whole. Were the tracks created using with a holistic approach?  

JK: I guess so, we wanted to have a cohesive record; I think what is challenging is to make a cohesive record that has lots of elements to it. I always like albums that feel like the songs are in the same world, you can go two ways about it you can either make like a Ramones record where each song is Ramones or you can make an album like Wilco's A Ghost is Born, which is very cohesive but there are very different songs on there.

KH: A journey?

JK: Yeah, I like those albums because you can keep finding something new in them, they are slow growers but they reward you in the end.

KH: The soft tones of ‘Swing Low’ provide an end to the album that is pleasantly surprising. What motivated that decision to end gently? 

JK: It was a song that I had floating around for a while, it almost didn’t make it on. It was this one take that I did early in the morning after being up all night recording, it was one of those freaky things, it had a certain quality to it. Sometimes you capture songs immediately and other times it takes ages, and that was one of those rare moments where you go, “That’s done”. It felt like a really nice way to ease people out of the record. It’s subtle enough to involve a bit of a journey, but there’s not much going on just vocals and guitar and a bit of piano.

KH: I’ve read a few interesting tales from studio time spent recording Notes From A Ceiling involving vertigo and the like. Any experiences that out-odds those this time around?

JK: Recording can be quite stressful – it can be like an hour of pleasure and the rest of it is sheer torture, particularly the way we do our albums, it’s not like you know what you’ve got before you go in so I guess weird things like vertigo tend to happen to me when I am under stress.

With this one, I had a beard and hair started falling out of it, it’s a funny thing what that kind of pressure can do to you, but I just put that down to the fact I wasn’t sleeping. The vertigo thing was just bizarre I never want to experience that again, it was like literally being on a boat the whole time and it was making me sick and I was falling over a lot, I thought I had a brain tumor or something.

KH: There were quite a few contributions made by other musicians on Devil’s Elbow. Not so many this time around. Was that a conscious decision?  

JK: Oh not really, with Devil’s, if people were around we just got them to come in and play to see if it worked or not. On this one, we had all the different instruments set up in the studio and I’d just jump on one and see if I could find a part that would be tasteful and if we got it we would. The only other person was Ces’s girlfriend Anna, there were a couple of songs that we thought would be perfect with female vocals.

KH: Speaking of contributions from other musicians, Stevie Hesketh joined you on your recent Oz tour. Is that a permanent arrangement? 

JK: I’ve known Stevie for years and years, and he and I have always talked about playing together and doing something. We just rang him up and brought him along, for us it was a very natural thing to have him. Some shows we have him come along, but it just depends on how we are feeling really.

KH: On the live front you have the Annandale Christmas Party in Sydney and Trackside Festival in Canberra coming up. Anything else I have missed? 

JK: I think we are doing something for New Years but I don’t know if that has been announced and we are playing the Sydney Arts Festival in January. 

KH: I take it from the nod to Leland Palmer in ‘Bare’ that either you or Ces - or both of you - are Twin Peaks fans? Is that the case? 

JK: Yeah I am a huge Twin Peaks fan, I love it.

KH: Are there any other subtle Twin Peaks references in your work I am not aware of? 

JK: Not to movies so much, I know I was really obsessed with Let the Right One In as well about vampires which I thought was amazing, so there are a few vampire references in there but they are subtle, it’s not like talking teeth and blood.

KH: Any plans to head O.S. in the near future? London? NYC? LA? 

JK: We’re looking at going to the states again next year, but we have to see how it pans out and see how the record is received but we would love to go back.

the mess hall, for the birds