Lyrics Seemed Superfluous

The geography of an underground genre

The last five years have seen a resurgence in the art-rock tradition of Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs. During the first half of 2005, instrumental rock bands in particular have moved into the city’s mainstream venues and onto its larger stages.

The scene

It’s 4 pm on a cool, colourless Melbourne weekend. Across the city, music fans are organising their night out – twitching post-punk hipsters at Ding Dong Lounge, pub rock at The Espy or an international blockbuster at Rod Laver Arena? Twenty or so of us have already decided. In fact, we’re already there. Collected on the sidewalk outside a Collingwood record store, we’re peering through the windows to watch six musicians pass around a bottle of wine and weave their instruments into a frenzy of sound, just centimetres from a cross-legged front row. The band in question is Laura, one of the many recent local groups to have eschewed the traditional rules of pop songwriting and the overriding presence of a lead vocalist.

After five weeknights’ worth of Coca-Cola advertisements marketing the “spirit” of rock, jeans labels promoting the garage-punk flexibility of their denim and “rebellious” hair products promising more teenage wet dreams than productive uses, one would be forgiven for noticing that this low-key affair seems almost … well … honest. In an environment of co-opted and commercialised music culture, could the rejection of a marketable singer be the new underground statement? Those of us staying behind to share drinks over a makeshift barbeque avoid such abstract questions, choosing instead to toast the nearly 400-strong crowd the band pulled in a fortnight earlier.

Sure, it’s no 10,000. But Melbourne doesn’t have the population of New York or London, and the further a band shifts from radio-friendly formulas, the more emphasis they place on each hard-fought addition to a door sales figure. James McGauran – the promoter behind many of Melbourne’s recent instrumental rock gigs and organiser of the yearly Grand Music For Tiny Souls event – stresses the difference between an attendance of 10 or 30 people for the viability of booking unconventional acts. Like most observers, he has noticed the recent surge of vocally-bereft talent circulating the city.

“The last year or two has definitely seen a bit of a ‘golden era’, with more of these bands gaining the attention of perhaps a wider audience than seemed possible in the past,” McGauran reflects. From a humble beginning, the second Grand Music event was held at The Corner Hotel – a space usually reserved for musical veterans, crowd-pulling imports and Triple J darlings. It was also the stage ambitiously chosen by Laura for the launch of their debut album, after repeatedly filling the city’s usual underground venues. It seems like every other week bears witness to sold-out Fitzroy band rooms as more groups attract listeners from outside the usual crowds.

It’s not just Laura who are exciting a larger audience, and the attention isn’t limited to street press hyperbole and independent radio stations. This winter has seen the richly atmospheric Because of Ghosts embark upon a tour of Japan, and coverage of ambient and lo-fidelity improvisers This Is Your Captain Speaking appearing in broadsheet press. Most importantly for themselves and the instrumental “scene”, these three bands have managed to match the quality of their live performance in studio recordings. This coming-of-age has proved difficult for many of their recent contemporaries, where just five years ago it all seemed rather unlikely.

“The late 90s seemed to be the time in both Melbourne and Sydney for instrumental acts,” McGauran reflects. “It seemed in 2001 and 2003 when my own band Season started playing shows and releasing music, that many people were saying, ‘Oh, you’ve come a few years too late, instrumental music is dead now, Mogwai’s Rock Action was the last nail in the coffin.’ Bands like The Dirty Three were into the stratosphere now – overseas, playing huge shows, no longer Melbourne’s own instrumental heroes.”

Part of the resurgence has been due to artists like David Evans and Nick Lane of This Is Your Captain Speaking who, “lamenting the lack of spaces for playing and listening to more introspective and ambient sounds”, took it upon themselves to create one. In 2003, Evans and Lane started a monthly event in Fitzroy titled Museum, aimed at showcasing the diversity of understated talent existing in the local music scene. Over 18 months Museum hosted a comprehensive catalogue of instrumental bands: High Pass Filter, All India Radio, International Karate, School of Emotional Engineering and City City City in addition to those already mentioned, plus almost 40 other local and interstate acts.

One of the night’s unintended outcomes was to establish a more tangible and personal connection between bands with similar musical interests. While Evans maintains that “instrumental bands don’t necessarily have anything in common”, it’s undeniable that a large part of the current scene has been built on mutual support and inter-dependence, with larger bands booking smaller and upcoming acts for support slots and slight but indicative habits such as the willingness of different bands to staff each others’ merchandise tables. Events such as Museum have been crucial in forming these links, but Evans emphasises the contribution that others have made.

“A major reason for the success of the night was the support we got from Owen McKern who presents 3RRR’s instrumental program Delivery,” Evans explains. “Owen had one of the Museum bands do a live-to-air performance on his show almost every month, and that kind of coverage helps a lot in getting people through the door. I think Owen has actually played a very significant role in fostering the scene in Melbourne – almost every instrumental act gets their first airplay on his show and he has done much to give the music greater exposure.”

Indeed, the only list of local and national instrumental bands greater than Museum’s collated line-up is boasted by McKern’s radio program Delivery, which has been running weekly since 1997. The presenter remembers a decade ago when the genre was relegated to “discreet musical communities” of avant-garde jazz improvisers, contemporary classical composers and a “handful” of art-rock bands. He recalls the Ergot Derivative’s experience of being heckled by the audience, who demanded that the band “sing, you lazy bastards!” throughout their set. The most successful (and influential) of the mid 1990s’ groups, The Dirty Three, drew their crowds from an already established pool of maturing punk fans who remembered Mick Turner and Jim White from their late-80s band Venom P Stinger. “There was no real instrumental scene at all,” he concludes.

Over the last 10 years, McKern has noticed a discernable shift in this situation. From a disparate Fitzroy art-rock scene centred around the Rochester Castle and the now defunct Punters Club during a time when the extent of mainstream exposure rested upon the “odd indie-rock band playing one instrumental track during their set”, to the last four to five years, which have seen larger audiences, wider media coverage and the formation of a “whole community of wonderful bands playing, writing and recording instrumental music” around Melbourne.

McKern may have more to do with this development than he lets on. His involvement with 3RRR began as a reaction to the way independent Australian music was represented in the media: “In the post-grunge days of the mid 1990s, the music press focused almost entirely on guitar-rock bands as the embodiment of alternative local music … My initial reason for starting Delivery was to broadcast acts that didn’t simply play variations on the guitar-rock theme.”

Encountering early problems with the scarcity of Australian content, McKern has since received a growing amount of correspondence and submissions for airplay from both in and outside the city. He stresses the impact that Melbourne pioneers The Necks and The Dirty Three have had on relaxing the rules of Australian music as a whole: “Both bands have dispelled a number of previously held truisms about contemporary music – that tracks over six minutes could not get radio airplay, that instrumental bands couldn’t survive anywhere other than in either classical or straight dance realms [and] that ‘alternative music’ referred only to loud 3-piece guitar, bass and drum bands.”

As for the recent wealth of instrumental music in Melbourne, McKern tentatively suggests that the impetus has come from a mixture of local and international predecessors (including the controversially classified “post-rock” movement), key people within the Melbourne scene who have “actively worked to build the community” and the sheer number of like-minded acts forming and playing since 2000. At least for the moment, it would seem that his show wont be running out of material any time soon.

Meanwhile, our Collingwood barbeque has run out of sausages. Most of us will go onto another gig – perhaps wander across the road to The Tote, or track down some dinner before another three instrumental bands play tonight at The Empress. Who knows? There’s always a decent art-rock gig at The Rob Roy …

The music

Which is precisely where I find myself one week later, reviewing yet another sold-out record launch. This is the tricky part. If music writing sometimes seems like a contradiction in terms – a concept somewhere between two languages with no translation – then surely the hardest genres to describe in print are those which choose to shun the use of words themselves. If nothing else, Melbourne’s burgeoning number of instrumental rock bands seems to have left fans and critics alike lost in a mess of stunted synonyms for “expressive” and “atmospheric”.

“It’s a bitch describing the music to your workmates,” note Because of Ghosts’ rhythm section, Jacob Pearce and Domenic Stanton. They go on to list the pros and cons of creating music without lyrics as: “We don’t have to write them and we can close our eyes on stage and ‘feel’ the music” and “it’s difficult to think of song titles and we look pretentious on stage because we’re ‘feeling’ the music,” respectively. Their charm not wasted, I ask the pair to elaborate on the band’s creative process.

“Our songs have been composed from improvised jamming. Lyrics just seemed to be superfluous,” Pearce and Stanton reply. Drawing inspiration from most corners of contemporary music (Sonic Youth, Tom Waits and Bjork are mentioned before the more predictable culprits), they began experimenting at home with guitarist Reuben Stanton for personal enjoyment, before realising that there may “be some people in Melbourne who might really enjoy [it]”. In fact, Because of Ghosts have become one of the scenes most loved acts, playing packed shows in churches, warehouse spaces and alongside international icons Tortoise at their Melbourne show earlier this year.

The group’s sound is testimony to the shadow left over Melbourne by The Dirty Three, with Jim White’s distinctive drumming style recast by Pearce amongst guitars, glockenspiel, cello and samples. If the band’s recollections of being surprised when first given the chance to play to an audience are accurate, one can only imagine that they have accepted later successes humbly. After brushing off any attempts to over-analyse the nature of starting an instrumental band, Pearce and Stanton add a final, self-mocking truth: Their “distinct lack of vocal ability and capacity”.

Not all bands are privileged with such clear direction from the outset. Many have settled into an instrumental style quite by accident, deciding that the presence of vocal tracks inhibited other musical elements or having failed to find a singer who “fit” their sound. David Evans of This Is Your Captain Speaking informs me that the 3-piece “didn’t really set out to be an instrumental band”. Originally experimenting with vocals and spoken-word lyrics during their practice sessions, the group soon found that they “intruded” upon the music.

“Once we found our sound, based mostly around counterpoint melodies, we wanted to keep our instrumentation simple and minimal,” he continues. This seems in keeping with the band’s sound on their debut album Storyboard – intertwined and contrasted melodies plucked out on mandolin and guitar or struck from a metallophone. For Evans, the benefit of this style is the space allowed for each instrument, which is allowed to develop gradually and betray its intricacies and flaws to the listener.

It also offers a distinct type of emotional interaction. “Instrumental music can evoke emotion in different ways than music with vocals, where the emotional tone is set to a degree by the lyrics and their delivery,” Evans notes, touching upon a recurring theme in our discussions. “The listener is able to make their own meaning in the music and let their mind wander off, so that the same piece of music can have very different meanings and create different feelings for different people.”

Andrew Chalmers of Laura has reflected on the issue thoroughly. “If your goal is to get the person who’s listening to feel the same way you do, then writing without lyrics can be a bit of a blunt instrument,” he notes frankly. “It’s tough to know which of two variations of how you hold your pick, say, is going to affect how people are feeling.”

Like others, Laura’s sound has been formed through a process of discovery rather than a conscious decision. “Officially, Laura started from the ashes of an earlier band,” Chalmers explains. “We found that in writing new material without vocals, there were avenues that were open to us that we’d never really considered before. It wasn’t about the vocals the earlier band had, it was more about all these unspoken rules of songwriting … It took parting ways with a vocalist to make us recognise them.”

Surely, though, the rejection of more traditional songwriting rules also involves adopting new ones? “Yes, definitely, and we like the new rules a lot more,” he replies, smiling. “A big aspect of why people are attracted to a type of music is whether they like the effect the rules have on the songs, but on the other hand, the reason people keep listening to a band or style is if the rules keep on drifting.

“Sometimes Laura digs itself a big hole with rules, and sometimes they save us. We try to keep things fresh and keep changing the rules … without getting precious or pre-calculated or different for difference’s sake. We’ve gotten pretty good at calling ‘bullshit’ on ourselves and each other when an experiment gets out of hand.”

The antidote to such technical concerns is noted by most bands during our discussion: The unexpected and emotional reactions of audience members stumbling into a gig for the first time. Laura’s David Gagliardi and Andrew Yardley excitedly list those faces that stay with them from the stage – ecstatic, angry, sometimes even crying or screaming. Chalmers remembers the visibly shaken fan who grabbed him after a Fitzroy show, barely able to communicate her inexplicable anger, overcome with bewilderment and praise. “It’s so far outside the realm of day to day, public transport, working 9 to 5 life, and so against the rules that everyone I know lives by, that it shows something must have really clicked,” he says proudly.

And there it is again – the concept of rules. Rules of pop songwriting, of what is constituted as “alternative” music, of audience reaction and emotional involvement and more generally of the spaces held by instrumental groups within the broader musical spectrum. Strangely enough, though, none of these ideas pass through my mind as I retreat behind the thick Rob Roy crowd and close my eyes in anticipation of another set. In fact, nothing does.

“All this talk of rules is a bit wanky really, because it comes along after the fact to make me feel comfortable about the weird stuff that’s been bubbling away in our various subconscious minds that makes us play what we play,” Chalmers continues. “Launching Mapping Your Dreams at The Corner was incredible. For three hours a spontaneous community leaps up that listens to and wants to make a type of music which involves … really switching off the part of your personality that’s constantly chattering away with a million thoughts a second and getting to grips with the bigger picture of what’s around you.”

What’s around me tonight, though, is just that. A community of talented musicians and passionate audiences – the two categories usually overlapping – revelling in the knowledge of when to shut up, sit down and lose themselves in the music. Just ask Jacob Pearce, who apologises later in the evening for an unintentional, uncontrollable scream behind the drum kit, reverberating throughout the band room and unsettling each pint glass as it travels along the bar. “Shit, you heard that?” he asks. Yes, and it sent a shiver down our spines.

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