Aleks Bryant gives us an insight into the 10 tracks that make up Aleks and the Ramps’ second album 'Midnight Believer'.

‘Destroy the Universe with Jazz Hands’

I recorded this one as a demo ages ago and didn't have any lyrics so I just laid down a vocal track of singing the melody in gibberish. That'd be a pretty funny song to use as a b-side or something, but I don't really think I'd feel OK with letting the public hear it. Someone (I think maybe Extreme Wheeze) said it sounded like it could be a protest song or something, but instead it turned into a stream-of-conscious rant about a guy whose memories consist entirely of apocalyptic hipster role plays/dance moves and outdated phone numbers. Or something. If you listen closely, you can hear the unique squeals of Billy Corgan.

‘Walking in the Garden’

There was this project called "Hidden Bookshelf" where these guys found a bookshelf with fake books and titles. They asked a whole bunch of writers and musicians to create something based on the title of a book on this shelf. We were asked to do it, and by the time I put in my preferences for what title we'd do, all the ones I wanted were gone. ‘Black Milk’, ‘Waterside Planting’ and ‘Dagger Lane’ were titles that I tried to put dibs on, but someone else's dibs were already on them so we ended up with ‘Walking in the Garden’ which isn't really a bad title or anything. Its secret Ramp title is ‘Laaaaaaaaaaser’. True Fact.

‘Hey Owl’

This is a song, it has guitars on it and some drums and other things like keyboards.

‘Circa 1992 Ideas’

The original title of this song was ‘Plasma X-Tron 4000’. Actually now that I think about it, most of these songs have had around two or three titles. We've got a little stash of spare titles floating around – if any bands out there want a title, drop us a line and we'll see what we can do. Potential Falcon and Slo-Mo Speedboat were originally Ramp titles that are now a band name and soloist name, respectively. This title came from a nightmare Denim Owl had when she went to bed after watching Walter Murch's creepy/incredibly cheesy Return To Oz. In the nightmare, our kitten (Wind Panther) was sleeping on Denim Owl while whispering evil “circa 1980 ideas” into her ear.

‘The Non in Non-Fiction’

Vocals were recorded for this track and it was going to be called, ‘This Heavy Breathing Is Just For Show’. I decided that it was better as an instrumental.

‘Boy Meets Ghost’

This is the oldest song on the record. The original lyrics were me singing something in Spanish that meant roughly, "Are you under the impression that I seek your companionship only for sex and nothing else?", followed by random tourist Spanish like, "At what time does the bus leave?" and "How much for two beers? Are they cold? I very much like cold beer". It's pretty different now. When we play this live, there's a big epic noise jam stuck in the middle that didn't seem to work on the record. Special!

‘Whiplash’

This one features a friend of ours named Mikey. He does a baritone "oooh-oooh---ooooh" and goes "waaaaahhh!" at various points. He also referred to the guitar tone as "rinky dink". Phhh! Whatevs dude. This song initially was about going to the airport to pick up someone who doesn't know that you're coming, simultaneously trying to figure out what flight they're on and how cigarette butts slipped through your pockets into the lining of you jacket. But then it turned into something else, something along the lines of "boy stalks girl, girl rejects boy, boy starts a plastics manufacturing business in Keilor". You know the drill. Evelyn "Pikelet" Morris does some angelic "oooohs" on this too.

‘Amputee Pilots’

I wrote this in a Hotel room. True story.

‘Weather Patterns'

Captain Rad, who used to play drums in the Ramps, moved to Mongolia a little while ago. He's been writing poetry and sending them to me sporadically and I asked him if he'd like to donate some poems to use in the liner notes in the record. He was pretty psyched to do it, so he sent me a bunch of poems that we could use, and they're pretty freakin’ ace. In the end it didn't gel with Lily [Coate's] artwork plan to have a whole bunch of text in the sleeve, so we had to ditch it, but we whipped up this little piece to showcase something he wrote called ‘History’. It's read aloud by the built in Mac OS X voice called "Alex".

‘Antique Limb’

Pop songs are really fun to write, who would have thought? We're going to do more. This one used to have a melody that was a direct rip off of Robbie Williams' ‘Tripping’ so we changed it. I'm running out of time, so I'll wrap it up by saying, "Shaaamoneeeee!!"

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Midnight Believer is out now through Stomp.