Finally I had the opportunity to interview one of my all time favorite 80ies bands. The Australian Shoegaze-Psychedelic-Rock band THE CHURCH started 1980 in the Australian city Canberra, in their first years they were probably one of the most fascinating, yet not very well-known New Wave bands. In 1988 their hitsingle “Under the Milky Way” was released and brought them some success in the charts. Their 1988 album “Starfish” is one of those fine musical moments in time that no band today will ever be able to recreate again.

Now they are back. THE CHURCH are about to release their fascinating new album “Untitled #23”. Steve Kilbey, Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper continue to walk their path of athmospheric- psychedelic Pop. My personal favorite on “Untitled #23” is definetly the wonderful epic song “anchorage”.

I had the sincere pleasure to ask Steve Kilbey a few short questions.

Steve, are you already getting bored with people asking you about the title of your new album? I mean it’s called “Untitled #23”, probably a lot of uninspired people find that worth joking about…

It’s funny that you call the album “untitled” and a lot of people ask what that means…but i don’t get bored with answering it. I usually make up some story about it.

Is there a story you would like to share concerning the  song “Anchorage”, which is probably my favourite on “Untitled #23”?

I have never been to Anchorage, so I wrote the words to this blind. I knew this piece of music should become a song about a city. And Tim suggested Anchorage when we started. I just imagined all the rest, it’s like snapshots of someones fucked up life and love.

Would you agree that it gets more and more important for you throughout the years to create an album that works more as a whole, rather than have single hits on it?

Wow, I wouldnt mind a hit and a whole…if you know what I mean…but if it has to be one or the other….god, i dont know…

Was there any particular thing that inspired you the most while doing “Untitled #23” ?

I became re-inspired by melody and i sought to inject lots of melody into everything.

Thank you Steve, for a few of those magical musical moments in life.

There is something extremely intriguing about Gothenburg, when it comes to music. I experienced that some people in Gothenburg already get bored by the fact how many musicians domicile in Sweden’s second-largest city.

A quite new band from Gothenburg, which is definetly worth checking are ZEIT. Formed in June 2008, ZEIT were influenced by MY BLOODY VALENTINE and THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN. Their new EP is titled “The Glued and Honeydripped” and is dark Shoegaze at it’s best.

Erik Engblom, Erik Jonsson and Björn Alm answered my questions on their influences, ideas and feelings about the music scene in Gothenburg.

One of the characteristics that stands out with your music, is the very simple musical approach. Especially the very few chords that are used in a repetitive way. How did you find your style and how did it evolve?

Erik Engblom: As I remember it, ZEIT took shape in my brother’s sofa while talking to my good friend Erik Jonsson (whom I formed Zeit with in early June 2008). I can recall that we shared some structural ideas about music that involved simplicity and rather then focus on technicalities, such as, variation and changes in the music we wanted to capture atmosphere.    And we both grew up listening to bands like THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN and MY BLOODY VALENTINE, in a pure theoretical sense my idea with Zeit was to combine the atmosphere you can find in MY BLOODY VALENTINES sound, but with a more simplified structure that resembles in my opinion THE JESUS AND MARY CHAINS approach to music. A few days after this discussion I went to Erik Jonssons place, he had two chords that he played on his down tuned guitar that eventually became “Happiness in Times of Misery”. It was the proof for us that two chords can be enough, and I remembered thinking that this song materialized the whole concept I had in mind.

What is the song “Happiness in Times of Misery” about?

Erik Engblom: It is my reflection, or paraphrase on the famous Dante quote: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery”. I try to describe such sorrow, and in my opinion, the greatest sorrow is to live your life constantly contemplating over the past, and as a result you will not be able to “inhale” the present. In such state you tend (or maybe it’s just me) to see the world through a lens of a bittersweet nostalgia, you are not dead in any serious sense, but you live as if you were. That’s what I try to capture in the song

What are your feelings about Gothenburg’s music scene?

Erik Jonsson: There is lots of great music being made here and that is inspiring. There is so much good punk, noise and other experimental music coming out of Gothenburg. Stuff like Batalj, Ättestupa, Street Drinkers, Weary Nous, The Black Bug, The Fresh Weather Bomb Attack (shameless self promotion) and so much more. I don’t feel like the Gothenburg scene has alot to do with how we sound though but it’s nice to be in a city that has lots of different things going on.

Björn Alm: The music scene in Gothenburg is better than the one Stockholm. Sure there are maybe bigger bands that come to play there, but my overall feeling is that there are so many more good bands that come from Gothenburg. For example: Silverbullit, Franke, Soundtrack of our lives, The Embassy and  Convoj.

http://www.myspace.com/zeittheband

Thanks to a lucky coincidence  and a colleague with great taste in music, I discovered Stockholms THE EXPLODING BOY. The Swedish Goth/NewWave-revivalists fascinate with a mix of THE CURE, INTERPOL and EDITORS. After Gothenburgs CUT CITY, the next great Swedish band that pays tribute to a genre, that found its beginning on the day when Punk died. In May 2009 their new album “AFTERGLOW” came out in Sweden, on the 3rd of August it is going to be released in Germany, France and Holland. Wonderful songs like “Heart of Glass” impress with beeing dark, mellow and catchy at the same time. Recently THE EXPLODING BOY played at the (in)famous German “Wave Gotik Treffen”- festival in Leipzig, which regulary attracts the majority of the German Goth-scene – or let’s say a scene, that considers themselves to be “Goth”, but are a bit spacy in my view.

It was in the early 1980s when gothic rock became a subgenre of the Post-Punk-movement. Bands that have to be mentioned here are foremost ADAM AND THE ANTS, BAUHAUS, SPECIMEN, SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES, THE DAMNED, THE CURE, CHRISTIAN DEATH and ofcourse JOY DIVISION. Sometimes one gets the impression that the modern Goth-scene has almost forgot about those bands and that they are only obsessed with cheesy Electro/SynthPop-hymns, which I have a hard time to understand musicwise.

I interviewed Nick and Johan from THE EXPLODING BOY on this issue and also on their influences for their new album “Afterglow” and ofcourse on their personal Post-Punk favorites.

Nick, Johan,  you played at the “Wave Gotik Treffen” in Leipzig, which is probably the biggest Gothic-festival in Germany. What kind of experience was that?

Nick: It was an amazing experience and very overwhelming that so many people showed up…

Johan: Absolutely, It was a great experience. For me, I had never been there, and was always a bit jealous of friends who went there and loved it, and suddenly we got booked there, and the friends from Stockholm was in the audience! I even heard one of them cried when we played a sad song, so that is kind of a revenge I think.
It was the biggest stage we’ve entered as well, so that felt really good. I think our music gets better at bigger stages.

Don’t you find it sometimes strange how much the modern Gothic-scene (especially in Germany) is music wise and from the outfits detached from the scenes originators, which I still consider to be bands like JOY DIVISION, BAUHAUS and SIOUXSIE?

Nick: The Gothic scene today is more about the gothic style and the clothes. It is very rare that you see an “original goth” in worn out black jeans, pointy shoes and a SIOUXSIE T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Now it is all about plastic and everybody seems to be into this S&M thing, and that had nothing to do with the gothic scene from the beginning.

What were your biggest influences when working on “Afterglow” ?

Johan: I think since we were just me and Les who made the first album, and now all the four of us, the other guys distributed with a lot of things to the sound, and that influenced us all a lot during the recordings. Stefan with a lot of PLACEBO-vocals and punk-guitars, and Nick with a lot of SISTERS OF MERCY-feelings and a lot of keyboard playing in the making of the songs. And though we like those things from the beginning, it is more obvious in this album. I think it feels very fresh and as a great mixture.

Nick: The biggest influence was probably Stockholm and Sweden in general. We recorded the album during the cold and dark period and that probably made the record what it finally become, melancholic, but with a strong underground party feeling to it.

Do you have favorites in the PostPunk – genre and for what reasons?

Nick: The early ADAM & THE ANTS stuff has always been a big influence for me…

Johan: I really like most of those bands like THE SOUND, MAGAZINE, BAUHAUS but early THE CURE stuff has always been one of the main influences. The common thing is that they’ve got a certain feeling I love. I don’t know what it is, but since I totally love melodies in a song it has probably something to do with that.

www.myspace.com/theexplodingboyse

Doom-pop from Downtown L. A.

Saccharine-sweet melodies, catchy singalongs and apocalyptical discordant guitars converge to a – one must admit – typical US-type post-punk bombast. Honest lyrics sang by great baritone Neil Popkins satisfy all the lost New Wave-souls out there, yet WAR TAPES has an extremely modern, contemporary Pop-edge to it, almost crossing the border to more mainstream – type acts.

With „Continental Divide“ WAR TAPES manage to get the attention of a more mainstream orientated audience, but they also keep the more stubborn, conservative post-punk fans like me listening with delight.

I asked singer Neil Popkins from WAR TAPES two short questions.

Neil, one of my favorite songs on „Continental Divide“ is “dreaming of you”. Is there a story behind that song you want to share?

It’s about living out a romantic fantasy in your life solely in a dream world. Not caring about reality only because the more you dream the more it becomes a reality. You would rather sleep your life away then deal with the fact that the moment has passed ages ago and it is out of your reach.

Which bands of the Post Punk-era had the biggest influence on you and why?

THE CURE, I love how prolific they have been over the years even their new material is equally as important as their early years. The first time I heard “Boys don’t cry” I was immediately in love with their music.

JOY DIVISION, I love the romanticized story behind the band how picturesque and utterly heart breaking their demise with Ian Curtis’s suicide which led to the legend surrounding the band and the man. It’s a terrible tradgedy but it needed to happen in order for the world to unfold the way it did. They paved the way for the underground.

www.myspace.com/wartapes

Support the band and get WAR TAPES “Continental Divide” here !