Unchained Melody Triffids in a Jugular Vein

Rip It Up, Issue 130, 1 May 1988, Page 12

Unchained Melody Triffids in a Jugular Vein

“Going for the jugular” is how head honcho Triffid David McComb describes his band’s assault on the commercial pop market with their new album Calenture and single ‘Bury Me Deep In Love.’

These Australian expatriates are now many years down the road from their high school beginnings in Perth, and “Phil Spector” is the sixties catchphrase that’s replacing “Dylan" in the Triffids’

music-making vocabulary. After recording four albums for independent Australian label Hot, the Triffids last year signed to Island in the UK and began recording the Calenture album. Island were chosen out of a number of major labels courting the Triffids because the band saw the label as having a history of taking on more adventurous acts, and of looking after those artists. “You can’t romanticise record companies or their role at all,” says David McComb, “but Island do have character and style. We liked the fact that they seemed to have a sense of history with their acts.” The Triffids had spent a long time looking after their own interests and heading in their

own direction, but they arrived at their new record company with a definite idea of what they wanted to achieve and set about working on Calenture tor eight months with producer Gil Norton, who had also worked on their previous studio album Born Sandy Devotional. "One reason why it did take so long to make, ” McComb says, “was the fact that we were using some really prehistoric instruments like Velian pipes, melodian and autoharp, in conjunction with very modern things like samplers, and getting the two tuned up to each other was sometimes very difficult. “Most people, when they make a record, tend to use all acoustic instruments or do everything with a computer, and we wanted to link them up. I don’t think we’ve got there yet, but I do want to combine electronic equipment with archaic instruments — a country hip hop record is the broad

outline for the next album I ” Calenture came as a complete change in approach as compared to the last Triffids album In The Pines (although the development from Born Sandy to Calenture is somewhat more linear...). It’s an album from which the band have escaped the confines of civilisation and modern recording techniques to spend two weeks in a woolshed in the Australian outback, armed with a mixing desk and plenty of liquor. Where it succeeds, In the Pines has moments of country blues with an ecstasy of purpose that leaves the impression of a band revelling and alive in the echoey

chamber of the woolshed. In contrast, Calenture's heavily chiselled vistas are about as “produced”as produced can be, and the highly dramatic effect sometimes means the humanity of the songs get 105 t... “I guess that’smyfault,"says McComb, admitting that next time he’d like the effect to be a little less layered. “But I really love that Phil Spector thing — his style of recording has nothing at all to do with live music; it’s all this beautiful jewel-encrusted creation in the studio. And so, on Calenture I’d never put down like just one organ, it’d be at least four, or six autoharps rather than just one.

I’d say, ‘Oh, that sounds good, let’s put another five of them on!”' And how have diehard fans of the first two Triffids records reacted to Calenture? “The reaction’s been pretty good. In some people it inspires passionate hatred — those who think we should just be content playing a sparser type of music in the “traditional Triffids way". But even though I do like that myself, I don’t want that all the time. And I think that when we play live it dispels a lot of misconceptions about what the band’s like now—we still play long sets, covers, and plenty of old songs.” Both Calenture and (especially) 'Bury Me Deep... have achieved the chart success overseas for which the Triffids are long overdue, but to me the most interesting thing about Calenture is how the Triffids have almost challenged the mainstream into accepting the album at face value, whilst still retaining almost subversive levels of eccentricity beneath that luscious sound. They have utilised the tools of production to almost Stock, Aitken & Waterman levels of calculated excess, but retained a musical and lyrical integrity that seeps out around the edges. It drills an over-the-top fuzz guitar solo into your head on ‘Kelly's Blues,' delivers a short piano interlude for a title track halfway through the second side, and would rather bring an Iron Age man from the British Museum back to life in a song saying, “I'm shrivelled and black and my bandage is torn / But my fingers

are cold, won’t you please take me home:” than say “We ain’t never gonna berespect-a-bul.” "Yeah,” agrees McComb, “I try not to think in terms of left or right fields. ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, even though it’s AOR, does have its strange levels, and Calenture does have levels of irony that are probably missing from other MOR or AOR “However it's not a military strategy—you talk about 'production values’ but in the end, to make a record like this,' one has to love that specific sound and listen to it in the studio 250 million times... “And I think we surprised Island with that, too, in that 'Bury Me Deep’is so accessible, going for the commercial jugular, as it were... It’s interesting, though, listening to one of these Sydney FM stations and hearing that song sitting alongside a Lionel Richie song!” " Interesting, and a sign of deserved success for the finest (or is it “only”) band to come out of Perth and conquer the NME. Alongside the Go-Betweens, the Triffids have always been at the forefront of Australian bands demanding recognition on the pop charts, and if you fancy banks of recorded strings that have been described as being “as dramatic as a flock of flamingoes taking flight”, this Calenture (tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods away from land, who imagine the seas to be green fields and desire to leap into them) could be just your cup of brine.

Paul McKessar