The Drones on the road to Havilah

Drones guitarist Dan Luscombe takes The Dwarf to Havilah...

Dan explains what is coming for us - other than Generation Y despair – “crooning” vocals from frontman Gareth Liddiard that will keep your ears to the ground and melodies between the band.

Luscombe clarifies that it was not a conscious decision to name this upcoming album the place of where they recorded it, like Gala Mill. “Havilah is the name of the town where we recorded the album…our nearest neighbour was 4km away”. In fact, this Victorian town was once a gold rush town populated with thousands of people just before the turn of the 20th century. It is now fitted out with about 30 people, and on this note, touches of Australian history are filling this album before we have even heard it.

The band rehearsed for four weeks prior to heading out to their mud brick house to record. The house, having no electricity, had to be decked out from top to bottom with one very good generator, and a little one too. The ironic surprise about this album is that Havilah will be the most layered album yet, well, “layered for The Drones” Luscombe explains. Not only this, but Luscombe went on to explain that “we studied every little corner of the song, making sure everything was doing what it was suppose to be doing”.

From listening to single The Minotaur, it is not entirely different to anything from Here Come, Wait Long or even Gala Mill. It is The Drones well thought out, experimenting with different percussion and crunching melodies. It is The Drones dealing with despair that lies ahead, and not the despair experienced already. However, it is The Drones with their trademark sound and the incomprehensible literature and lyrics at times guided by Liddiard.

“I didn’t want Gareth to (feel as if he needed to) compromise his style of playing…neither of us had to sit down and talk about how we were going to play. We know what we each other are doing and it’s intuitive now.” And this definitely shines through the peep show look of the album with the single The Minotaur, which you can hear on the band’s MySpace. With Luscombe already having played on the Gala Mill album doing the slide guitar, and the compact 52 date tour last year in the UK, Europe and Scandinavia, it gave him plenty of practice for the album, especially having taking reigns of guitarist in August of 2006.

Any lucky fan who headed out to the East Brunswick a couple of months ago, would have caught the band playing the album in its entirety. “I feel bad all of these people paying good money to see us play a whole bunch of songs they haven’t heard before”. Yet, on reassuring him it is not really that bad, and it is good for people to hear the substance before it is mixed and concreted down into a little compact disc, he went on to explain that even for a band who play so many live shows, even he was nervous about playing Havilah prior to recording it.

Whilst recording in the mud brick house turned studio, it gave the band an opportunity to experiment a little with recording. “We put mics up on the ceiling and put them in places where we haven’t put them before to record…the drums were set up in the kitchen and occasionally you’d hear someone in the background chopping carrot and celery, making dinner”.

In the circumstances of their recording environment, it puts pressure off on the recording process but engineer, Burke Reid (of Gerling), had the shortest stick of the five and pulled the longest days out of everyone. “I felt so sorry for Burke, he was the last to go to bed and the first one to be up in the morning” - but putting in those hard yards laid back on the rest of the band too. As the band finished recording after two and half weeks, they packed their bags and drove straight to Big Jesus Burger in Sydney with Reid to mix the album for a week. Then after that, went back to Melbourne to master their CD for another week.

It is all hands on with the band with their co-production on this album, as they have done so previously. Working closely on grounds with Reid like this keeps their music where they want it to be and how they want it to sound like. “No opinion was ignored and we took every opinion into account.” Though it is not only in the production process that the band pooled all their ideas together.

“On the last album, some of us didn’t even know the songs that we were playing. Gareth and I sat down and worked out some of the songs (for this album)…and it was the most arranged album, there was a push to make melodies as opposed to a full tilt racket.” Gathering from the sounds of The Minotaur, you can understand where Luscombe is coming from, the structure, the melody, and how the song builds in places where they wanted it to build. There is less space for renowned Drones growling guitars, and it is – structured. It has Gareth singing and as Dan explains, “this album is a mature one”.

The Drones play:

17 Oct- Republic Bar w/ Rocket Science Hobart, Tasmania
18 Oct- The Forum Theatre- Melbourne
24 Oct- The Metro Theatre w/ The Gin Club- Sydney
25 Oct- The Zoo w/ The Gin Club- Brisbane
31 Oct- The Gov, Adelaide, South Australia
1 Nov- Stone Fest- Canberra, New South Wales
7 Nov- The Bakery w/ The Gin Club- Northbridge, Western Australia
8 Nov- Mojo’s w/ The Gin Club- Fremantle, Western Australia
30 Dec- Falls Festival- Marion Bay, Tasmania
31 Dec- Falls Festival- Lorne, Victoria

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