I was in the computer lab at school, sophomore year of college, when Nathan first played me 'Shark Fin Blues.' He put it on, left me alone in the room and since that moment the The Drones have steadily become one of my favorite bands. Now I'm attempting to write about them, even though, according to frontman Gareth Liddiard,
"talking about music is like dancing about architecture."Apparently, "Jmag recently conducted a poll of over 70 of Australia’s best songwriters, asking them to nominate five tracks and write about the bearing the songs had on their lives.
'Shark Fin Blues' by The Drones beat out thousands of Australian songwriters to win the greatest Australian Song Ever."
They're a band that make me feel like I've lived a lot more than I have, connecting me to stories and images I've never experienced before. Stuck somewhere in the cracks of Liddiard's vocals are worlds of anger and suffering, violently detailed, spackled over in irony.
Though the above song "River of Tears" is a cover, it's a slick example of their temperament.
As the singer, lyricist and lead guitarist, Gareth's hardened view of life is really what it's all about. He's seen a lot, lived a lot, which gives it a sort of undeniable authenticity.
As he puts it: "It’s the fucking suffering artist kind of wank. Bad shit happens. It feels fucked while it’s happening, but if you write songs, you will write a better bunch of songs."
And on subjects that don't come from direct experience, like racism, he writes about it "because it’s there. A lot of people won’t sing about anything like that because it’s just not cool.
You couldn’t see Jet singing about that shit, or something like that. No matter what you think of Jet – as a fashion statement, it would just be fucked."
Although the rest of the band is essential to the performance, sometimes they just feel like friends, talented musician friends, backing up their troubled buddy who is daily haunted by
morning’s like a walk
into a blunt narcotic fog
until you’re brought back to your senses by
eight wheels nearing a dog that’s dead or
sleeping pills
Cheer up, emo kid! But don't, because you're so good at being down.
Much like Roast Beef:
It is just like that.
And yet it's impossible to be TOO bummed out by all the misery and woe because of their execution. Their sound has been called
"The Birthday Party kick the shit out of Neil Young in Hendrix's garage" and when you go to see them play, there's about as much sweat and spit as you would expect from that description.
Thanks to Nathan for this quote from critic
Greil Marcus, who puts it epically in his review of their Sept '09 Brooklyn show--which I was at, actually, and got a mouthful of said bronchitis:
"Having flown in that day from Australia, complaining of jet lag and offering to share bronchitis with the sparse crowd, they threw out one ferocious song after
another. “Sitting on the edge of the bed crying,” Gareth Liddiard sang over and over, with storms of noise whirling around his head, the words muttered, chanted, shouted, whispered, until the piece seemed less about a broken heart than the human condition. Guitarist Dan Luscombe said they’d be doing songs from their 2005 album …Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By…
The music was so strong, so full of loose wires twisting through the air in a spastic dance, that you could imagine that yes, you were the “you” in “your enemies”—and that Liddiard, Luscombe, bassist Fiona Kitschin, and drummer Michael Noga were your enemies, and that as they floated by this was the song they sang."
And that'd be Fiona's copy of the setlist from the show (notice the heart on "Jezebel," a song about life during wartime), swiped by my brother.
Anyway, who DOESN'T want to go out with one eye on the horizon like the victims of circumstance described in these songs?
Convicts waiting to be executed, sailors eaten by sharks, spacemen pissing themselves. It all sounds very romantic. AND IT IS. But there is also art, history, dare I say INTEGRITY in their records that
separates them from many others. Ewww did I say integrity? YES. I TOTALLY DID.
I just really love 'em. When they're not independently churning out albums (
award-winning albums), they're touring all over the world. I've seen them 3 times in Brooklyn in the past year or so and there ain't nothin' like it. I can't wait to see what they do next.
