“The solo thing was kind of hard work and lonely, I figured that having a few other people around would make it easier,” Lewis says on Lowtide’s genesis. “That sort of grew into something that was no longer a solo thing and needed its own space. That turned into Lowtide, and it’s just gone on from there.”
With only a handful of studio tracks released in the past few years, anticipation for Lowtide’s debut full-length is understandably riding high. “I guess the oldest song would have to be three or four years, then there were a couple of songs just before we started recording,” Lewis says on the album’s gestation. “Held was the last one that was written, that was probably two weeks before we started recording. People would go away and we’d think we would have this time to sit down and write stuff because we weren’t doing anything else. Then nothing happens, so eventually we made a rule we would never say when anything was going to be ready. We kept quiet about it, now finally we have something out.”
It wasn’t simply a case of transposing a setlist into a tracklist, with each performance imbued with considered song selection – the album’s running order even more so. “Live, it was just week to week, gig to gig. It depends on who we’re playing with, and we’ll try and tailor it to whoever is supporting us. With the album, we tried to squeeze everything in so it would fit on two sides of a record. There were a few things that weren’t fitting quite right and we weren’t quite sure about it. Then Lucy [Buckeridge, bass] had a connection to Simon Raymonde from Cocteau Twins and sent off an early mix of everything, and he sent back opinions and ideas on track order and things like that. It was great having outside input, especially from him. We took on some of those ideas, then freed it up a bit more by removing songs, then it had a far nicer flow.”
Rising well above the glut of shoegaze revivalists in recent years, Lowtide manage to craft deft melodic touches within their huge washes of guitar tones. Still, it’s a genre touchstone that’s proving susceptible to pigeonholing. “I do want to be cautious about that, but you can’t change people’s opinions about things. And that shoegaze aesthetic is exactly what I’m trying to get it to sound like. It’s a recent thing, everyone’s so sick of hearing about it now because it’s back in fashion, but I’ve been really into it the past 15 years or so. I don’t really see it as any different from a blues or roots group rehashing old shit. But obviously I’m trying to add elements of pop to the guitar stuff I’m doing. you need a catch and a hook, it’s not just experimental music or noise, it needs substance and structure. Something that will make listeners latch on. The sound is just they way it’s passed onto you.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
