Harmony
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Harmony

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“Geography’s probably played the biggest part in everything I’ve done,” Lyngcoln says. “I think it created my particular sound, allowed me just to concentrate on what was just going on immediately around me. Part of it was growing up around The Stickmen, Sea Scouts, all these Tassie bands that I loved, I think a lot of what I’ve done, why I create such harsh identities, is a natural extension of growing up there and being around those bands.”

Lyngcoln’s music has always been brimming with of a sense of claustrophobia and alienation. Perhaps the same can be said for anyone who vocalised their frustration at spending part of their lives in isolated communities that rarely tolerate misfits. It does explain his lingering sense of indebtedness to the bands that came out of Hobart in the late nineties, a scene that Lyngcoln says was never more than 80 to 100 people, but which was radical and otherworldly enough to still be lionised by people who were there 15 years after the last of that era’s bands called time.

Plenty of people are drawn to Melbourne as an avenue of escape from their small town upbringings. They may dream up unrealistic expectations, and they may fall out of love as the years plow on. The Nation Blue’s sophomore album, Damnation, is a de facto concept album about the city’s urban wastelands, projecting the same feelings of alienation and revulsion that underpin the rest of Lyngcoln’s music onto these surroundings.

Equally apparent in his work is the sense of frustration that so many people live their lives oblivious to the varieties of human existence in Australia, cosseted and comfortable while others struggle. Lyngcoln’s current line of work involves carpentry and shopfitting for boutique wine cellars in various cities around the country, where the divide is often glaring.

“The nature of the work, the places we work are not exactly low socio-economic areas but you don’t ever have to look far,” he says. “You look around, that suburban wasteland is pretty prevalent. People don’t tend to renovate houses and improve their surroundings, they just kind of dwell on what they’ve got, striving through it. It has an effect on you and it does keep turning up in lyrics.”

His current project could be interpreted as the inevitable mellowing that comes with age. Harmony’s down tempo and minimalist percussion certainly underscores the differences with the ear-warping deluge of The Nation Blue’s songs, to say nothing of his new outfit’s three-piece gospel choir complementing Lyngcoln’s widely lauded vocal range. Lyngcoln is inclined to see more similarities than differences.

“In a lot of ways the new band’s an extension of The Nation Blue, a continuation of ideas maybe taken to an extreme. I think those same themes are still there, I’m still prone to those same mood swings that are in my songs, and what I write is still very immediate. I have poor attention, so I kind of say what I see. I can’t remember what I learned in school and it hasn’t got better over the years, in between head injuries and beers.”

At the moment, Lyngcoln is mixing Harmony’s second album, expected in the second half of the year with the first single launch due at the Curtin early next month. The product of a recording process that began with the band’s 2011 debut and never really stopped, the seamlessness of the band’s evolution probably owes a great deal to Lyngcoln’s new musical partnership with his wife, Alex Kastaniotis.

“We’ve been together 12 or 13 years but we’d never played music together,” he says. “As far as the musical relationship’s concerned, it’s still very much in its infancy. As we find time, she plays drums and I play guitar, and together what we do becomes the basis of the recording. It’s kind of intuitive too, we just play what we have with the skills that we have – sometimes it’s surprising and sometimes it’s predictable.”

From the outset, Lyngcoln’s goal with Harmony was to play shows in unconventional settings. With his hometown undergoing a cultural shift in the last decade, the idea of playing the MONA FOMA festival has a definite appeal.

“Hopefully one day,” he says. “I love the gallery. It does defeat the odds. I can’t speak to what it’s like to live in Hobart in the last ten years because when I was there it was such conservative place. It’s interesting now that the gallery continues to survive and thrive and be supported by the community. The people who would have beaten on me in school are going there, talking about the values of the different pieces – which is encouraging!”

BY SEAN SANDY DEVOTIONAL