Beaches
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Beaches

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“I guess it was a while ago, probably four years now,” Antonia states, recalling She Beats’ initial conception. “I think we basically thought we had enough songs for an album. We initially recorded She Beats at a different studio, with [producer] Neil Thomason at Head Gap [Recording Studio]. That went really well, but it felt like we didn’t have enough songs on there. Plus there were elements on there that sounded a bit ‘fresh’, I guess you’d call it – like we’d written them and taken them straight into the studio, thinking the fresh approach would be the way to go. But it wasn’t really. So we’ve taken two stabs at recording this album.

“In between that chunk of time and the time we spent recording with [producer] Jack Farley at his warehouse space, we continued to work on the songs – writing two or three new songs and ditching two or three old ones. That’s pretty much what happened between us deciding to record another album and now.”

Though their debut album stands as a vehement success, the pressure of producing a worthy follow-up didn’t define the long gestation of She Beats. “The whole second album thing? Well I guess it is a thing, isn’t it? Often people can ace their first album and not really think about it. She Beats was definitely a longer process, but I don’t think anyone feared the second album thing,” Antonia reasons.

She Beats, more so than Beaches, features an intertwining pastiche of varying guitar tones – with each component of the triumvirate of guitarists projecting their own aural signature.

“I think it’s more the fact that we have three guitarists and our guitar sounds are a little different. When you have that many guitars, it can become a thick, enveloping sound – which I think there is more of on She Beats than the first album. Other times we have these disparate guitar sounds, because that’s the reality of the band. We are different people with different sounds, coming together to make a cohesive whole,” she explains. “But you can still hear the individual parts.”

Another sonic point of difference between the two Beaches albums is the increased prominence of the vocals in the mix – with the often-indecipherable vocals on the debut elevating into relative clarity on She Beats.

“If you compare it to other bands, the vocals are still pretty low in the mix. I heard one of our songs on the radio recently, and the song played afterwards was quite shocking in terms of comparison to how low our vocals were mixed,” Antonia ponders. “I don’t think that we were consciously thinking, ‘Let’s bring them up and make them audible’. I like the idea that vocals can be quite shrouded, that there is that mystery. It is a little louder than the first record, but that might have to do with the vocals having to compete with lots of layers. This record is way more layered than the first album.”

Last year saw the Australian return of krautrock icon Michael Rother – a visit that coincided nicely with Beaches’ recording schedule. As Antonia recounts, Rother’s guest appearance on three of She Beats’ dozen tracks was due to more than happenstance. “That was an interesting one, because we played alongside his band Harmonia at ATP a few years back. We met him there and then he stayed in touch with us, which was lovely. We’re big fans of his music. Then he was in Australia recently playing some gigs on his own, and he got in touch and asked what we were up to. We said we were recording, then he asked if he could come play on the recording. It was kind of amazing, because we would never be forward enough to ask anyone like that to play on the album.

“Obviously we were into the idea, and he was into doing this fun thing while on tour. It was basically a jam session because he’d never heard the songs before. He came to Jack’s warehouse and reacted to the songs, played the parts, and we kept the first take of everything we did,” Antonia beams.

Discourse surrounding the release of She Beats has struggled to apply a definitive label of genre – ranging from psychedelic rock, stoner/desert rock, krautrock, Melbourne garage, guitar pop, and everything in between. “We definitely never set out to be a psych-rock band and make that type of music, because that’s not how we work. I think we do get called psych-rock quite a lot because we have three guitars. It’s hard to make that sound thin or quiet. But we have so many other musical loves – garage, post-punk, surf guitar, even ‘60s girl groups to an extent – all these other elements do pop in, which is a good thing,” Antonia reasons.

The past couple of years have seen only a handful of Beaches live appearances as they put together She Beats. Now with the album out in the wild, we can look forward to the band returning to their element onstage. “I guess I see us as a live band. There’s a thing that happens when some bands play live where there’s an intensity that’s quite ephemeral, one that’s quite hard to capture on tape. That’s there when we play live, and I don’t think that was quite there as much on the first album. Also I’d say we are more of a live band because you can change things, you can play those wild sets and pull it together for a different feel. I think we’ve done it, but I hope She Beats captures what we like about playing live.”

BY LACHLAN KANONIUK