Archive for the ‘Flyying Colours’ Category

Interview: Flyying Colours

Wednesday, August 26th, 2015

Between touring Europe and the UK, releasing their second album, ROYGBIV, and supporting Johnny Marr on this Australian tour, it’s been a busy year for Flyying Colours. Before they join A Place to Bury Strangers in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane next week, Matthew Stoff spoke with lead singer Brodie Brümmer to talk touring the old world and how a Reddit post led to an international distribution deal.

Matthew Stoff: So your band was recently announced as the support act for the upcoming national tour of US band, A Place to Bury Strangers. Are you excited?

Brodie Brümmer: Very much so. It’s pretty great. I saw them last time I was at the Corner Hotel, and now we’re playing with them at the Corner Hotel. They’re one of the loudest bands I’ve ever seen. It’s going to be great. We’re playing with some friends of ours as well, Luna Ghost — they’re a great band, you should check them out.

MS: You’ve been touring constantly since the international release of your latest album, and the local version just dropped earlier this month. Do you think you’ll slow down anytime soon?

BB: No. The only reason we’d slow down or stop touring is to make our record, which is what I want to do now. I think the thing with touring is that if you just do it, things will just come up, you know — like the A Place To Bury Strangers tour, which is going to be a great opportunity. And then we had Johnny Marr when we came back from Europe, and we’ve got our own single tour that I guess we’re kind of in the middle of now, and our EP tour in September, and there’ll be different things towards the end of the year. In Australia, it’s not very exhausting at all in my opinion. It’s nothing like playing in the Europe or the UK when we were over there. We played that many shows. It’s a bit different in Australia.

MS: How do you find the Australian scene compares to what you saw in Europe? Was it different to playing shows in Australia?

BB: Yeah, I mean, people were a lot more fanatical about music over there, less worried about being cool or whatever it is. I think people just like music over there and I think that we experienced that. The kind of music that we make, being shoegaze, and the kind of audiences we were playing for and where we were over there in Europe, that’s essentially where this kind of music came from, so it was very well received.

MS: Yeah, I think you’ve got a really British sound in comparison to a lot of the other stuff that’s coming out of Australia lately. Really traditional shoegaze, in a way. Do you think that had any impact on your reception overseas?

BB: It’s not generally contrived. We don’t necessarily set out to make that type of sound, but yeah, I think a lot of music coming out in Australia is very different to what we do. A lot of bands in Australia play guitar and it’s usually either a slacker indie sort of thing or an all-rock thing, like Kinghook or something like that. I’m not into any of that crap, I think it’s all rubbish.

MS: Fair enough. So, what are you into? Where do you find your inspiration?

BB: Me? I don’t know, anything and everything. That being said, our Facebook page really sums it up. Our influences are listed as Fleetwood Mac and My Bloody Valentine. That’s pretty correct. So you know, we listen to absolutely everything and all different kinds of stuff, but I think it just culminates in this 90s-inspired, shoegaze type of thing. Sonic Youth and Nirvana were two bands that really got me into playing guitar. That was kind of what I loved but I don’t know. It’s not like we’re trying to be anything. It just kind of comes out a certain way. That’s what bands like us and Luna Ghost and Contrast and some other bands in Melbourne are about. We’re trying to be a guitar band, full of loud guitars and not be rock and roll or pop or something. You can still have loud guitars and not be like that. You know what I mean?

MS: Yeah, you’re loud and rocky, but at the same time you’re quite melodic.

BB: That’s what I love about music and I think that’s how Nirvana came to be who they were in the end. Because it was still loud guitar music that got people going, but at the same time, Kurt Cobain was a really genuine songwriter who was quite melodic too.

MS: You guys are basically like that, but with a really psychedelic vibe as well.

BB: Exactly, and I guess that’s just drawing on all our other influences. That’s the benefit of it being 2015 and not 1991. We’ve had a lot of stuff happen between then and now that we get to draw from as well.

MS: Yeah, and the internet means we’ve got more access to those influences than ever before.

BB: Definitely.

MS: Was it also helpful in marketing you to overseas communities?

BB: Yeah. I mean, it’s the only way it would have been even possible. We got our label over there, Club AC30. That came about by someone posting about us on the shoegaze subreddit. Club AC30 saw the song, listened to it and asked us if we wanted to put it out through them. And we’d only really just put the album out in Australia, it had only just been distributed here. But they really have their shit together. They know what they’re doing. They’re a very specific label for our kind of music, and they just took the EP and ran with it. We got a lot of attention over there in the UK particularly just by going through AC30 and Shelflife in the US as well. They’re both kind of varied labels, but genre specific labels. So straight away it puts you in that area.

MS: I think it’s a popular sound in Europe at the moment, particularly in the UK as well. Lots of shoegaze specific radio stations where you guys would fit in.

BB: Definitely.

MS: It’s been a bit of a whirlwind success in some ways.

BB: Yeah, it’s just been awesome. It’s cool as well to be able to go overseas. I’d never been before in my life, so it was really cool to go the UK and Europe and play a bunch of shows. People actually knew our music and wanted to see us. It was great.

MS: So what are your plans for the rest of the year? Do you have any new songs you’re working on?

BB: Oh yeah, we’re going to record a full length album by the end of the year. Whether or not we finish it is another question. We’ll finish up this run of shows Melbourne, then we’ve got the A Place to Bury Strangers tour, then one more before the end of the year, but mainly we’ve just got a lot of new material that we’re working on. I think it’s that thing, you know — you get to that certain point where you’ve played so much live that it’s really exciting to go to the studio, even just the rehearsal room, and make music for no one but yourself. I’m really looking forward to that.

Flyying Colours join A Place to Bury Stranger on their Australian tour on the following dates:

Friday September 4 — The Corner, Melbourne
w/ Luna Ghost
Saturday September 5 — Manning Bar, Sydney
w/ Narrow Lands
Sunday September 6 — Crowbar, Brisbane
w/ Dreamtime

Tickets on sale now through lifeisnoise.com, Oztix and venue outlets.

ROYGBIV is out now through Shelflife.

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Flyying Colours — ROYGBIV

Wednesday, June 10th, 2015

Melbourne shoegaze band Flyying Colours have received a lot of attention in the UK and Europe recently after the international release of their 2013 self-titled debut EP early last year. Since then, they’ve become the overseas ambassadors for the local shoegaze scene, an unexpected novelty for UK and American critics unfamiliar with the bulk of similarly-inspired music played by a growing number of independent artists in Australia since at least 2010. In 2013, Flyying Colours set themselves apart with their crisp production, pop hooks and pitch-perfect, energetic live shows. With the band returning to Australia at the end of their UK tour, local shows announced, and the national release date of last month’s new album still yet to be confirmed, now seems like the proper time to talk about their new material. Their latest EP, ROYGBIV, named after the colours appearing in the rainbow, is receiving rave reviews from international critics on account of its quality and novelty as a British sound coming from an Australian band. But here in Australia we’re familiar with many acts like Flyying Colours, with local bands like The Laurels, Day Ravies, and Nite Fields all putting their individual spin on the same basic set of stylistic inspirations. Without the sense of novelty experienced by international critics, is the Flyying Colours second EP still going to be worthy of your time?

Opening track ‘I Don’t Want To Let You Down’ is the same driving, My Bloody Valentine-inspired shoegaze as their last EP, but recorded in crisper, higher definition sound. The lo-fi edges of the last release have been smoothed out into bass-driven, radio-friendly dream pop, while still maintaining the grinding, Loveless–inspired guitar riffs that give the band their heavy edges. This sort of sound is still relatively hard to find in local artists, most of whom rely on gothic or post-punk references to generate their darker undertones, though Flyying Colours are adept with those as well. Second track ‘Running Late’ is closer to this more Australian sound, with a Cure-esque guitar riff placed under dual accented vocals, and driven along by urgent, militaristic drumming. This is followed by the ethereal opening strains of ‘Not Today’, where bass and guitar driven high-tempo rock is matched with languid melodic vocals for a pleasingly psychedelic effect. ‘In The End’ begins with a similar combination, taking the same mix of low-energy vocals and high-speed instrumentation, but adding distorted guitars and Disintegration–era Cure riffs to create more of a gothic feeling, and closing track ‘Leaks’ brings these all of these disparate styles together: with a classic mix of psychedelic rock, goth, and shoegaze, pulled into the structure of a pop song. It’s a strong closer that represents all the best aspects of their old and new material, and, like the best finishing tracks, it lingers long after the album is over, making for one of the more memorable tracks on the album.

ROYGBIV doesn’t represent much of a change in style from the Flyying Colours of previous records, but it’s tighter, cleaner and more confident than anything they’ve done before. It also still sounds relatively original, drawing more overt inspiration from British bands like Ride or My Bloody Valentine than any of the other comparable bands coming from Australia at the moment. But it shares a problem with their last release in that still, with a runtime of only 20 minutes, it’s disappointingly brief. Taken together as a single package, the two EPs offer a glimpse of what would have been a breathtaking debut, but without the space to properly explore its many influences, it falls a little short of its potential. Still, even without the novelty it might afford to overseas listeners, this is a really strong release. ROYGBIV stands apart from other new releases from other Australian shoegaze bands, and is strong enough to compete in its own right on the international stage. If you’ve never heard the band before, the new album is as good a place as any to discover them, and if you’re already a fan, it’ll offer five tracks of tantalizing new material even better than the music on their old release. It’s a decent album, but hopefully the next one will be longer.

ROYGBIV is out now through Shelflife Records.

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