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Rolling Stone
November 2008
Vanishing Point
Watch Me Disappear is Augie March's crucial fourth album. But can their gravity handle the jump to warp speed?
By Michael Dwyer
Hank Williams, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young all sang longingly about 'the Mansion on the Hill'. The fact that they all wound up living there only makes the dream more compelling to those still squinting up from the lowlands. Here, perched high above the long, wide sweep of manicured gardens rising up from Auckland Harbour, as wind and rain lash the wide white colonial verandas of Neil Finn's triple-storey family home, the dream is so real you can walk around in it.
'It's a very, very difficult thing to get your head around, that we're sitting in Neil and Sharon's kitchen talking right now,' says Glenn Richards, nursing a stubbie of Kiwi Lager under an ornate chandelier. Decades ago, as a kid in Shepparton in country Victoria, the future singer-songwriter of Augie March grew up on Split Enz and Crowded House. Now, from two rooms away, we can hear his mates playing pool in the house that those bands built.
It's past midnight, the end of another long day's recording at Finn's nearby studio, Roundhead. Echoing down the hall, drummer Dave Williams is leading the pool party in an all-humming version of 'Name that tune' as a large, unattended television plays music videos in a distant corner. Somebody else is loudly insisting that one of these floorboards simply has to conceal a long-forgotten block of hash.
The Finns no longer entertain visiting members of Pearl Jam and Radiohead here. They've recently moved to smaller lodgings, leaving this stately joint free for the Augies' intensive three-week stay. But Finn has taken more than a passing interest in Watch Me Disappear, the band's all-important fourth album.
'Not long after we arrived he invited us up for this party and we has a chat about what you need to do if you're going to make an album in this way,' Richards says. 'The importance of the studio, and having someone like Joe on board and what a difference it made to him'?
He means Joe Chiccarelli, the gun American producer of the Shins, the White Stripes and My Morning Jacket, a man of scrupulous attention to sonic detail who is probably even now poring over the day's takes, fine tuning things most ears might never even notice.
'(Neil's) already experienced what we're going through: 'OK, you've made a record and it's done OK, but it's still for your mates in a way, and the scene you grew up in. The next step is, can you go world class while retaining what was good and honest in the stuff that you've done to this point''? Richards says.
The question hangs for a moment, heavy in the air. The songwriter cocks his head, as if somehow trying to balance the eternal conundrum of art versus commerce. 'When you hear that from someone like Neil Finn, well, he's someone who's done it all. So I'm hoping that a lot of it rubs off. I'm using his guitar on most songs,' he grins. 'It sounds silly but it feels good.'
The world appears to be ready for Augie March. Their lucky third album, Moo, You Bloody Choir, found reviewers scrambling to assimilate perceived echoes of the Beatles, the Kinks, Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev with the imagination of Bob Dylan and Lewis Carroll.
Moo was nominated for six ARIA Awards and sold platinum in Australia on the back of a single that smouldered in the Top 100 for 60 weeks. 'One Crowded Hour' topped Triple J's Hottest 100 and earned APRA's Song of the Year and Breakthrough Songwriter awards. The album's status as a modern classic was sealed with the peer-voted $25,000 Australian Music Prize in 2006.
Small wonder that the follow-up has distilled in Richards' mind to the point of near perfection these past six months. Downstairs in Finn's soundproof rehearsal rooms are two CDs containing 20 unusually detailed demos. Of those, thirteen have been painstakingly re-recorded at Roundhead ' live except for vocals and weird shit. Tomorrow is the last day to nail the fourteenth, 'Weaving Mind', before Williams is booked to return to Melbourne.
The pace has been tight but the mood mostly bright. Organ maestro Kiernan Box says the Chiccarelli sessions have been more disciplined and methodical than the Augies' usual approach. 'Probably in the past we've had a more random or chaotic quality. I wouldn't say that's a bad thing, but I don't think that side of things has been as welcome this time,' he says. Asked if he enjoyed the process, he looks faintly amused and says, 'I'm not sure it's meant to be enjoyable.'
Chiccarelli is a big presence. The studio veteran learned his craft engineering for the likes of Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson. These days he'll kick back and tell stories about Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright and Jack White, when he's not lugging kick drum speakers into stairwells to find some of that classic Simon and Garfunkel ambience.
A big part of his brief on this project, he says, is to bring Richards' songs into the best possible light. Box, who is also preparing the album's strings and horn arrangements, believes it's no more than these particular songs deserve.
'I'm rarely disappointed by the material in this band but I think this is probably the best we've had,' he says. 'Thematically? I'm still working that out. I pick up a thread of some sort of escapism. Take a song title like 'Watch Me Disappear.' That might be a good place to start trying to unravel the mood of the lyrics.'
If Augie March did disappear anytime soon, a good place to start unravelling the band's twelve-year-long legend would be in a very narrow Victorian terrace house on a busy bus route in downbeat Melbourne suburb Collingwood.
Bassist Edmondo Ammendola fondly remembers the arranged marriage that took place here one day in 1996, not long after Williams and guitarist Adam Donovan moved south from Shepparton to study jazz.
'Dave was into jazz fusion,' the bassist recalls. 'Me and Adam were the drug-addled old school Dixieland types. One day Adam said, 'We know this guy who's got some songs. He's a singer'. I remember the four of us nervously sittin' up there going through these songs?
'Of course, Glenn is from a completely different discipline,' Ammendola says. 'His music came from his poetry and prose. Music was a distinct second tier to that. So it was all enthusiasm from the rhythm section ' and from Glenn, this completely other world that we didn't know anything about. But we liked it. That was how it started.'
Richards had a vague idea he'd be 'some kind of journalist' when he moved to Melbourne to study English in the mid-Nineties. He picked up the guitar relatively late but when he did, it was a revelation. He found melody not only came easily to him, it somehow completed his otherwise cryptic scribblings.
'Melody is the saving grace,' he says. 'If I can't say what I mean then I can suggest it by having a chord progression or a key point in the song that solves the problem. The music has to match the theme or the emotion. That makes complete sense to me and that's what I still try to do.'
Richards takes his job seriously. He pieces his songs together from 'hundreds of receipts and slips of paper with snatches of lyrics on them'. 'The immediacy of it is addictive,' he says. 'And it's also kind of diminishing too, if you're not too careful.'
At least Richards has a nice office. Actually, he lives very near that crumbling terrace house but facing the pastoral peace just beyond 'the slums', as Ammendola describes their shared neighbourhood. It was in the foggy Yarra River Valley, a snaking oasis of green in Melbourne's inner north, in between a converted convent, a children's farm and various expanses of bush, that Watch Me Disappear took shape.
'Autumn is my favourite season,' Richards says. 'We had four or five days of smoke in the air because they were doing some burning off in the Dandenongs and it coincided with these glorious autumn days. Everything was hazy. You walk down there and it's just magic. I wrote quite a few of these songs by taking walks like that.'
Some of them, like the snake-hipped title track and the comically upbeat 'City of Rescue' sound like they're physically materializing from the mist ' which pretty accurately reflects Richards' process. Other songs, such as 'Dogsday' and 'The Devil in Me', speak just as eloquently of his overcast internal weather.
That said, he's unusually buoyant about the calibre of his new songs. He's a hard marker of his own work, and even now berates himself for not relegating some of those classic Moo songs to b-sides. He won't say which ones. But he's adamant that there will be no such dead wood on Watch Me Disappear. 'It satisfies me emotionally, this collection of songs,' he says. 'I haven't left too much out. Getting to the point where you think you've got an album is like?I've ticked the boxes, in a way.'
Richards is particularly pleased about 'Dogsday', which only made the shortlist after a recount of tracks when the band arrived in Auckland. The song's especially beautiful melody counters one of the darker aspects of his character. 'Early in the day you can have the best feelings and the best intentions and you can feel anything's possible. But if you're accustomed to the inevitable slide, you're aware of it even while you're trying to enjoy being happy.
'It sounds awful,' he concedes, 'but it's just a condition I've always had. I don't even regard it as depression.' It's not so much depression as a general default position of meditative silence that characterises Augie March. Sure, they'll shout at the TV when the footy's on. They'll fall down laughing over a pool table and hack into each other's email accounts with stuff that would make Grinspoon blush. But it almost seems their omnipresent laptops are a more viable channel for communication than face-to-face conversation.
When Richards and Donovan jet off to Los Angeles to complete mixing in July, the others will check for updated MP3s constantly as mixes are fixed and altered by something like band consensus. Holed up in a café two bus stops away from that purple crumbling Collingwood terrace house, Ammendola is doing just that. He's also cheerfully frank about the band's strangely stilted personal chemistry.
'I'd probably say it's becoming more of an issue,' he says when pressed. 'Not because there's more pressure or expectation. It's got nothing to do with that. It's as stupid as 'Who stole my smokes'? and then the whole day's ruined. I stand back and look at it sometimes and go, 'This is ridiculous.''
'Whether that's just the trigger for some underlying stuff, I dunno,' he adds. 'We're certainly not a regular touring band. You hear stories of bands who base their careers on touring, people beating each other up and stuff. Nothing like that ever happens with us. It's just typical stuff: power plays, ego, all that. It's like we're regressing into primary school behaviour. And I don't know why.' Perhaps the mysterious condition naturally reflects the misty depths of the material at hand. Let's face it, bands that choose to sing about cars and girls are open books. Like the dense imagery that a legion of fans will shortly be decoding in internet chat rooms, maybe Augie March is a band better puzzled over than fully understood.
'Some would argue that Glenn's still coming from a different galaxy to where we are,' Ammendola shrugs. 'But that's fine. That's part of what makes the music edgy at times.'
Back in Auckland, 'edgy' is a fair description of the band's last day at Roundhead. 'Weaving Mind' has gone past twenty takes when something goes down in the ProTools recording department. 'The devil is digital,' Chiccarelli sighs as he spins out of his chair to reboot the system.
Richards has set up his guitar in a separate vestibule to distance himself from the pummelling drum attack. He's unhappy with his 'redundant' rhythm guitar part, which he palpably pares back with every take while demanding that Donovan put some more personality' into the crucial lead guitar riff. 'Use your fingers! Dig! Don't just turn corners,' Richards growls at Donovan.
The mood calls on all of the producer's diplomatic faculties. When Richards silently stalks from the control room during playback, it's Chiccarelli who goes after him and when they return, it's he who relays the bandleader's concerns. It seems some of the playing has been a little surplus to requirements. 'I think I used the word 'fusion',' Richards mutters, markedly relieving the tension as Donovan snickers up his sleeve. The Augies file back into the studio and hit their notes immediately, nailing the song to the producer's satisfaction in the very next take. Well, sort of.
'Rockin', reeeeeally rockin',' Chiccarelli hoots. 'That was tight and big, real exciting. That sounds like your take to me. Now, let's do one more for insurance.' Like Box says, maybe it's not meant to be enjoyable.
Richards' frustration is easy to understand. In his head, this album is already complete. The challenge now is to get it into some shape that the rest of us can understand. And that's none too straightforward in the first place. 'I don't start with a theme. I don't think I ever have,' he says when he's pushed to verbalise the gist behind his disappearing act.
'But for a while I was imagining this wolf in sheep's clothing as a cover image. I was thinking about the worst of yourself, and how close it is to the surface. Is it getting closer? Is it more submerged with every passing year'?
Again he laughs at his own intensity. 'I hesitate to say whether it's one or the other, because if you're in a position where you're questioning it, you're probably not the best judge.'
The world will do that, of course. Watch Me Disappear will either edge the band closer to their own proverbial mansion on the hill, or simply redouble their cult following from Melbourne to Minneapolis. Either way, the result is unlikely to reflect the worst of Augie March. 'Glenn could always write great pop songs ' but he always hated them,' Ammendola confides. 'I've got tapes at home that you'll never hear. The only reason they exist is because he had to get them out of his system, maybe.
'But now he's coming around to that. That's kind of where Augie March are naturally evolving to, after all this time of Glenn denying it's in his system. We're closer to that now than we've ever been. So it's an interesting future we're looking at. If anyone can subvert the pop idiom, it'll be Glenn.'
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