Harmony are a fucking great band.

I was lucky enough to attend a special live recording of them performing in a loungeroom in Marrickville a few weeks ago for Sydney indie site Polaroids of Androids and it stands as one of my (as well as Billy Russell’s) highlights in music in 2013.

Despite the confines of a ridiculously unconventional performance space, they shook the paint from the walls with their combination sludge rock and choir harmonies. Simultaneously heavy as lead and delicate as petals, they performed one of the most sonically gorgeous shows I’ve heard anywhere in any venue in a long time. They’re a band that are perfectly honed into their potential and their limitations, and they push those boundaries with precision to produce a truly unique sound – something almost unfathomable in modern music.

Their new album, Carpetbombing, is needless to say one of the records I’m most looking forward to ruining what’s left of my hearing with in 2014, so I caught up with their frontman Tom Lyngcoln to discuss kicking arse in a year where they didn’t even release an album; weirding out your musical heroes so they’ll play on your record; why sitting on a finished album for a year was a blessing in disguise; and the suicide mission that is releasing an album of cover versions and originals at the same time.

NW: 2013 has been a big year for you guys in terms of carving out a name for yourself with both supports with the Drones and and appearing at their All Tomorrow’s Parties festival – not to mention putting out some pretty incredible seven inches. Would you say it’s been a surprisingly big year for you seeing as you didn’t release an album?

TL: Yeah, it has been surprisingly big because – I mean the record’s been ready for 12 months. We’ve been just kind of sitting on it. One of the singers had a particularly brutal year at uni this year and we decided to take a back seat and a back seat ended up being not very back seat; more like front seat drivers. It was full on. We ended up doing a bunch of amazing stuff – ATP, like you said, you listed it all then. I guess it’s been our most successful year so far. We’ve just done everything that we’ve wanted to do.

In that sense then, seeing as the record’s been on the back burner and you’ve got that extra experience and time together, do you think that that’s unified you guys a lot more than say if you had released the album a year or even six months ago?

Yeah, that’s spot on. To be honest it probably took us 18 months from the start of the band playing live to learn that first batch of songs off the first record. We’re only just starting to kick the hell out of the new songs now; we’re only just starting to wrap our heads around them. It’s like a muscle memory thing that needs to be developed in order for the songs to work live. They’re not easy songs to pull together. If somebody can’t hear themselves or something like that they go from songs into hate crimes pretty quickly. It becomes pretty painful to listen to. I think for that reason it’s been great. We’ve actually worked out how to play the songs live and we’re ready to release this record, which is something that I think if we had have tried to force it out this year I dare say there would have been a lot of unhappy people. As a band I think the shows would have been miserable because we wouldn’t have been able to play it properly. I’d say that it would have been a frustrating year but it’s really worked out beautifully.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny_sRVrSPKY?rel=0]

You’ve got Don Walker doing a spoken word performance on the new record. How did that come about? Did you meet him at ATP while you guys were both on the bill?

Actually it pre-dates ATP by about a year. I think the Drones stole Don from us. I’d been talking to Don and just threw it out there and sort of said, “Look, have you got anything you want to do? Do you want to do a spoken word for us?” We’re talking 18 months ago, when I received it in my inbox and he gave me two things. He gave me poems that he’d recorded and I gave him some backing music to see if he’d be interested in laying it down and there was this one thing that he had that just worked perfectly.

It was a cold call. I did that with Tom Waits’ guitarist, Marc Ribot, on the first record. I basically just sent him an email and am only now finding out that he’s really difficult to pin down. I know people that book jazz festivals and stuff and have said that he’s really elusive. I just sent him the song. I sent him another song and he wanted to play on that. I said “No, that’s just what we’ve got up online at the moment. Here’s the song I want you to do.” And he was like, “Oh, can I do the other one?” I said no, “No, I want you to do this one.” [laughs]

Don was a lot more flexible and he was lovely. He’s such a nice bloke. But it is one of those things, you know, my parents got divorced to Cold Chisel [laughs]. Listening to Cold Chisel in cars and at barbecues and parental parties and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes I’ve got to remind myself who Don Walker is, you know? Sometimes I’ve just got to come at it from a different angle. Because as songwriters go it’s him, Paul Kelly, Archie Roach – a select kind of few who are really next level kind of guys. It’s yeah, kind of an honour to have him on our record, that’s for sure.

It is such a surreal thing when you meet or talk to people who havebeen a presence in your life musically for a long time. When you finally meet them and realise their just a person it’s weird. But it’s also strange when you go back and listen to their music again because it takes you straight back to a time and a place where they were these “giants” in your mind.

I find that the way – and this is something that’s developed over years of punishing people to death about music and them basically telling me to fuck off – the way that I kind of come at anyone who I respect is to try to weird them out and come at them sideways. I think that my finest example would be King Khan from King Khan BBQ Show and The Shrines. I loved his records and I saw him one night at a pub down in Melbourne and he was trying to pick up two girls at once  –I don’t know if that’s actually true, but he was talking to two women and had been for a while. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I kind of went up to him and said, “Look, my dog loves this particular song.” There’s this song called ‘What’s For Dinner’ – we used to put it on and the dog would go ape shit because he knew it was dinner time – and he got completely obsessed with it and he drew a portrait of the dog on a tea towel for me. It took him like 20 minutes! But the dog had a massive dick and he was still obviously riding high on testosterone. It was awesome. We talked for a while and then I left him alone and that was the end of it.

I find that if you kind of come at people – like if I’d have gone to Don and started banging on about the Tex, Don and Charlie stuff that I love of his or bloody ‘Flame Trees’ of ‘Khe Sanh’ or any of that stuff he probably would have just deleted the email, so you’ve got to come at people from – not a level playing field – but from a more humane angle as opposed to an idea that they’re demi gods or whatever.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZZkAAySncM?rel=0]

They’re almost like boxers, they expect the same people to keep coming up at them over and over like jabs so they keep blocking them – but then if you hit them with a hook you get them to take notice.

You just punch them straight in the dick. Something they’re not expecting. I think low blows are my specialty. Definitely my angle for talking to people on the street.

The press release for the record says that you guys have a “new cohesive sound” between band and the harmony singers. I know that that would have come through time playing together, but as the producer as well as the front man of the band, you’re in a unique position in knowing how to exactly shape the interplay of the dynamics between the two major sonic elements of the band. Has that been an arduous process that you’ve had to work at to figure out how to fit all those sounds into a particular mould or has it arrived organically through time recording and performing?

To be honest, I’d written a bunch of songs for the first record and when the girls came into sing it they didn’t know what they were gonna do. I didn’t know what they were gonna do. I didn’t know what they were capable of. So when they actually opened their mouths for the first time, I actually almost had a heart attack. The band changed in an instant. It just became this whole other beast. So this time I knew what I had and it meant that I could – as the guy recording it and as the guy writing the songs – I knew that I could exploit a lot more and I knew the kind of firepower that they are capable of. So I guess it means that I relaxed a little bit more with the songs and let things meander a little bit more because the first one’s [album] a little bit rigid kind of song writing where there’s a bunch of chord progressions and they kind of make lineal sense. Whereas this one I left a lot more space for them to ghost their way through things and kind of creep people out a bit more.

I think there’s a few more pensive moments on it. It’s not as forced and it’s really fun not being limited by vocals. I’m a pretty shit singer but the girls are verging on classically trained or are classically trained, so I can now pull off things with them that I can’t do myself. I fell like Robbie Robertson from The Band where you’re writing for all these really great vocalists but you yourself are not such a great singer.

Well you just made me think too about an interview I saw last year with Jack White when he was touring with an all-male band and an all-female band and he talked about they could be playing the same songs but when he was using the different bands the sound and the texture and the delivery was so different because of the approach of the two different styles from the feminine and masculine elements. You’ve got a history with The Nation Blue [Lyncolgn is also the frontman of the Melbourne heavy rockers] of playing fairly aggressive and like you said “rigid”, rock – have you found yourself be influenced by the feminine element in the band in terms of the textures or the delicacies or even the strengths in certain parts that you didn’t have in your music but have incorporated into your playing?

Yeah, I think they’re influence is kind of all pervasive. They influence me on every level. From the moment we step in a tour van – I spent a lot of years in what I call the ‘cock forest’, which is a male heavy dominated kind of scene. It got pretty tedious – The Nation Blue’s been going since 1996, so that’s a long time to be in the forest, as I describe it.

I’d played in quite a few bands with women in the past and I’m not using it as a point of differentiation or anything like that – a musician’s a musician – but there is a dynamic that shifts where I think women are more cohesive to play in a band with. I think it’s a lot more of a pleasant experience. When we ride up the Hume it’s a lot easier than three grumpy men sitting in a car or four grumpy men sitting in a car and that goes all the way through to the music too. There’s actually moments where I’m playing on stage where I forget what I’m doing because I’m listening to them so intently and listening to them as a fan and you forget where you are sometimes. Like sometimes they’ll hit a frequency that literally turns my brain off and I start drooling and then I have to remember to breathe and then I come back to and I look out and I’ve missed my cues – there’s something that kind of floors me.

It took a fair bit to get my wife Alex back to playing drums. She’d kind of sworn off it and moved away from it and that’s where it all starts from – everything starts from me and her jamming and I think that process is a lot easier than with men straight up. We’ve got a pretty deep-seeded relationship, obviously, but I’ve found it to be a really easy process to write songs with her.

It is a really unique sonic dynamic for a rock band, what would you say has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned between records and performing over the last 12 months about harnessing the band’s sound most effectively?

We experimented for ages trying to figure out a way to play it live and just in general play the songs. We tried turning our amps down really low like Leonard Cohen does and having basically no stage sound whatsoever and that wasn’t working and things were creeping up and it was too loud but I think the one element that we’ve figured out that was probably the most important and has also, once again, changed the dynamic, is we now take our mixer Johnny with us everywhere. He mixed Nation Blue for 10 years and he’s actually a physicist, so he studies acoustics and all this kind of stuff. He’s a complete brain. So we now take him everywhere and that has actually changed the functioning dynamic of the band as well because there’s these kind of little cliques in the band and he’s evened that out a lot. We know that if we do our thing, and we’ve got the confidence now to do our thing, we know that he’ll be taking care of us out the front because we’ve had a lot of mixers just not understand it and push the girls way into the background when they need to be as loud as I am. We can actually, when it’s humming and it’s working well, you can actually feel it vibrating properly and you can get confidence from that. But it’s taken us years to get to that point where we actually feel comfortable to do it. And I think the biggest part is just knowing that he’s taking care of it and we’ve got somebody we trust.

The record will also be out via Poison City who you’ve just signed with. Their known for having more of a punk rock roster, what made you sign on with them?

Andy’s [Andy Hayden – Poison City Record’s founder] a friend and has been for years. Everything we’ve done we’ve done through one label, even Nation Blue. Our friends Matt and Nat have taken care of all that stuff for years and we’ve never really had to think about it. So when they kind of – they haven’t wrapped up the label but they’re taking a break from it – we didn’t know who to ask and we checked in with a bunch of people and Andy was the only one that kind of felt right. We needed somebody who was going to be enthusiastic about it. It’s a pretty weird band and it’s also a really sceneless band. I mean there’s probably only three or four other bands who we’ve considered to be kind of kindred spirits – we’re kind of out there on our own. So for him to be excited about it and want to work it as just an independent piece of work is really good because we’re not attached to a scene and that makes it quite hard for people to understand how to use all their mechanisms to make things work. So he’s great.

We have found ourselves playing a bunch of shows – the Hoodlum Shouts are also on Poison City, a great band from Canberra now living in Melbourne, that we’ve played with a bunch of times, so there’s actually this weird kind of fork in the Poison City catalogue. There’s a lot of the punk stuff, then there’s White Walls who are like a shoe gaze type of thing. It gets pretty varied at that label. Andy’s got “If it’s universally good, it’ll do” kind of mentality, which is great.

Carpetbombing will have 15 songs which is a fairly epic countdown. Was it always the plan to release such an extensive album or did you just record everything and couldn’t bare to let go of anything?

There’s a few shorter moments on it. There’s a few little interludes and weird things but yeah, when you listen to it it feels like a lengthy record – but it still clocks in at about 44 minutes. So it’s still pretty short by comparison. All the Nation records are an hour long and that was purely because we’d only do one every four years and you’d want to get every single thing that you could on there so that people had that to listen to and still be listening to it six months later but with this it’s actually pretty concise. I trimmed the shit out of it, cut it down a bit – there were a few superfluous guitar intros and Eddie Van Halen moments that I decided to do away with and it moves pretty well. The 15 songs, realistically, is about 12 solid songs and some fucking around.

You’ve adapted a stark, black and white aesthetic on your record covers and in your most recent video for ‘Diminishing Returns’. What is it about that juxtaposition of that aesthetic that you think works with your music? 

I grew up listening to punk music and it’s not that far off a rip of Raymond Pettibon and Winston Smith – Dead Kennedys and Black Flag artwork.

It’s almost the negative of that artwork.

Yeah, it’s just a contrast thing. With a name like Harmony, the artwork could be dolphins, crystals and fucking Sting fucking your mum. We had to go juxtaposed on the name because it’s a shit name, so you’re always going to have to have a point of difference because otherwise it gets lumped into a crowd of heinous shit that we don’t want to be a part of.

I kind of like the high contrast on every level on the artwork because we’ve got this mate Alex Gillies and all those are woodblock prints which he carves himself. The guy’s and idiot savant. And then Ben Butcher, the guy who takes all our photos, he only shoots on film and he only uses this lens that’s half cracked, so half the photo’s in high contrast and the other half’s a blurry mess. Everything’s meant to disarm and make things harder to understand and hopefully it does that and hopefully it’s not too obvious.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9tP9ULPFM?rel=0]

You’ve also got a covers record coming out to coincide with the Carpetbombing release with some pretty epic artists on there, including Summer Flake and Adalita. Has it been interesting to hear how all these artists have reinterpreted your music? And were you shitting yourself when you sent some of the music out to certain artists?

That’s actually been one of the most frightening things. In a lot of cases I had to record the songs. It’s been cool but it’s also been pretty stressful because you’ve got to show people stuff, sometimes before it was done, and it’s so overwhelming having people do stuff for you. Particularly, like, Adalita’s been a long term friend and she ripped through a pretty amazing version of one of the songs. Everything on there’s really good and it’s not surprising to me at all. That’s why we asked the people we asked, we could guarantee the quality was going to be really high. But it’s certainly an unusual process particularly because we invested so much in the actual record ourselves that the idea of putting out two versions of one thing at the same time is pretty tweaked. In some cases, like, Summer Flake actually did one of our songs and it’s better than the original. It’s one of those things that you’ve got to cop on the chin and hopefully people can separate it and when we turn up and don’t play the song the way that people have heard it or the one that they like, hopefully they can forgive us for that. But it is weird, that’s for sure, because there are a couple. Like Batpiss have done a better version – it’s a pretty great way to cut your own throat before you’ve even started, that’s for sure.

Originally published on vmusic.com.au