Drown This City
Drown This City - EP Launch Friday 17th June at The Workers Club in Melbourne.
Words: Rod Whitfield Photo: Andrew Basso
It’s very difficult to stand out in the heavy music crowd. And especially in the heavily crowded melodic metalcore/post-hardcore scene. However, new Melbourne post-hardcore band Drown This City is poised to stand up, wave a massive red flag above their heads and scream ‘look at me!’ They have at least two major points of difference that should distinguish them from the cookie-cutter pack, the most obvious one being the fact that they are female fronted, which is extremely rare in that scene. We spoke to frontwoman Alex Reade and bassist Michael Furolo recently, and Reade reflected on her role in the band and how her gender and, even more importantly, her unique approach to her craft gives them a less conventional sound. “Specifically in post-hardcore, with more modern bands like Crossfaith, Amity Affliction, Bring Me the Horizon and so on, there aren’t many females at all,” she declares, “that was definitely a challenge, because I felt a lot of pressure to live up to the men in this scene. And I worship a lot of the male vocalists, and when we were starting out recording, especially with clean vocals, a lot of listeners expect clean vocals with no vibrato. I think it’s easier for male vocalists to pull that off, especially in this scene. “So I was trying to tailor my sound to that sound, and thinking I need to sound like that. I listened back and thought ‘that doesn’t even sound like me at all. I just have to be who I am and hope that people like female vocalists! Because a lot of them don’t like it.” Reade states that she wants to be appreciated as a vocalist, not as a female vocalist. “I think of myself
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as a vocalist, it shouldn’t matter if I’m female or not, people will like me for the sound that I make, not just because I’m female. I love being a girl and I love playing in a band and I like people’s reactions. I like not being expected, I like being the dark horse, I like surprising people.” The other factor that this band brings to the table is a very strong electronic sensibility that is also quite rare in this sub-genre. In fact, the band began its life as a techno project, but it quickly morphed into the blisteringly heavy act, with strong electronic touches, that we hear today. “Our original intention was to write soft electronic music,” Reade recalls, “and all of a sudden we said ‘this is our last chance, let’s just go as heavy as we possibly can’, and our project genuinely turned into a really heavy post-hardcore electronic outfit.” “We all had heavy influences,” Furolo adds, “that was always our influence, heavy music. So we wanted to do something different, incorporate electronic influences in.” “I wasn’t even originally planning on screaming. But the next thing you know, everything’s screaming, and we had to find parts for clean vocals in there!” Reade laughs, “I don’t think a lot of post-hardcore fans like synth, so we decided the very first song we put out, the first 20 seconds, synth, crazy synth. We thought this would shock everyone, and if they can make it through that, this is a good representation of our music.” The debut EP from Drown this City, False Idols is out on 3 June 2016. H
Comacozer Words: Cameron Cooper Photo: Courtesy of Comacozer
Between the Black Sabbath and Acid Bath worshippers making up the weird world of doom and stoner rock, there are the few whose cosmic rumblings defy expectations. Deep within Sydney’s dope-soaked halls is a disastrously heavy psychedelic power-trio. In ancient times they would have been called wizards, demons or heathens – but now? We may call them Comacozer. “In the beginning, we just improvised,” says drummer Andrew Panagopoulos on the group’s astral-walking beginnings. “We have never played any of the songs the same way twice.” The band’s free-form, jam-oriented sound has a precedent in heavy metal, but the inter-dimensional grooves they explore share a lot in common with The Grateful Dead: driven by Panagopoulos’ beats, bass player Richard Elliot and six-stringer Rick Burke trade evil melodies and effect-laden rumbles to craft blissfully dissonant melodies give way to spiritual and…er… substance-fuelled pondering. “We’ve been called Space Doom, Acid Psych and a bunch of other monikers,” Panagopoulos explains. “We have so many different influences, whether it’s middle eastern, spacey tunes, or soundtracks. The over-arching theme is that we want to take the listener on a journey.”
Although the band initially planned on bringing a singer into the mix, it soon became clear that they had a good thing going as a space-walking, instrumental trio. It has certainly worked in their favour, with the band catching the scene’s attention via their mind-bending live performances and 2014’s Sessions EP – a noisy, MC5-esque sketch of what was to come. The Comacozer sound was refined soon after with 2015’s Deloun under the guise of Frank Attard, who has also taken the helm for debut fulllength Astra Planetala, which hits the cosmos in June via Headspin Records. “[The] album has the same vibe as Deloun, but is definitely a step-up in taking the listener on a journey. When we were writing the tracks we always had the structure of the album in the back of our minds, not just the formula of the individual tracks,” explains Panagopoulos. “An audio mindf*ck of psychedelia! A bit of a toke or acid pop might help the whole experience as well if that’s what you desire.” With some interstate shows on the horizon and plenty of gigs in NSW, the only way is forward for the threeheaded beast they call Comacozer. Heavy, evil and nothing you’ve ever heard before – go see them before they blow-up. H
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