Archieven: acts

Bio provided by artist:
Having taken their name from a line in Hooray For Hollywood – inspired by the song’s jarring use in Robert Altman’s Philip Marlowe detective movie The Long Goodbye – there is an aptly cinematic quality to Any Young Mechanic’s music.

With intricate scenes, enthralling narratives and unique characters cropping up across the lyrics, and a kaleidoscopic yet coherently interwoven spectrum of moods and emotions stretching through the music, the Adelaide five-piece bring a fresh language to folk music’s natural propensity to spin a good yarn.

So rather than offering borrowed references illuminated by the cosy flickers of campfire flames, on their debut album The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot, the Australian band’s urgent songs conjure up vivid, widescreen vistas that blend the genre’s enduring charms with a musical dexterity and sharp vision reaching beyond folk’s usual corners.

‘We are trying to make folk music for now,’ suggests frontman Sam Wilson. ‘Turning it on its head in a new, sometimes uncanny way, because we don’t want to just do the old thing again. I don’t think it’s interesting to make things again, so we’re searching for a contemporary edge.’

The roots of this original yet inclusive approach, in part, go back to the Adelaide music scene that helped to forge Any Young Mechanic.

Though all five studied aspects of music, from classical to contemporary, at Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium, it was the intimate, interconnected nature of the DIY music scene in Australia’s fifth city that helped to shape the band. At the same time, an organic influence from South London also proved as useful as instruction on crotchets and minims, song structures and production.

‘Adelaide is a small city so it’s a small scene, but a very tight knit musical community, everyone plays in everyone’s else’s bands,’ explains violinist and multi-instrumentalist Thea Martin, recalling how half a world away Adelaide’s musicians were galvanised in 2019 by the emergence of Black Midi and Black Country, New Country New Road around Brixton.

‘Their records were like a bomb going off in the Adelaide scene,’ agrees classically trained double bassist Allan McBean, recalling how they triggered the embracement of new sonic textures and the application of musicianship into genres beyond those endorsed by the classical establishment. ‘Those records inspired us to explore other musical contexts. Creatively, they were wonderful.’       

Serendipitously, at the same time the virtuosos’ horizons were expanding, Wilson began working on the folk songs he had been writing with drummer/backing vocalist Jachin Mee, creating a perfect vessel for this explorative spirit. 

‘The problem with everyone playing in each other’s bands is that they are also your audience,’ laughs Wilson of the scene’s intimacy. ‘But it does mean you can get to know anyone whose music you find interesting and proposition them with an idea. You don’t get the cliqueness of a big city. So there wasn’t a eureka moment at the band’s start; in fact, it was whatever the opposite of a eureka moment is. Uni, where Jachin and I had been studying popular music every day, was over and I realised I needed to find a way to keep doing music because I can’t do anything else.’

After alternative incarnations performed as Wake In Fright (the name was later switched to avoid confusion with the Australian film that inspired it) the permanent recruitment of Martin, McBean and guitarist and banjo player Luka Kilgariff-Johnson in 2023 saw Any Young Mechanic’s true identity emerge, together with a strong desire to immediately make something that encapsulated it. Hence, for three months, drums, violins, keyboards and a double bass that had to be ducked under doorframes were routinely crammed in and out of Mee’s childhood home. 

‘We rehearsed the album in my shared bedroom at home. It was a ridiculous rehearsal space in retrospect, but you do what you can at the time,’ explains the drummer. ‘We didn’t have enough space for all of us, but it proved an enabling constraint. There was no decision fatigue about what we could and couldn’t do, we just had to focus on the songs.’

Those cramped conditions created something special.

‘That rehearsal process was the best musical period of my life so far,’ declares Martin, despite the lack of elbow room. ‘It had everything I loved from my classical music upbringing because it felt like doing chamber music again. Sam and Jachin brought the songs to the rest of us, then we wrote our parts. It was amazing. It felt like such a full body of work that kept expanding as we spent time with each other.’

The meticulous rehearsals were needed, not only to harness the creativity flowing between bandmates, but also because of the way The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot had to be made.

A borrowed studio meant Any Young Mechanic had just three days of recording time, but with Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks offering an inspirational bedrock and Big Thief’s 2019 album U.F.O.F. showing them that modern songs can still be made in a timeless manner, that time limit was turned into yet another ‘enabling constraint’.

‘I was getting very frustrated by conversations around AI in music and the supposed novelty of removing humans from the equation of making music. That made me want to make being a band in a room together imperative to the record,’ explains Wilson of their approach.

‘There are no edits. It’s all just what happened in the three or four minutes were were recording.  Even the reverb our engineer fed in manually,’ adds Mee, revealing the sessions eschewed amplification and overdubs.

‘We wanted to remove as many electronic or ‘artificial’ things from the mix as possible,’ continues Wilson. ‘Yes, there are lots of technologically interesting ways to make music and we could explore another time, but it is also very interesting to record in a room together.’

Turning limitations into advantages, the finished body of work – produced by the band and local engineer Sam Lench – possesses the undeniable coherency of a true album, its musical interconnectivity striking against a digital sea of scattergun playlists.

A mesh of criss-crossing folkish paths, melodic alleys and lyrical highways, while the record possesses an immediacy that quickly turns its 12 tracks into lifelong friends, no two listens ever seem quite the same. With each spin, fresh turns of phrase and musical passages suddenly command attention, as both the sweeping horizons and intricate gullies of Any Young Mechanic’s musical landscapes unfold.

Opener There’s A New Place On The Market demonstrates the band’s creative depth of field from the off. A mix of hard memories and thoughtful psychogeography, its driving folk meshes affectingly with Kilgariff-Johnson’s sympathetic banjo. Remarkably, the guitarist only picked up the instrument for the first time during the track’s creation. ‘It happened in a way that if you saw it in a biopic, you would think it was ham-fisted,’ smiles Wilson. ‘A banjo was lying on the couch, so I suggested to Luka that he give it a go. He was so good that I asked him to join the band, though I warned him he’d have to play banjo on the whole record!’

After this passionate establishing shot, the beautifully picked out melodies of Pretty Strange World swoon in before the dusty heart of Write You Wrong emerges to broaden the album’s impressive emotional spectrum. And it is a range that chimes beautifully with the band’s cinematic inclinations.

With Captain And Compass’ defiant march, the enigmatic swing of Snug Barber and the chiming warmth of I Never Met An Engine Don’t Need Tanks, Wilson channels his inner-auteur director as he delivers a series of soul-stirring close-ups. 

Indeed, visualising the experiences and feelings that he wanted to convey as imagined scenes playing on the cinema screen of his mind’s eye proved a crucial process for creating an album that not only feels intimate for the lyricist but the listener too.

‘My hope is that people can project themselves onto the songs,’ he suggests. ‘We’ve all been to shows where someone says ‘this is about my dog dying’ and then all you can think about is the dog. You can’t add yourself. For me, if you’re listening to my song, I want you to use it as a kaleidoscope for your own life. So I try pretty hard not to give the game away. I guess that sounds a bit pretentious… though I was rewatching Looney Tunes on DVD recently and Daffy Duck makes the same joke I do in the song My House Divides, so maybe everything I’ve ever written is just  squirrelled away in those cartoons.’ That’s really not all, folks.

With the storming power of the aforementioned My Houses Divides contrasting with the wistful airs of Barn Burning – which ripple with palpable feelings of bewilderment and yearning respectively – Wilson’s lyrical soft focus consistently unlocks a series of enveloping musical journeys.     

And that ultimately is The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot’s charm. Like a host of classic albums before it, some ideas and details that will immediately enthral, but behind them there is a musical world that the listener can take time to inhabit and mesh into their own lives. With its folk-tinged lens, The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot – fittingly an idle line uttered by a friend of the group, now recast in a whole new context as the record’s title – is a debut that musically and emotionally projects a bigger picture.

According to the old Hollywood song, ‘Any Young Mechanic can be a panic…’ but only the 21st century folk of this one will make you feel it all in widescreen.

Bio provided by artist:
Having taken their name from a line in Hooray For Hollywood – inspired by the song’s jarring use in Robert Altman’s Philip Marlowe detective movie The Long Goodbye – there is an aptly cinematic quality to Any Young Mechanic’s music.

With intricate scenes, enthralling narratives and unique characters cropping up across the lyrics, and a kaleidoscopic yet coherently interwoven spectrum of moods and emotions stretching through the music, the Adelaide five-piece bring a fresh language to folk music’s natural propensity to spin a good yarn.

So rather than offering borrowed references illuminated by the cosy flickers of campfire flames, on their debut album The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot, the Australian band’s urgent songs conjure up vivid, widescreen vistas that blend the genre’s enduring charms with a musical dexterity and sharp vision reaching beyond folk’s usual corners.

‘We are trying to make folk music for now,’ suggests frontman Sam Wilson. ‘Turning it on its head in a new, sometimes uncanny way, because we don't want to just do the old thing again. I don't think it’s interesting to make things again, so we’re searching for a contemporary edge.’

The roots of this original yet inclusive approach, in part, go back to the Adelaide music scene that helped to forge Any Young Mechanic.

Though all five studied aspects of music, from classical to contemporary, at Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium, it was the intimate, interconnected nature of the DIY music scene in Australia’s fifth city that helped to shape the band. At the same time, an organic influence from South London also proved as useful as instruction on crotchets and minims, song structures and production.

‘Adelaide is a small city so it’s a small scene, but a very tight knit musical community, everyone plays in everyone’s else’s bands,’ explains violinist and multi-instrumentalist Thea Martin, recalling how half a world away Adelaide’s musicians were galvanised in 2019 by the emergence of Black Midi and Black Country, New Country New Road around Brixton.

‘Their records were like a bomb going off in the Adelaide scene,’ agrees classically trained double bassist Allan McBean, recalling how they triggered the embracement of new sonic textures and the application of musicianship into genres beyond those endorsed by the classical establishment. ‘Those records inspired us to explore other musical contexts. Creatively, they were wonderful.’

Serendipitously, at the same time the virtuosos’ horizons were expanding, Wilson began working on the folk songs he had been writing with drummer/backing vocalist Jachin Mee, creating a perfect vessel for this explorative spirit.

‘The problem with everyone playing in each other’s bands is that they are also your audience,’ laughs Wilson of the scene’s intimacy. ‘But it does mean you can get to know anyone whose music you find interesting and proposition them with an idea. You don’t get the cliqueness of a big city. So there wasn’t a eureka moment at the band's start; in fact, it was whatever the opposite of a eureka moment is. Uni, where Jachin and I had been studying popular music every day, was over and I realised I needed to find a way to keep doing music because I can’t do anything else.’

After alternative incarnations performed as Wake In Fright (the name was later switched to avoid confusion with the Australian film that inspired it) the permanent recruitment of Martin, McBean and guitarist and banjo player Luka Kilgariff-Johnson in 2023 saw Any Young Mechanic’s true identity emerge, together with a strong desire to immediately make something that encapsulated it. Hence, for three months, drums, violins, keyboards and a double bass that had to be ducked under doorframes were routinely crammed in and out of Mee’s childhood home.

‘We rehearsed the album in my shared bedroom at home. It was a ridiculous rehearsal space in retrospect, but you do what you can at the time,’ explains the drummer. ‘We didn’t have enough space for all of us, but it proved an enabling constraint. There was no decision fatigue about what we could and couldn’t do, we just had to focus on the songs.’

Those cramped conditions created something special.

‘That rehearsal process was the best musical period of my life so far,’ declares Martin, despite the lack of elbow room. ‘It had everything I loved from my classical music upbringing because it felt like doing chamber music again. Sam and Jachin brought the songs to the rest of us, then we wrote our parts. It was amazing. It felt like such a full body of work that kept expanding as we spent time with each other.’

The meticulous rehearsals were needed, not only to harness the creativity flowing between bandmates, but also because of the way The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot had to be made.

A borrowed studio meant Any Young Mechanic had just three days of recording time, but with Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks offering an inspirational bedrock and Big Thief’s 2019 album U.F.O.F. showing them that modern songs can still be made in a timeless manner, that time limit was turned into yet another ‘enabling constraint’.

‘I was getting very frustrated by conversations around AI in music and the supposed novelty of removing humans from the equation of making music. That made me want to make being a band in a room together imperative to the record,’ explains Wilson of their approach.

‘There are no edits. It’s all just what happened in the three or four minutes were were recording.  Even the reverb our engineer fed in manually,’ adds Mee, revealing the sessions eschewed amplification and overdubs.

‘We wanted to remove as many electronic or ‘artificial’ things from the mix as possible,’ continues Wilson. ‘Yes, there are lots of technologically interesting ways to make music and we could explore another time, but it is also very interesting to record in a room together.’

Turning limitations into advantages, the finished body of work – produced by the band and local engineer Sam Lench – possesses the undeniable coherency of a true album, its musical interconnectivity striking against a digital sea of scattergun playlists.

A mesh of criss-crossing folkish paths, melodic alleys and lyrical highways, while the record possesses an immediacy that quickly turns its 12 tracks into lifelong friends, no two listens ever seem quite the same. With each spin, fresh turns of phrase and musical passages suddenly command attention, as both the sweeping horizons and intricate gullies of Any Young Mechanic’s musical landscapes unfold.

Opener There's A New Place On The Market demonstrates the band’s creative depth of field from the off. A mix of hard memories and thoughtful psychogeography, its driving folk meshes affectingly with Kilgariff-Johnson’s sympathetic banjo. Remarkably, the guitarist only picked up the instrument for the first time during the track’s creation. ‘It happened in a way that if you saw it in a biopic, you would think it was ham-fisted,’ smiles Wilson. ‘A banjo was lying on the couch, so I suggested to Luka that he give it a go. He was so good that I asked him to join the band, though I warned him he’d have to play banjo on the whole record!’

After this passionate establishing shot, the beautifully picked out melodies of Pretty Strange World swoon in before the dusty heart of Write You Wrong emerges to broaden the album’s impressive emotional spectrum. And it is a range that chimes beautifully with the band’s cinematic inclinations.

With Captain And Compass’ defiant march, the enigmatic swing of Snug Barber and the chiming warmth of I Never Met An Engine Don’t Need Tanks, Wilson channels his inner-auteur director as he delivers a series of soul-stirring close-ups.

Indeed, visualising the experiences and feelings that he wanted to convey as imagined scenes playing on the cinema screen of his mind’s eye proved a crucial process for creating an album that not only feels intimate for the lyricist but the listener too.

‘My hope is that people can project themselves onto the songs,’ he suggests. ‘We’ve all been to shows where someone says ‘this is about my dog dying’ and then all you can think about is the dog. You can’t add yourself. For me, if you’re listening to my song, I want you to use it as a kaleidoscope for your own life. So I try pretty hard not to give the game away. I guess that sounds a bit pretentious… though I was rewatching Looney Tunes on DVD recently and Daffy Duck makes the same joke I do in the song My House Divides, so maybe everything I’ve ever written is just  squirrelled away in those cartoons.’ That’s really not all, folks.

With the storming power of the aforementioned My Houses Divides contrasting with the wistful airs of Barn Burning – which ripple with palpable feelings of bewilderment and yearning respectively – Wilson’s lyrical soft focus consistently unlocks a series of enveloping musical journeys.

And that ultimately is The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot’s charm. Like a host of classic albums before it, some ideas and details that will immediately enthral, but behind them there is a musical world that the listener can take time to inhabit and mesh into their own lives. With its folk-tinged lens, The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot – fittingly an idle line uttered by a friend of the group, now recast in a whole new context as the record’s title – is a debut that musically and emotionally projects a bigger picture.

According to the old Hollywood song, ‘Any Young Mechanic can be a panic…’ but only the 21st century folk of this one will make you feel it all in widescreen.