betchadupa www.betchadupa.com
If we gave you a dollar for every time you’d heard a band claim to be “all about the music, maan”, but deliver white bread songs that have been fed through so many computers that the band can’t even play them live anymore, you’d have enough money to set up your own Pro Tools rig – right?
Well, here’s something completely different, a band that really are all about the music, with the chops and the choons to prove it.
Their name is betchadupa and their eagerly awaited sophomore album is Aiming For Your Head.
This Auckland reared act, comprising Liam Finn (vocals/guitar), Matt Eccles (drums), Chris Garland (lead guitar) and Joe Bramley (bass) are veritable rock veterans at the ripe old age of 20, having already shared stages with the likes of Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction and Queens Of The Stone Age, and achieved gold sales in NZ with their debut album, alphabetchadupa. And,
now they’ve saved us the bother of trying to pass them off as Australians (as is our want when something from across the Tasman takes our fancy) – by packing up their tour cases and re-settling in the rock friendly confines of inner-city Melbourne.
By now you may have realised that ‘different’ is a word you’ll probably hear bandied about a fair bit when it comes to the four lads, so viewers who are into vanilla are advised to switch off now – for everyone else, welcome aboard. The band’s distinction is something you’ll hear from the moment you press ‘play’; for starters, there’s the eerie, plangent My Army Of Birds And Gulls, the album’s first track. Where many bands might kick off with a loud verse-chorus-verse bullet between the eyes, betchadupa lure you into an uneasy calm with My Army… before Who’s Coming Through The Window’s manic Pixies-versus-The Swingers riff beats you about the ears and wakes you senseless again. Oh, then there’s the magnificent Move Over, which takes the old quiet/loud thang and turns it into something you’ve never heard before. If you’re thinking, ‘yeah, well, any band can fit three good songs on an album of twelve’, they’re not the three ‘best’ songs, it’s only the first three tracks – and the rest of them are just as amazing. Welcome to the world of Aiming For Your Head.
If you’ve had the pleasure of catching betchadupa on tour, and you have a pulse, you were probably blown away by their live energy and musicianship. Maybe you even left the venue humming the chorus to Weekend or whistling that mesmerising riff from Design. If you thought the guys were impressive live, wait ‘til you get a load of the title track Aiming For Your Head – it’s almost like being there (BYO beer and smoke). As front man Liam Finn says, “We’ve always
wanted to just go into the studio and make a record like they used to, where you’re all in the room together and you’re keeping the taping completely live. We’ve never achieved that until now – and that’s what we’re happiest with about the record”.
It’s easy to be amazed when, live, betchadupa tackle the soaring, yearning harmonies of My Song, or that great dropout in the middle of Move Over (you know, where it all cuts out and then roars back) and pull them off. But when you hear that type of thing on a record, you could be forgiven for assuming the band and producer have cut-and-pasted various tracks until it sounds just right – hey, it’s the norm these days. Not so betchadupa, choosing – as usual – to
try something different. The band took a trip back to the good old days of rock and laid down all their songs in analogue format, feeding off each other and letting the vibe shine through, which is just what they do on stage. “It always just seems a bit more realistic to me to be recording onto tape”, says Liam, “because there’s no bullshit; it’s just what you play, straight onto the tape. We’ve always wanted to do that but finding someone that is confident that they can get the best results working on tape rather than Pro Tools and trusting in us that we can play well enough to get it all straight away is another thing”.
How fortunate, then, that producer Nick Launay chose to enter stage left as the band were preparing to return to the studio. Famed for his raw, vital recordings with Midnight Oil, Silverchair and Nick Cave, Launay was the perfect choice to translate betchadupa’s brilliant live presence into recorded form. “It was the first time we’d really worked with a real producer”, chuckles Liam. “but it was lucky that we were able to work with Nick because he’s so dedicated to analogue and won’t have it any other way. He seemed to be on the same wavelength and we responded to that
immediately”, recalls Liam. “He’d seen us a few times and wanted to record us live and make it as much like a show as possible, which was the hardest thing we’ve found, translate betchadupa’s billiant live presence into recorded form, while his connections also secured the band the keys to the Oil’s extensive library of vintage guitars and amps.
Thankfully for us as much as the band, that’s just what they’ve done: listen only to the urgency of the churning, yearning Aiming For Your Head, or the penultimate track, the shimmering nouvelle vague shake of The Bats Of Darkwell Lane – we’ve said it once, we might as well say it again: it’s just like seeing betchadupa live. There’s even an instrumental, the high-octane riffer, RT 10 90 – what better distillation of a band who’ve built their reputation on masterful musicianship. As Liam says, “The instrumental is quite different; there are not many bands that do them, so it makes quite an impact to have a few minutes with no voice. Then, when the vocals kick back in on the next track, it has a real catch that you’ll hear”.
Unsurprisingly for a bloke whose first song was called Gee This Sounds Good, I Can’t Believe We Wrote It, Liam is modestly effusive when it comes to assessing the final product. “I think we’ve all been even a bit surprised at just how well it’s worked”. Hey, even Keith Richards admits that you can only ‘receive’ a good song; it’s a mystery – but there’s nothing mysterious about the fact that Aiming For Your Head will be one of the most rewarding, exciting and diverse listening experiences you’ll have for a while. “I think there’s been a lot of safety within music for a while; there hasn’t been stuff that pricks people’s ears up because it’s different”, says Liam, in closing. “What we’re about is making music that interests us and is catchy but definitely has some aspects – stops, time changes – that are quite challenging. We’re not claiming to be a radically experimental band, but hopefully we can introduce music-lovers to different kinds of music that they might not have had a chance to hear. A gateway band!” Are you ready to take the trip through the looking glass?
