Thirsty Merc Slideshows |
Phil Stack – Electric & Upright Bass/Backing Vocals
Sean Carey – Guitar / Backing Vocals
Karl Robertson – Drums
Almost three years on from the release of Thirsty Merc’s much-loved, self-titled debut, now comes the highly-anticipated new album – SLIDESHOWS.
SLIDESHOWS is a glistening collection of 12 new melodic, rocking tracks from one of Australia’s most popular and hard-working bands. The first single is “20 Good Reasons”, a gloriously anthemic number with a huge sing-a-long chorus, sure to prove itself another instant Thirsty Merc radio favourite.
Since first bursting onto the national scene back in 2003, the Sydney-based Thirsty Merc quickly built up a reputation as one of the country’s best live acts. Word-of-mouth and hundreds of shows around Australia – and, of course, a swag great songs – saw the first Thirsty Merc CD spend over a year on the ARIA album charts and end up selling over 120,000 copies.
The album produced a string of memorable singles: “Emancipate Myself”, “My Completeness”, “Someday, Someday”, “In the Summertime”, “When the Weather Is Fine”.
And now, this is SLIDESHOWS – sit back and prepare for a considerably different Thirsty Merc experience.
Singer Rai Thistlethwayte says the title of the new album is intended to instantly stir up a sense of indefinable nostalgia. “Something memory-based, a subliminal thing,” explains Rai. “To me, it describes little emotional vignettes, which these songs are. They all describe different aspects of relationships with people and real life.
As bassist Phil Stack likes to point out: “We couldn’t call it Thirsty Merc II.”
Jokes aside, though, Rai reveals SLIDESHOWS is a more serious album than the debut. No more smart-arsing about. “The first time around, you’re just trying to get noticed,” Rai notes. But this time, he kept asking himself the same esoteric question throughout the year that it took to write and record the album: What actually matters?
“With the music, I’ve definitely tried to be more honest with myself about it,” says the singer. “That’s the way I want to play this stuff, because it’s the truth. Things aren’t always 100 per cent shiny (spelling was ‘shinny’) and great.
“It’s very self-explanatory what these lyrics are about because, lyrically, I didn’t want to sugar-coat anything on this record. I just wanted to tell it the way that I saw it. There’s a lot of break-up on this album, so much more than the first album.”
The core theme throughout all the slides in SLIDESHOWS is about each of us deciding what’s important in an ever-increasingly confusing world. What is real? What do you stand for? What actually matters? Rai tries to explain: “I’m feeling like today, global village, internet, myspace, youtube, static, advertising, commercial-meets-fashion-meets … Being busy with that, it’s a very busy, cluttered environment. And everyone’s got millions of friends and associates, whether it’s digital or just out on the town. Whatever it is, everyone’s a bit lost in translation. You have to redefine what really does matter to you.”
Musically, as much as Rai hates this description, he genuinely feels Thirsty Merc has matured a lot since recording THIRSTY MERC. Now 26, Rai points out that he was only 21 when he penned songs such as “Emancipate Myself” and “Someday, Someday”.
“I don’t know how to describe how SLIDESHOWS is different,” he says. “I feel that it’s less local and it’s not necessarily more rock, but it’s deeper and heavier in subject matter, bar a few tracks here and there. Harmonically, it’s simpler. Some of these things require you not to rock out as much. You want to feel the deepest level of the song and what they really mean, so it kind of calls from a new level of interpretation.” Of course, with an outfit of musicians as accomplished as Thirsty Merc, there are no musical limits.
Upfront, the charismatic, curly-haired Rai is a gifted and multi-faceted guitarist and pianist, as well as an almighty vocalist. Meanwhile, bass player Phil Stack can be found in his spare time playing his upright in the backing band for Australia’s biggest jazz star, trumpeter James Morrison. In Thirsty Merc, Phil hooks in with drummer Karl Robertson – they’ve played in bands together since they were little kids, so as a rhythm section, they just couldn’t be any tighter. Lead guitarist Sean Carey was the last to join the Thirsty Merc fray, just before the release of the first album, so you know he was hand-picked from all the guitarists in Earth to be the perfect Merc guitarist.
While some of the new songs call on the band not to rock out, there are many moments on SLIDESHOWS where Thirsty (spelling) Merc rock harder than they’ve ever rocked before, such as on the opener “She’s All I Got”, or the riff-heavy “The Vision” and the glam-infused “She’s My Brother”.
But these thumping, grinding moments are well-and-truly balanced out by the more delicate and aching tracks such as “The Whole World Reminds Me of You”, the painfully heartfelt “Crying in Denial” and the piano-and-strings driven album closer, “Homesick”.
SLIDESHOWS is a record which shows off the depth of Thirsty Merc’s shared experience – all those hundreds of shows they’ve played together. “I don’t know if you realise it while you’re doing it, living out the rock & roll dream,” says Phil, “but I was looking through my old 2004/05 diaries the other day and it was just ‘el spazzo’. At one point, it was something like 68 gigs in 70 days – we went around the country four or five times in a row.”
“It was awesome,” laughs Sean. “We never slept. It was just good times. It was so loud that your ears were ringing all the time, your always on planes, your always dehydrated, but you’re always cracking up laughing.”
Following some dates overseas, Thristy Merc finally put a stop to all the endless touring early last year to clear space to work on the new record. After looking at a handful of producers abroad, the band decided it would return to the same production team in Melbourne that worked on the debut album – producer Lindsay Gravina and engineer Rob Long.
At first, the going was a bit slow, but letting things happen naturally and new methods of playing live in the studio gave way to the songs taking shape. “We ended up doing a lot of the recording in the studio’s central drum room, just all standing in there with Karl,” Phil explains. “Things like that made a big difference to the groove of the album, so we tried a lot of things before we realised what works best for us.”
In the end, the main bulk of the recording happened very quickly, with most of the songs on SLIDESHOWS all recorded or re-recorded in a month late last year.
“We just went in and bashed it out,” says Rai. “After that, it was almost done before we knew it.”
To add some extra texture to the project, jazz legend Paul Grabowsky was brought in to put subtle string arrangements to several tracks, while Rai also jumped on an upright piano.
Once the recording was all done, Rai took the tapes to Los Angeles where the songs were given an extra sheen by internationally renowned mix engineer, Mark Needham [The Killers, My Chemical Romance]. The end result is an incredibly rich-sounding, diverse yet cohesive work. The perfect example of how bright SLIDESHOWS sounds can be found in its first single, “20 Good Reasons”.
“It’s such a strong song,” beams Sean. “I feel like it’s very much a flagship for the whole thing. It’s got the hooks and hits that Merc do really well, but the lyrics are so strong, so vivid, very deep. Together, it’s a smash, it’s great. It’s got all the elements that I really like in pop music.”
SLIDESHOWS is the beginning of a bright new chapter for Thirsty Merc. What actually matters? It’s about the songs, the music, the emotion, the honesty. And it’s all captured right here on the brilliant second album from Thirsty Merc, SLIDESHOWS.
