| THE WHAT 4
by Kerry Loyson
Deriving influence from the likes of Killing Joke, Primus, The Necks, Front Line Assembly, Sonic Youth and Mars Volta, The What 4 are Adelaide's freshest experimental rock outfit to explode onto our local music scene. Having recently released their debut album, Say It Straight, Paul Handley, the band's synthesiser operator, invites Rip It Up into their world of instrumental and novel quirky sound and dynamic musical scope while pondering the concept of cover bands...
"If you're a cover band, you might get some nice well paid shows at the Hyatt or whatever, but you can't sell CDs because it's not your music!" he begins. "We might play a few daggy pubs and stuff but there's a chance that people will get familiar with our music then and they can buy [it]... we've always concentrated on playing originals, we're not big on cover bands and stuff!"
And original they are. Paul along with Jo, Will and Frank have some fairly specific and strategic notions for The What 4's overall effect.
"We try to steer away from rigid verse/chorus set ups, it's a little bit more improvised... We like to let songs build and evolve and they change at different times when we play them. We try not to overcomplicate things, by keeping things simple it can actually make it a little more difficult to play. You've really got to rely on the right sort of swing and groove to hold the interest of the song because you're not going to have another change. But it does allow a bit more scope with the dynamics and building songs up... there's some diverse extremes that seem to fit as a whole [as] we try to encompass a lot of different elements and bring them together."
Paul continues by explaining the manner in which the music is created.
"The way we write songs is that we all contribute to our own parts. We're a bit of an autonomous collective, we like to all be equally important within the band and regardless to influences, it's because we all have different interests in different music and different tastes, it's more just our own individual parts that sort of bring it together."
Luckily for fans of The What 4, another album should be thrust our way fairly soon.
"We're actually working on a new album at the moment so we should have another one by the end of the year. Yeah, we just keep on coming up with new ideas for songs and I guess because it is a new band we've sort of got a lot of new things we can try out... The world's your oyster when you've got a lot of synthesisers!" |
