Tearing Us Apart

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday October 24, 2008

Bernard Zuel

Aussie rockers Augie March have created a brilliant pop album but success hasn't come easy, reports BERNARD ZUEL.

IT SEEMS like a fairly simple equation for Augie March.

There was a hit single two years ago, One Crowded Hour, an accompanying album, Moo You Bloody Choir - their best seller yet - and acclaim galore, from ARIA nominations to the $25,000 Australian Music Prize.

Comprehensively backed by a record company that had never previously shown any interest in the more arty or less obvious end of music, they recorded their fourth album in Neil Finn's Auckland studio with one of those "famous LA producers" whose client list includes Beck and the Shins.

The result is Watch Me Disappear, a fresh-sounding record, lyrically adventurous, melodically strong but deliberately less busy musically than before. People seem to be loving it. The record company has plans. A national tour has begun. The sun is shining. Augie March are happy, right?

Well, let's say the jury is still out on that.

In separate long conversations Glenn Richards, the band's singer and songwriter and resident Eeyore, and Edmondo Ammendola, bass player and self-described "glass half-full" man, reveal a band in flux. A band still recovering from a bruising recording experience with producer Joe Chiccarelli, who arrived with very strong ideas and imposed himself more than any other producer had with them before. A band uncertain if their new writing and working methods have worked and not certain if they like or dislike the new album.

"We're not communicating as well as we should be at this point in our career within the band," Ammendola says. "The music has got more focused, the production has got more focused, as individuals we've all sort of honed what our sound in our head is to the point where we think it's being clearly represented on a record. But yet the other stuff, like hooking up a rehearsal and making sure everybody turns up, has gone by the wayside. There are factions and fissures within the band that are their deepest yet. I don't mind saying that. I don't think saying that sort of thing is detrimental."

Are these differences reconcilable?

"I think so but at this stage a lot of things are quite difficult," he says. "That's not necessarily a negative thing. What's happened in the past is that, regardless of what's going on outside the band or how people are feeling, the will to play good music is still very much at the centre."

Alongside Richards and Ammendola are guitarist Adam Donovan and the band's polar opposites, intensely reticent keyboard player Kiernan Box and ebullient drummer David Williams. They are all talented, smart and opinionated people. Whenever you put together a combination like that, you're not going to get unanimity regularly, if at all. The best you may get is accommodation.

"And some would say - none more than Glenn - that the whole process in this band is 99 per cent compromise," says Ammendola, who frequently lavishes praise on Richards's songwriting. "We still are handing out large chunks of ourselves and putting it on the table and trying to arrange it into some kind of cohesive storytelling machine. It still works, I think, but it's strange times."

No one is putting out larger chunks of themselves than Richards, who writes alone. For inspiration he often walks the streets near his Melbourne home or takes himself off to Tasmania.

It's also true that no one is more likely to say about this album "it's not that good, we've stuffed it up" than Richards.

Hearing this, Richards laughs knowingly. "That's pretty much where I'm at. Not the kind of thing I'm supposed to say, though, is it? I think it's a good collection of songs. I know where they could have gone and, as often happens, they've gone somewhere else. But it's a nice album."

It is more than that, of course; it is a very good pop album. Which isn't necessarily something that people would have thought of with Augie March before.

"Um. Well, look, I'm getting from the unlikeliest of places favourable commentary and I didn't expect that, so that's made it a little more interesting to me," Richards says, not entirely convincingly. "I don't know. I grew indifferent to it pretty early on. For another three years to elapse [since he wrote the songs for the previous album] and only 11 songs to come out of it is always a bit heartbreaking for me."

Richards's comment that he had grown "indifferent" to the album early on has an echo in something Ammendola admits with a mix of perplexity and concern. "I don't feel it. I don't feel this record compared with the rest of them," the bass player says. "And I'm kind of waiting to see kind of what shape it takes playing live. The way Augie March make music now has changed so much and I can't say I see it. It's strange, a strange one."

I tell Richards that Ammendola had felt some of the distance came through what he saw as less involvement in constructing the songs this time.

"If he is talking about one or two songs then sure. But no more than the last album," Richards says, slightly peeved. "As far as the band being able to organically put the tunes together, there was ample opportunity for that but I don't think the process was as simple as Edmond might be making out. There were plenty of opportunities; it was just whether people actually wanted to or felt that their ideas were welcome or not.

"It's probably the result of a lack of patience on my part, which obviously stems from the insane amount of time it takes to get anything done when you are working with several people.

"You've got to bring good ideas and you've got to show that you got inside the song and if it's not there then what is a songwriter supposed to do but say it is not there."

Richards considers the direction this interview has gone and says: "I'm not supposed to talk about this. There's the implication, regardless of whether you thought it was a positive or negative experience - and as always it was a mix of both - that you're supposed to try and highlight the positives. I don't see why you wouldn't talk about the complexity of it as opposed to spruik."

It is, after all, the Augie March way.

AUGIE MARCH

Thursday, 8pm, Metro Theatre, city,

9550 3666, $33.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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