Body Type - In Conversation
Introduction & interview by Beau Croxton
Body Type by Jack Saltmiras
Australian rock band Body Type hits their 10th anniversary this year, and their third album is one hell of a way to celebrate.
The band (comprised of Sophie McComish, Annabel Blackman, Cecil Coleman and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums) has had quite an incredible run so far. From their initial EPS and their acclaimed debut Everything Is Dangerous but Nothing's Surprising, to their sophomore LP Expired Candy– the group has served consistently witty and razor-sharp garage/post-punk-tinged rock. Body Type has also shared the stage with the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Foo Fighters, Fontaines D.C, the Pixies among many others.
This Friday, July 24th, Body Type returns with their third studio album Tally, which was produced by Warpaint drummer (and Courtney Barnett collaborator) Stella Mozgawa. The group eases into a more dynamic sound thanks to Stella; synths, bongos and mellotron are sprinkled throughout and enhance the group’s clever songwriting.
Tally is a very self-assured and diverse record that sees the band’s sound maturing without losing its edge. It’s full to the brim with catchy tunes, but the album’s variety and the band’s ability to spread its wings give the record its true charm.
“And What Else” is a total earworm that combines post-punk and retro call-and-response vocals for a delightfully punchy anthem. Written by guitarist Annabel Blackman, the catchy lead single explores the pros and cons of fishing for compliments.
Written by guitarist/singer Sophie McComish,“Sick Bag” is a catchy tune that studies the line between devotion and self-erasure in a one-sided relationship. The track proves that the band can be at their most effortless and brilliant best even while harnessing vulnerability and dialing things back a bit. “Mulberry” is a jangly slice of heaven, with breezy harmonies and melodic guitar breaks that should dazzle for fans of Wet Leg or The Strokes.
Last but certainly not least, proto-punk banger “Planet 8” (written by bassist Georgia) is a major highlight. With its Go Go’s-esque camaraderie, its infectiously pulsating beat, and anthemic choruses– the track pulls you in for a dramatic and delightful ride.
I recently caught up with Body Type guitarist/singer Annabel Blackman to discuss the making of Tally, their favorite tours, guitar solos and much more.
Check it out below!
INTERVIEW
BEAU CROXTON: Hello! Hi. How's it going, Annabel? I’m Beau, nice to meet you.
ANNABEL BLACKMAN: Hi! How's it going?
BEAU: Quite well! I've had some time this week to spend with your record– there's so many excellent tunes! How is everybody feeling with the release of the record coming around the corner?
ANNABEL: Pretty excited, I guess. We’re trying to plan what to do for this Courtney Barnett tour we're going on in October, and our album tour in Australia the month before. So it feels like impending hard work. So I guess I personally feel a little bit of... it's not dread… but I'm just a little bit scared, you know? Yeah– it's exciting too. It’s mainly excitement, mainly good things and happy stuff.
BEAU: Excellent– surely there will be hard work, but there will also be a lot of adrenaline, euphoria, and happiness etc…
ANNABEL: Yeah. The highs and lows of being in a band.
BEAU: So I'd love to know what you wanted to approach differently on Tally, versus Expired Candy and Everything is Dangerous…
ANNABEL: I think every time we make a record, we just get a little bit more relaxed or something. If I could graph it, it would kind of be this diagonal line… where we wrote a couple EPs and we sort of just had no idea what we were doing– we basically wrote things that sounded like our idols. We had a specific Body Type playlist, and we had our sounds that we like together. After that, we kind of went somewhere a lot more harsh and noisy because we realized that was fun to play live, and we're also a bit angry.
But now, it's sort of getting to a point where I can finally write a kind of chill song on an album and not feel like it's a total outlier, or something embarrassing when we play it live. I get self-conscious about that stuff, because it's obviously more fun to play something energetic that's gonna make people move or something, but I think I personally gravitate towards more like….stuff you could maybe cry to, I don't know. So there's definitely some more stuff like that on this album that's a bit more relaxed. There's still a couple of spiky bits.
I think with (our producer) Stella there to lend to everything or add her touch to it… It's just a bit smoother somehow. I don't mean that in like… a Steely Dan way (laughs)...
BEAU: (laughs) No, I get it– there's a little more little more peaks and valleys going on.
How was working with Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) as a producer and you know what did she kind of bring to the table that was exciting?
ANNABEL: Well by the end of it, she pretty much just felt like the fifth member of the band. She's so cool and has impeccable taste, so it was easy to trust her. I think in the past, we haven't worked with a “producer” before, we've kind of always put our recording engineers or whoever on the spot. Jonathan Boule (who also plays in Party Jazz and who we've worked with in the past), he definitely has given us his opinion, but he hasn't been too much of a driving force. He kind of let us be the people sort of steering the whole affair.
So it was great, because Stella was actually there to do it and suggest things. I think that was a great comfort, because you can just feel so unmoored when you're in the middle of finally recording a song you've painstakingly put all these hours into making. Then you're like “Oh god.. does it actually sound good with this guitar tone?” and everyone's like “Yeah sure…”, it's not very convincing. But yeah– she kind of was there to put the final word on things and really make us feel confident in what we were doing.
BEAU: Absolutely, and I think it's kind of a perfect pairing towards what you were saying before where you kind of have a few songs where you want to mellow out a little bit…
ANNABEL: Yeah and she can she can nail it all
BEAU: So what gear was crucial in getting the sound for the record?
ANNABELLE: Well— we flew over and we didn't have any of our guitars or pedals or anything. So we were just in the studio (Velvet Laboratory) and there was just so much stuff, and there was just a massive rack of guitars. I just have one guitar that I use, and so many pedals and stuff. So we tried to reassemble what our pedal boards would be like at home but I think it ended up being a bit more like fruity or something. Obviously not too fruity, because it doesn't sound that way.
I really like this Hot Cake guitar pedal. I brought one over and there was one already there, so I really didn't need to try so hard. That's just one of my favorite kinds of guitar sounds. I guess what was crucial was doing a bit of guitar gymnastics– like bringing in different ones for different songs, and tailoring it to the sound of the song. So it really wasn't like a specific instrument, it was kind of like using everything within reach, which was really cool.
BEAU: So “Eye Is A Mouth Is A Face” is apparently your most collaborative track now, and it's a great one. There's a lot of really great rhythms and call and response going on in that track. What was the process like collaborating on that one?
ANNABEL: Such a funny thing– I didn't realize it was our most collaborative track… I swear we've collaborated before quite heavily, but I think maybe yeah, it's true, we did collaborate pretty hard on that one.
We were just having a rehearsal and we just jammed it, I don't think there was any pre-existing structure. Usually everyone's got some kind of idea of their separate songs, then they would come in and leave a percentage of it free for everyone to do their own thing on top of..
This was pretty free form, and I guess that's maybe how the call and response comes more into it, because we were just sort of talking back and forth figuring out how to do it. Soph and Georgia just collaboratively worked up the lyrics together around this exhibition on Louise Bourgeois that was in Sydney at the time.
BEAU: One of my favorites is “Planet 8”, what an excellent tune! How did that song come together?
ANNABEL: So that's one of Georgia's songs, and she's like the “rock and roll pedigree” of the band. She's grown up with her parents with impeccable rock taste, and she's inherited that, and brings that to the band. I know that the song kind of references some other song. I think it's the line “Come Up and See Me” or something like that. She's sort of playfully saying like we sing songs like that song, so she's referencing the song directly.
She has a way of writing these songs that are very structured. But at the same time, because she's kind of a theater/acting person, she has this kind of way of guiding us through things that kind of make sense, but also has everyone a little bit like “What the hell's going on?” and “How do we actually structure this song in a way that's not too loose and non-structural?”. So I think it took a while for us to actually tie that together structurally, because it just kind of bounces between these different parts.
Anyway, that was funny. I think it made us all a little bit loopy when we were writing it, but we got there. Obviously it's heaps of fun to play too. There's all these different parts to it that make it pretty entertaining to play as opposed to just watching it.
When we were recording it, something that was great about working with Stella is that sometimes the obvious sound wasn't the one that you needed on a track, like you didn't need a really distorted guitar for a song that sort of felt “rock” or something. There's some bits where I came up with a Devo kind-of line in the studio, but it didn't have a Devo sound effect on it, it was more like a clean guitar with delay or something.
I found that part of recording really interesting because sometimes you go in the opposite direction to the one you think you need, and then it comes back and it kind of makes sense with all the predictable elements.
Body Type by Jack Saltmiras
BEAU: Another thing I really love about your band is the really melodic guitar solos. I'd love to know– what are some guitar influences in general, new and old?
ANNABEL: Yeah– sometimes, I think the guitar solo is the worst thing ever, and so that's pretty influential for me. I don't like every song to have a guitar solo, but sometimes it just happens (laughs). I sort of forgot this, but one of the things (that I liked from the past) for guitar solo sound was The Carpenters.
They have this insane Big Muff sound on some of their solos in their songs. You're like, “I thought this was kind of a real sweet like brother and sister affair”, and then they come in with these nasty guitar tones. So I find that pretty inspiring.
I think Sophie wrote a solo kind of for “Tally”– for the title song. It really reminded me of a solo by the band Girls. There's this sort of sprawling solo in that Father, Son, Holy Ghost album, the white one. It was kind of very emotional but jagged, and I don't know.
For comparison, I would say Sophie has a real distinctive style. She has a particular way, and she's got her things that she does with her hands, like on a lot of solos— her own kind of style. I guess I have one too, but I'm not really sure what that is. It's probably just a bit more utilitarian.
BEAU: So do you have any personal favorites on Tally yourself?
ANNABEL: The one that just came out, “Sick Bag”, I've been a big fan of. That was one of my picks for putting out as a single.The structure's really interesting…you know, it's got some almost classical music kind of references in it.
Other favourites…. I don't know, I hope it doesn't sound vain, but I've been having a lot of fun playing the Tally songs that I wrote live, because usually I do write some sort of quieter stuff, and it's been really fun to play live. It kind of reminds me of a lot of music from Melbourne where it's just like everyone's playing bar chords and yapping over the top of it, and so it's a bit more of a simple kind of playful song for us. It translates as being a pretty good time when we play it live.
BEAU: You recently teamed up with King Gizzard's p(doom) Records for this album. How has that been, and how did that kind of come about?
ANNABELLE: That's been great, and it sort of was like the missing piece. I mean, we put in so much work into this record, and really wanted to make something special. So it's cool to have that cherry on top. We're also lucky that it's sort of this shared release between them and Poison City Records in Australia– it's kind of like we got to have the best of both worlds.
That came about, because I think it was almost like a chance thing. Soph has known some of the band for a while. She did an internship in New York with 4AD at some point. I think she also hung out with them over there while she spent a year living there. So it's just kind of like being a really long, long-term spanning kind of friendship. I think maybe there's a Perth connection– all the girls except me are from Perth. So it was just completely lucky, I think.
BEAU: Body Type has played with a lot of really exciting artists— Foo Fighters, Sleater Kinney, Warpaint, Pixies. I could go on. Are there any kind of experiences from any of the bands you played with or any favorite shows that kind of stick out?
ANNABELLE: Definitely the Australia tour with Pixies was a highlight. That was something that I think we'd fantasize about, because we used to like drive to rehearsals listening to “Hey”, and I don't know, we thought we were pretty cool or whatever.
Sophie sort of sent them some direct emails being like, “ Hey, do you need us to support you?”. The kind of the thing that they just completely overlook. Then somehow they didn't overlook the suggestion at some point from bookers or whatever.
That was just insane, and I was pretty nervous around the band, especially Black Francis. It was pretty intimidating because they're so sort of legendary…it was just insane. We played the show at the Sydney Opera House forecourt, we played two of them.
That's kind of like the pinnacle of venues in Australia. I know it's great to be inside the Opera House, but it's even cooler to play in front of it, and stare at it and the Sydney Harbor Bridge and stuff. It doesn't get much more iconic than that. So it's pretty mental to open for them on those shows and get to play there.
I think there's some footage of Black Francis standing in the back doing like dad-mode kind of aerials– kind of getting a video of us playing as well. So that was amazing. (laughs)
BEAU: (laughs) That's incredible. Yeah, I definitely hear just a little touch of Pixies in some of Body type’s melodic guitar stuff I was talking about– that's another really great pairing there.
ANNABEL: Yeah, we're very lucky.
BEAU: Well, There's so many amazing Australian bands right now. We we cover a lot at Occult. We're somewhat tapped in, but I'd love to know if there's any Australian bands that you think everybody should know about…?
ANNABEL: I feel like I listen to a few abstract ones, but I mean, do you know about Eddie Current Suppression Ring?
BEAU: Yeah!
ANNABEL: They've got a new album out, and they're kind of one of Australia's biggest sort of underground bands, I guess. Yeah– they're pretty wild.
There’s a bit of an art school band scene in Sydney, and I never went to art school, maybe that's why I like their bands so much.There's also a band called Carnations that I'm a huge fan of. I don't know if they're playing anymore, but I just heard some songs and they have another album coming out. They've got an EP they put out a while ago and I'm a big fan of them.
There’s another guy called Boba Lego, who's sort of an extension of that scene, and he just keeps pumping out these albums. He's an artist– I'm actually sitting in front of one of his paintings. He kinda makes easy listening, like dad-rock kind of stuff and has a way of combining all the conventional rhymes and making it seem cool that he did it sort of thing.
Those are some of my picks, probably missed out on some epic recommendations, but you know…
BEAU: I’ll take em, sounds great. So the Courtney Barnett tour is coming soon. That's another great pairing, I imagine you're super excited for that. How's everybody feeling about that and everything else to follow?
ANNABEL: I mean that's exciting. I hadn't really seen Courtney play live before, but when we were in LA, we went to this fire benefit. She played a few songs, and she stole the show– she's so amazing. She's such an incredible guitarist, and I don't think she even plays with a pick. It's crazy. There’s so much sort of natural kind-of punk spirit. She's not like trying to be a mega punk a lot, but I just think she inherently embodies it or something. So yeah, I think it'll be really cool.
I'm looking forward to seeing her, and also Stella (Mogzawa) is an amazing drummer, so it's gonna be cool hanging out with them watching them both play a heap. We haven't been on a tour that extensive throughout Europe before. We've seen some pictures of some of the rooms, so you know, feeling scared but feeling good.
BEAU: Yeah, I'm sure you'll crush it. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.
So is there any chance you're going to play in New York anytime soon, or the United States?
ANNABEL: I mean, we would love to.. (laughs). I think if we can somehow do that with this album release, that would be amazing. It's a little exxy, but we'll try.
BEAU: Well, I'll be there whenever you do come to New York. Thanks so much for the chat. I really appreciate it, the record is lovely!
ANNABEL: Thanks, Beau. Nice to meet you.
BEAU: Nice to meet you as well have a good one!
Tally by Body Type is out everywhere this Friday, July 24th via pdoom Records & Poison City Records.
You can order red vinyl from pdoom records here
You can order black or blue vinyl from Poison City Records here
You can see merch and more here on their bandcamp.
And you can listen below.
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