Growing up in the 90s, Simon Connolly (aleks and the ramps, Potential Falcon) began a musical obsession with Australian bands such as The Fauves, You Am I and Knievel as well as US acts Dinosaur Jr, Buffalo Tom and Wilco.
Taking a circuitous journey through indie pop with Aleks And The Ramps and Alt-Country with Potential Falcon, Simon has wound his way back to where it all began with Arrester, an indie-rock three piece with a shamelessly solid 90s sound.
Supported by Joe Foley (alex and the ramps) on bass and Jacqui Brannelly (Pourparlour) on drums, Arrester have released their second EP Endless Summer Days, which is set to be accompanied by an east coast tour starting May 22nd with shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and regional centres.
To celebrate its release and the upcoming tour, Simon gave us a track by track run down of the EP, check it out below and if you like what you’re hearing visit Arrester’s Bancamp for more info.
Rusty
Known to the band as ‘Rusty Shit Heap’, this song is a butt load of fun to play live. When we first started jamming it out in rehearsals, what now seems like a simple beat kept throwing us for a loop. I really like the way it kind of wrong foots you as to where the 1 is at the start. Also anything with an extended guitar solo means fun times for me because I write too many words usually and am forever chained to the mic.
Lyrically ‘Rusty’ is a mash up of different events from my childhood and adolescence, modified somewhat with creative license. The first verse vaguely references a friend I had in primary school who had a dirt bike track in his yard in Wagga Wagga NSW. My mum hated me being friends with him as he was kind of a bad kid, we’d spend all our time at his house blowing things up and tooling around on dirt bikes. The song then moves through a few other vignettes of bad behaviour throughout my high school years before moving through to adulthood and yearning for the freedom of childhood.
The Will Beneath The Waves
This one was written in less than an hour when I felt we needed a second song in Open E tuning. Having worked up the Jeff Buckley cover in that tuning I knew from experience that if a song was in a tuning that was only used once we’d never play it live as it just takes way to long between songs to re-tune. I like that it has 2 extra bars before the instrumental break just to fuck with people. It is a lot of fun to play live and for whole stretches of it I just strum open strings so I can do some shadow puppets or whatever with my free hand.
The lyrics of this song reference the death of Jeff Buckley and dreams of floating away on the ocean. While writing it I kept thinking of The Drones’ Shark Fin Blues or Everclear’s Santa Monica. Not that it has anything to do with either.
The Finish Line
When I initially wrote ‘The Finish Line’ it had a different opening/bridge guitar part. When we started learning it Joe (Foley, bass) pointed out to me that I had basically stolen it from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Californication. You can’t get anything past him, he can remember how to play every song we’ve ever written, from Minute Major to Alex and The Ramps and Potential Falcon, he’s got ten years of songs stored away in his brain.
I tend to write tiny snippets of lyrics on my phone, mostly single lines, and then come back to them when I come up with some chords. I think this started with the opening line ‘looking for some quiet contemplation’ and flowed easily from there. Like a lot of the current crop of Arrester songs this one is about keeping your head down and doing the good work of making art with some hope of a payoff in the future, but not minding if there isn’t one.
Vancouver
I’ve been a Jeff Buckley fan since I was about 14 and just never got tired of his stuff. I got to see him on the Mystery White Boy tour in 1996 at The Canberra Theatre with Crow as the support. Years later I would mix quite a few shows for Crow and marvel at how funny life is sometimes.
This is my favourite JB song, I’ve always wanted to cover one of his tunes but needed to figure out a way to do it without trying too hard to sing like him.
The recording session for this EP was initially just supposed to be a day of demos to see how things were sounding. At the end of the day we threw down ‘Vancouver’ for shits and giggles. Listening back to the recordings we decided just to release what we had as the vibe and sound was really working for us. It took a while to work this song out, largely due to the almost free-time end section, but I think we did a good job and managed to de-Buckley-ify it enough that people are just assuming we wrote it. Mission Accomplished.
Endless Summer Days
Some old band-mates of mine said this song was unlike anything I’d ever written and to do more like it. We’ll see how that goes but for now we have ‘Endless Summer Days’. I still can’t play the intro/break guitar part all the way through without fucking it up but decided to leave the fluffed parts in on the record.
I’ve been obsessed with Led Zeppelin for the last few years and love all the little mistakes and kick pedal squeaks etc left in their recordings. I read an interview with Steve Albini where he talked about recording the ‘Page and Plant’ record and asking Jimmy if he wanted to re-do a guitar part with a clear mistake in it, Jimmy replied ‘they’ll get the idea.’ I certainly did.
The lyrics are the most pessimistic/acerbic I’ve ever written I think. It’s largely inspired by living in Canberra during high school and the complacency that can come of being middle class. I chucked in some global warming metaphors for good measure and boom! We had a song.
Tour Dates
Fri 22/5 The Retreat, Brunswick
Sat 23/5 The Bridge Hotel Castlemaine
Wed 27/5 The Phoenix, Canberra
Thu 28/5 The Lass O’gowrie Newcastle
Fri 29/5 Standard Bowl, Sydney
Sat 30/5 Dicey Rileys, Wollongong
Fri 12/6 June Rics, Brisbane
Sat 13/6 June At The Treehouse, Byron
Sun 14/6 The Bearded Lady, Brisbane
