The Laurels burst onto the scene with their debut album Plains, but have kept us waiting a solid four years for a follow up as relentless touring gave way to various other hurdles that kept a follow-up album out of their grasp.

Now, after a solid year-and-a-half toiling away in their homemade studio, discovering new hip hop influences and conducting all sorts of sonic experiments, the Sydney quartet are no doubt very relieved to have their sophomore album Sonicology done and dusted – and they’ve got a lot to tell us about each track below in a very revealing track-by-track.

The eclectic beast that is Sonicology was released last Friday through Rice Is Nice, and is available for your listening pleasure below. The Laurels are also launching straight out of the studio and into a national tour to launch the record, with dates below, and fans must be hanging for their return.

Reentry

Piers: The Blue Mountains bush fires in 2013 were the catalyst for this song. The fires destroyed 65,000 hectares of forest, many homes and unfortunately affected a lot of families. It was started by the army during an explosives training exercise. Thankfully, the Acting Chief of Defence later apologised.

I was living with some friends at the time and given that the sky was blazing red and we were powerless (overhead power lines been knocked down on our property during a mini-storm), we decided to bail with our valuables down to the city while far more brave people in the RFS stayed to do battle. I packed my synth and computer and crashed in a spare room at a friend’s place, pretty much spending the whole week trying to rip off ‘Da Funk’ by Daft Punk.

Originally this song had snippets of a famous boxer talking about his pre-fight routine in the intro, as it felt similar to what we were doing, preparing to make a knockout album. Unfortunately that boxer was far too controversial for inclusion on a Laurels record and we would have also been sued. It was designed to appear at the beginning of the album and function similar to how a hype man in a rap crew would, pumping up our own tyres and declaring our mission statement (something we lack as we are not a rap group and usually quite modest).

To make matters worse, I tried to sing it in the style of David Bowie doing ‘Golden Years’, then had to speed the vocals and entire song up because it sounded so terrible. It’s probably our equivalent of Backstreet’s Back.

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Sonicology

Luke: Sonicology looks at how expression through sound has evolved over the ages and the many guises that music has taken along the way. The artists we find the most inspiring are the ones who have meaningful messages, particularly bands like The Beatles or Public Enemy who have the ability to affect the collective consciousness and bring on social change. Sometimes it can go horribly awry like it did with Charles Manson, but everyone has the potential to take their own meaning from a song and the propensity to make it something positive.

Music is such a powerful way of conveying information and we feel it’s important to keep that sort of expression separated from outside influences in an industry that is generally more focused on creating trends to aid in the amount of units they’re shifting. Our first priority has always been catharsis and then everything else is incidental (which probably explains why we have such long gaps between releases.)

Clear Eyes

Jasper: This track came about when my computer died temporarily and all I had was an SP-404 and a tape deck. All the sounds came from a Casio Rapman that I’ve had since I was a kid (kinda bummed I didn’t get to use the scratching sounds from the in-built ‘turntable’, but there’s always hope).

When we were tracking the album, Luke chucked some funky guitar on it at the end of a session. I took it home and added the rave synth and bass that come in at the end. After coming back to it, the track took on a new meaning to me of letting go and having fun with whatever you’ve got at hand, and thankfully felt I could change the name from the original working title ‘Rapman’.

Some Other Time

Luke: The years following the release of Plains were a very strenuous time for my family. My father battled severe bipolar disorder for the majority of his life and the nature of the illness meant that it continually worsened as time went on. This song focuses on a family struggling to come to terms with a loved one who no longer feels love and how that forces you to completely rethink your own sense of self and purpose.

Unfortunately he lost his battle with the disease last year but he still continues to inspire us on our respective paths with the wealth of wisdom he left behind. The main message is that we can’t get caught up working towards material gain when we run the risk of losing sight of why we’re really here.

Trip Sitter

Piers: A trip sitter functions as a guide, someone that can help you navigate on your journey towards the interior. The person this song is about had related to me a story that involved them having to take care of a friend who had taken acid on a bus, so I used the title as a vague reference to that situation in the hope she’d realise it was for her.

There’s only two guitars on this and the rest of the tracks are labeled with names such as “Enya”, “Nine Inch Nails Synth”, “Intergalactic” and “Bass station Arthur Russell”… so I can’t entirely remember what keyboard patches or instruments were used. It was written in a day or so and the freak out section was added the night before Jasper recorded his drums, just to make it a bit less repetitive. It was meant to sound like Prince crossed with some kind of early 90s video game music which plays when you pass a level, i.e a victorious song.

The “Next level” lyric tries to tie in that video game reference with Timothy Leary and his five levels of psychedelic experience, as well as the Heaven’s Gate religious group/cult. I stole the line “We can only be visitors here” from David Attenborough’s narration on the Planet Earth TV series (the Mountains episode). How profound.

Frequensator

Luke: Edwin Sheather from Dead China Doll got us really interested in binaural beats, particularly how theta waves can be used to bring on similar states used in deep meditation. The idea that music can be used to alter consciousness on that level makes us value a song as an artefact that can pass knowledge from generation to generation.

The root of all our thoughts are based on the communication between neurons in our brains and our brainwaves interact through harmonic frequencies which dictate our overall mood. Our deep emotional connection to music is a way we can help keep them in balance.

Aerodrome

Piers: On the way to Brisbane airport there is a big sign that says ‘Aerodrome’, and I loved the way the word ‘planes’ could create multiple meanings when sung in regards to our first album, with the take-off connotations etc. This song was the second one (chronologically) written for the record, and the drum beat was originally a loop of Rapper Dapper Snapper by Edwin Birdsong.

The spoken word parts are taken from the Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Tape, which is pretty freaky and not something I would recommend watching. I cut his words up to create new sentences as his voice had a real hypnotic quality to it that sounded good when separated from the fact he was trying to make the tape viewers kill themselves.

I don’t subscribe to their theories but the talk of comets, reaching higher levels of existence, the fact they all wore Nike shoes and suffered delusions on a level comparable to ours (we actually believed we were making a hip hop record) was something that resonated and seemed to fit thematically.

The cult members were trying to reach an extraterrestrial spacecraft which was (apparently) trailing Comet Hale-Bopp, which is the comet the news reporter on Reentry (first track) is talking about. Everything is connected. The lyrical reference to ancient Rome is a shout-out to Philip K Dick, one of my favourite authors and another sufferer of delusions.

Mystic for sure.

Hit And Miss

Luke: Hit and Miss is a song about the stigma surrounding mental illness and the struggle that sufferers face when trying to convey their feelings to others. There’s a tendency to label someone selfish when they resort to drastic measures like suicide without fully being able to comprehend the inner working of the brain, it’s not simply a matter of thinking yourself out of these situations when you’re dealing with a severe chemical imbalance.

The sunny harmonies and poppy chord changes mask the dark lyrics much like those dealing with depression put on a facade to hide their feelings from the people they fear will judge them. Continuing to educate people about the disease is the key to breaking those stereotypes while we work our way towards a cure.

Central Premonition Registry

Piers: There is a real Central Premonitions Registry that was started in 1968. I loved the original start-up purpose of identifying people with psychic gifts and for this song I imagined it was an advertisement for the Registry and that I was a receptionist behind the front desk, trying to get people to ring in with their premonitions.

I’ve had quite a few recurring dreams as well as unusual ones that have come true (often shortly afterwards), and I like reading and researching possible reasons for this as well as other people’s experiences with this strange occurrence. I think we all have psychic ability to some extent, it’s just that some develop it further whilst others remain unaware.

The Registry’s acronym is also CPR, a method of getting oxygen to the brain which can be life-saving. It seemed to fit well, given that CPR is usually performed when someone is unconscious, and the unconscious mind is the source of dreams and intuition.

Mecca

Luke: I’ve never really considered myself to be a spiritual person but it’s something that I’ve always wanted to work towards. I don’t find the idea of religion appealing but am intrigued by the concept of a universal consciousness and how that can be reached through meditation and psychedelics.

We have access to all this knowledge but ultimately we’re let down by our inability to work together as a society because of the behavioural constructs we’ve inherited from our ancestors. Any vaguely spiritual person has their own idea of nirvana that they’re working towards, but that will inevitably be dependent on how they act in this lifetime.

That kind of ideology has the potential to bring enlightenment but it’s also difficult to put into practice and maintain. I think it mainly comes down to the fact that I still need a lot more self-discipline!

Zodiac K

Piers: This song was the earliest one written for the album – after previously only using digital 8 to 16 track recorders, I acquired some recording software and it opened up a new world of possibility. I suppose this is why it sounds so different to anything that I had done before, as it became much easier to reverse sections of music and create trippy sounds. Luke played his guitar with a Fisher & Paykel toy robot that we nicknamed ‘Juan’, in order to create the drone that sounds a bit like a chainsaw buzzing.

Originally the track featured spoken word/inspirational quotes by my favourite racing driver Ayrton Senna, which seemed more applicable to life than motor racing. This would prove to be a hurdle when it came to sample clearance though. The ‘K’ in the title comes from Josef K, the protagonist in a Kafka novel named The Trial, who is arrested on his 30th birthday for an unspecified crime.

Being charged by a mysterious court for a crime you’re unaware of can be likened to the human condition sometimes, the quest for truth remaining ever elusive, much like the Zodiac Killer. My dream job is to be a detective, but we all already are in a way, investigating our own true identity. True detectives.

The Laurels ‘Sonicology’ Tour

Thu Oct 20 – Selina’s, Coogee (Free Show)
Fri Oct 28 – The Foundry, Brisbane – Tickets
Sat Oct 29 – Sol Bar, Maroochydoore – Tickets
Wed Nov 2 – Sosueme, Bondi (Free Show)
Thu Nov 3 – Transit Bar, Canberra – Tickets
Fri Nov 4 – The Curtin Bandroom, Melbourne – Tickets
Fri Nov 11 – The Northern, Byron (Free Show)
Sat Nov 12 – The Imperial, Erskineville, Sydney – Tickets
Fri Nov 18 – Badlands, Perth – Tickets
Sat Nov 19 – Highway Hotel, Bunbury (Free Show)
Fri Nov 25 – Hotel Gearins, Katoomba – Tickets
Sat Nov 26 – Rad Bar, Wollongong – Tickets
Fri Dec 2 – Brisbane Hotel, Hobart – Tickets

More info

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