Korn‘s Jonathan Davis was so excited by ORGY that he created his own record label …
How many waves of emo are we up to now? Three? Four? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as there’s never a shortage of sad young people who want loud emotional guitar music to soothe their tortured souls. UK quartet Moose Blood are part of the current wave, and are are visiting Australia for the first time, touring alongside good time boys Luca Brasi and The Hard Aches. Singer-guitarist Mark Osborne kindly woke early to answer our questions.
Hysteria: You’ve never been to Australia and now you’re making two visits in six months. How come?
Osborne: We were booked to come for Soundwave, but then that didn’t happen and we got an offer to go out with Luca Brasi. It’s a place I never thought we’d get to go to, to be honest.
Hysteria: You’ll have a lot of fun with those guys. You’ve been touring pretty much constantly for the past couple of years, particularly through the States. How much of that has influenced Blush?
Osborne: It influenced it a lot, especially lyrically. The sound of the record came from touring so much because we wrote it in such a short amount of time. We had about two months in between finishing our last tour before we went to record and that’s when we really sat down and started writing and demo-ing for the record. We had such an intense year off the back of that record, we toured every month for it. Writing while we were on the road didn’t work for us, it felt really forced and not like we were really getting things out of it. We messed around with two ideas while we were on Warped Tour and they eventually made it onto the record, but other than that, we were so focused on concentrating on the tours. I think that any time off was spent focusing for the next tour.
Hysteria: I think people really underestimate how much mental space touring takes up, and how that makes it hard to write on tour.
Osborne: Exactly! You’re really concerned about what you’re doing at the time and what you’re doing next and you don’t think past that. Our schedule was so busy—and that’s what we want to be doing, we want to be busy—but we were always very aware that we needed to start writing, it was just getting time to do it. Eddy (Brewerton, guitar) and me spent that short time off relentlessly writing, going through ideas, trying to get them recorded and sent to the boys and take them into practice and then make them into actual songs we could demo before we could actually make the record.
Hysteria: I must say I was surprised to learn you guys are British. Your music sounds quite American in a lot of ways, which I guess is why it does so well in America.
We’re definitely influenced by stuff like Jimmy Eat World, Brand New, all that old school stuff that we still love and listen to now. That’s what has influenced us from the start, but it wasn’t like we were trying to change our sound—we just wanted to be better.
[Mark Osborne]
Osborne: We’re definitely influenced by stuff like Jimmy Eat World, Brand New, all that old school stuff that we still love and listen to now. That’s what has influenced us from the start, but it wasn’t like we were trying to change our sound—we just wanted to be better. We really tore every idea we had apart when it came to making the record—should we rewrite it, should we scrap it? We take a lot of influence from a very American sound, for sure.
Hysteria: I’m sure working with Beau Burchell (Saosin, Underoath) helped with that too.
Osborne: He has a lot of influence on the record and the way we put stuff down. He’s a proper producer for us. His initial thinking was that maybe we would get half a record done because we only had two weeks and went out quite underprepared. We had about six demos, a couple of instrumentals and then a couple of tracks we hadn’t demoed and had literally finished working on the day before we went out. He really pushed to get the best out of us. If we weren’t happy with anything, then he was not going to record it. If it was something we thought was maybe not the right part, it’d be highlighted and we’d come back for it.
When we were recording we’d be tearing the ideas apart, then we’d go home to our apartment at the end of the day and we’d probably be writing something then. Even if it was a guitar part or lyrics or melody. Then the next day we’d do exactly the same thing again, and then we wouldn’t settle for anything less.
Playing together so much has made us better at it, hopefully, and we’ve adapted to being in a band and this being what we do now. We’ve made a better record than our first one, for sure.
Blush is out now through Hopeless / UNFD
Luca Brasi Australian Tour with guests Moose Blood (UK) & The Hard Aches
ALL TOUR SHOWS WITH LUCA BRASI SOLD OUT
UNIFY GATHERING 2017 TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE HERE
Wednesday 17 August – The Basement, Canberra
Thursday 18 August – The Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle
Friday 19 August – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Saturday 20 August –The Zoo, Brisbane
Thursday, 25th August – Jack Rabbit Slims, Perth
Friday 26 August – Fat Controller, Adelaide
Saturday 27 August – The Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Sunday 28 August – The Brisbane Hotel, Hobart
Moose Blood
