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The Panics.
The Panics' mini-album 'Cracks In The Wall', sounds a little introverted and gloomy. That's also how I would describe 'singer/guitarist/pianist Justin Laffer, although he was quite friendly with it. It's because his band are thinking of leaving Perth and heading across the desert to start again in Melbourne.
"We wanted to start work straight away on another album, and we just wanted to do it somewhere apart from Perth," he explains. "We've all been here doing the same stuff now for about three years, so we're all really into the idea of changing the scenery for a while. We've got friends in Melbourne, so we'd just get a house there, finish writing a record and record it, and try to get away from the comforts around here. At the moment we're a little lazy. We get a bit complacent because we've got it easy here, if we go somewhere else we've got to try a bit harder."
Apparently The Panics, whose promotional material simply described 'Cracks...' as 'a record,' don't know whether to call it a mini-album. "Well it's seven tracks..." he trails off. "It's a new record, you know? We could have added a couple more tracks and called it an album, but it's long enough for the mood that it is: it's a kind of low-paced, dark record. We weren't trying to make a big record just yet, we wanted to try a couple of different things. We're just going to record all the time, you can't be too precious."
It has a very different sound - much stark, less upbeat - than last year's 'House On A Street In A Town I'm From.' "Some of the stuff we were playing after touring, and after doing the first record, not all of it is how we want to be represented. We needed to work on lyrics and stuff a lot more and try and create more of an image of our own. This record is not that, but it's our kind of stepping stone.
"We tried to be more spontaneous in the studio. We made [the songs] all up as we went along. I just laid down something I'd been working on, just words and chords, and then the guys would just make up stuff that day and that became the record. It was good after labouring on the first record, to do something which didn't take long at all, we just pressed 'record'... We were just trying to create something different and I think the next record we'll try and make really big."
Laffer also says that they are paying less attention to the quality of the recording nowadays, preferring simply just to capture the energy and the passion in their music. "We believe that the mistakes in the track and the quality of the audio is definitely secondary to the passion in the song. Our first record is full of bum notes, notes I didn't hit in my vocals, but there was a great atmosphere in the studio when we did it and we wanted to get that across. After making our first record all digital, on a computer, we just thought it would be nice to make this record in a couple of weeks, just playing together, you know, like a Stones record... If it's not that good, then that will do, but we think the songs are great. That's the kind of mentality that we're going for: fucking around with buttons is not as good as getting a good take."
So what next for the Panics? "I just want to get the energy back up for the next record. Get a lot of instruments, get a good studio, get a good producer to help because we're bound to do each other's heads in. We always produce our records ourselves and it leads to a lot of arguments, in a good way, but we'd like to offload some of that onto people who actually knew what they were doing. I'd love to make a good rock'n'roll record... I don't know, we'll see what happens!"
Ben Revi
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The Panics play at the Enigma on Sat 20 March with The Morning After Girls. 'Cracks In The Wall' is out now through Embryo/MGM.
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