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End Of Fashion.
 Although
End Of Fashion have been absent for a while, escaping our wide
brown land for the more exciting shores of England and America,
they're back with a vengeance. Their new EP 'Too Careful' is
a corker, right from its great cover through to Justin Burford's
exceptional vocal performances. Burford is all to happy to let
me know what's been going on in the EOF camp while they've been
away.
"We went to South By Southwest, which was amazing. And we did some shows in London, I think we did one more tour after that, and since then we've just kind of been working on getting our album together. It got to the point where four or five months had passed, and then we decided, 'Shit, we'd better put out an EP.' The album's probably still another six months away, so we took a week off and recorded the EP... Oh, and we went to Japan a few weeks ago. That was really cool."
Burford, like a lot of Australian artists, found the Japanese experience to be quite surreal. "When you go over there they say, 'Now, don't be too disconcerted, but the crowds are really respectful and really polite.' What the crowds do is give you a short pause after each song, and then they will allow you to, for want of a better phrase, get your shit together and play the next song. They did do that the first night and it did put us off. But we were playing on this bill with a lot of other bands, and there was this punk-ish band, you know, like [attempts a Japanese accent] 'Revolution!' They're all like that, you know, 'Fuck society! Out on the streets!' But they're all dressed immaculately, it's funny. Anyway, in between every song he would have a kind of thing to say between each song, he'd explain what the next song was about and he even at one stage told the crowd the key the song was in... It was strange but suddenly it made sense. Over here people expect a lot more from rock bands - 'here we are now, entertain us,' you want to feel like you've walked away from an experience. Over there it's completely different. You go to a rock show to hear what your favourite band has to say about what's going on right now. They've got a different way of looking at the world."
Burford's vocal on the title track is superb, and really made me sit up and take notice - something not as apparent with their debut, 'Rough Diamonds.' "Something not many people realise is that when we recorded the 'Rough Diamonds' EP, I was sick as a dog. I had come down with something that hit me about a week before we went into recording, and subsided a couple of days before we finished, which is when I tried to do all the vocal takes, all in the space of a couple of days. I think there was much more of a throwaway attitude [with the new record]. None of us were really analysing it at all. We got a lot of Beatles references [from 'Rough Diamonds'], and a lot of really good stuff, but it occurred to us at some point that if we go off and make a record now and some of the songs are more indicative of who we are live: more kind of punked out, really faster edgier pop songs, it might look like it's coming out of nowhere. Even though we didn't plan on making this EP, it's a good opportunity to flip the first EP on its head and make fun of it, and approach it with completely different ideology."
The difference between 'Rough Diamonds' and 'Too Careful' also comes from personal changes in Burford's life. "I quit smoking earlier in the year. I used to smoke a lot of dope which I've stopped doing as well. I was running out of ideas for my songs, I'd lost my motivation to write, so I thought, 'That's it, I've got to get rid of it.' The difference between where our head was at recording last year's EP to this year's EP was we'd done a few more tours, we'd started taking what we're doing a bit more seriously in terms of, 'well, it looks like this is our life for the next ten years, we'd better get good at it!'"
Ben Revi
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'Too Careful' is out now through EMI and End Of Fashion play at the Enigma Bar on Sun 21 Nov.
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