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Line of Departure.
 After knowing all of the guys from Line of Departure for so long and seeing them completely get their act together as a band, I was delighted to hear that they'd finally gotten around to finishing their long awaited debut CD-EP 'Ixora'. I sit down with charismatic bass player Sam Le Ray for a chat at the Worldsend on a sunny Wednesday afternoon to talk about the upcoming release and ask him, as probably the least experienced member of the band when it comes to the studio, what the recording process was like from his perspective.
"It's been really good," Le Ray tells me with no hesitation. "It was pretty much my first time in the studio, but the other guys have had a lot of experience with other bands. It's been a really drawn out process, actually: we started recording back in November of last year when we did the drums and the bass with the help of [producer] Darren Thompson. Then over a period of the next six months we did the rest of it in bits and pieces. We recorded guitars and vocals and sort of did it a song or two at a time. It would have been good to do it in one big block, which is probably what we will want to do next time. But we did a lot of home recordings and studio recordings and they all melded together, finally."
Having so much time to live with the initial recording, I ask whether the songs on the CD evolved much between the beginning and the end of the recording process. "Yeah, they definitely did," Le Ray confirms. "I guess one of the good things about having so much time was that we had the raw tracks of the bass and drums to listen to, and it allowed us to take them home and work on a whole lot of guitar overlays and different vocal ideas and then test them in the rehearsal room as well as at home. So by the time we got to actually record them we had a whole lot of new fresh ideas.
"One of our songs was completely restructured in the studio as well because we had that time in between. It was only on the title track: we came up with a few different ideas and what we did really changed the dynamic of the song. That was something that we were all pretty stoked with, and hearing it back is so different to just jamming it out in the rehearsal room."
Could it perhaps have been a bit too much time between the inception and the final release? After all this time are these songs still relevant to the band?
"Totally," he insists. "We've played a fair few shows over the last twelve months, but not to the stage that those songs have been worn out at all. We might play them slightly differently live now, but I think they represent a pretty good snapshot of that time. We're still a pretty young band and we are still developing our whole sound. So it was almost like a peg in the ground where we said 'this is the sort of thing we're going for and we'll work from there', and it's been really good. Now we just can't wait to get it out there and have other people listen to it. We're writing heaps of new songs in the meantime but I still think it represents us well at the moment. We still really enjoy playing those songs live, and songs tend to get stronger the more you play them and the more you listen to them. They're all still relevant and we're all still keen to play them.'
Le Ray is clearly happy with what the band has produced.
"It's way beyond the way that I though it would end up sounding, I'm very impressed with it really," he enthuses. "The whole recording process was made so much easier working with Darren, who the other guys had already worked with. It was just really good fun to see how it's all done: after being around bands for so long and just doing demo recordings it's good to see how it's all done when it's done properly. It can be a bit sterile in the studio, but once you hear the final product it all pays off."
Sam Vinall
 | Line Of Departure launch 'Ixora' at the Enigma Bar on Sat 5 Nov with Sumi, The Open Season and The Rip. |
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