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Grand Fatal.
Sydney post-punk heroes Grand Fatal might just be the most hard-working band in the country. In just 18 months together the band has released two EPs, played around 150 shows across the country and just unleashed a full-length album. Drummer Ross Jarratt confirms it's been hectic, but isn't worried about the band's high-velocity lifestyle taking its toll.
"You don't get a lot of sleep, that's for sure!" he laughs. "But we just love it man, so that's the main thing - the recording, the playing, the touring, the just being together part of it - we love it, you know? We've all been doing it for ages in different bands over the years and this feels like finally a band making ground as much as we can push it. It feels like it's going at the right pace."
That said, it hasn't been easy for Grand Fatal. The recording of their debut full-length 'Allies,' a disc full of frenetic At The Drive-In-esque punk rock blasts, was plagued by difficulty.
"We did like 166 hours in eight days, which is pretty gnarly, hey? That's the amount of time we could afford to do it in so we just took pretty much all of every day and powered through it. Jimmy [Fatal, vocals] had the flu real bad and spent all the time that he wasn't either tracking or singing pretty much just sleeping on the couch in a sweat. The power amps in the studio at one point started smoking and sending out this horrible, obnoxious smell, and then I accidentally switched off the power to the hard drive on the second last day which contained all the files! It was just one of those moments where it was like 'holy fuck, we're screwed.' [But] we didn't lose it. Jon Boy [Rock, producer] had saved recently and we only lost one file. I thought I was gonna be dead. Everyone was just sitting there looking at me!"
Jarratt is quick to emphasise that the hardships turned out for the best. The album has a rawness and an energy that combines bitingly angry vocals and furious rhythms to effectively capture Grand Fatal's impressive live reputation. The band prize themselves on taking risks, and that aspect of their character is wholly reflected in 'Allies' - it doesn't sound quite like anything the current punk 'scene' has to offer.
"The records that are coming out at the moment are all very safe and pedestrian - like everybody's trying to pick the bones off a well worn carcass," Jarratt reckons. "Our whole thing is about striving to forge our own sound. Sure, you can hear where [we got] our guitar sounds and what we listened to as we were growing up, but we just want to be ourselves. We might fail, but, fuck, at least we know we tried and just did our own thing."
Records aside, it's Grand Fatal's live show that has seen them become surrounded in much-deserved hype. They've supported Grinspoon, Shihad, Cog and After The Fall, but in November and December Grand Fatal will take the biggest risk of their short careers when they head out on their first headlining tour.
"It's kind of exciting and kind of scary at the same time!" Jarratt laughs. "We just feel like there's a good chance that we will have bolstered enough support for ourselves in the touring that we've done over the last 18 months to pull heads to our shows. We'll see. It will fucking feel great when it does... if it does. We take a risk and either we'll feel like the rule-iest band around or we'll feel like a bunch of dickheads. But either way, we'll have fun playing 'cause we always do, so how bad can it be?"
And what can punters expect of the Grand Fatal show? "Having
watched it on video a few times it kind of looks like a train
that's going too fast and you're wondering if it might just
about to fall off the rails at any point, but it just holds
on. For us it's certainly really exciting and hopefully for
people who watch it it's equally as exciting. It's exciting,
it's sweaty and it's potentially deadly."
Matt Vesely
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Grand Fatal and The Scare play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Thurs 8 Dec.
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