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Sekiden.
I have long been on a personal mission to prove to the world just how wonderful Sekiden is, but just when they really start blowing up it seems fate decides to step in and there's nothing but silence from the Sekiden camp. However, with the release of their new album, the band is ready for another full scale assault on audiences the world over. That's right: Sekiden are back, baby!
Drummer Mirko is surprisingly blase about everything the band's
endured over the past couple of years. "The problem is that
we recorded our last album 'Junior Fiction' at the end of 2002,
and it wasn't released until 2003. And it's the same again this
time. So when you look at it, it's been years between releases,
which doesn't sound too good," he admits.
However, while the band have enjoyed some levels of success (a stint on the Channel [V] Music Bus in Queensland, and a successful presence in Northern America thanks to their friends at Boompa Records), Sekiden have their sights firmly on Australia.
"We've decided to make a bigger effort here at home before going overseas again. The last shows in Canada were great so we'll be heading over again later this year. Last year 'Junior Fiction' was released in Japan so we've had plans on heading there... but that's when our record company... sort of... went broke."
Free of the time restraints that commonly go hand-in-hand with record company deals, Sekiden were able to make the album they wanted to make. "We took last year off to work on our album and we decided to build our own studio under my house and did it there," he laughs, as if it really wasn't all that hard. "We recorded everything ourselves and tried to self-produce it, which kind of worked. I guess we just wanted to make an album that didn't have any sort of money or time restraints on it. We made 'Junior Fiction' with Magoo producing, which was great, but this time we wanted to do it a completely different way. And since we didn't have the record company breathing down our necks this time, we were able to take as much time as was needed to get the songs sounding the way we needed them to, to have the music as close as we possibly could to the way it sounded in our heads."
Until now I've always been of the opinion that Sekiden are a live band, that 'Junior Fiction' was good but didn't capture the live energy that just seems to pulsate from the stage when you see the band live. 'Sound Instincts', however, captures it with ease. "With 'Junior Fiction' there was a lot of rein pulling where we thought we should record songs slower than they actually were. So this time, rather than doing that, we chose to record the songs that were a more diverse [tempo] and they sort of took on a mind of their own without us steering them in any particular direction."
The band didn't even succumb to the usual 'we should be working on the album but let's just play video games instead' mentality that has seen many a band fall by the wayside when cut free of time restraints. "We were all enthused by the whole experience, so we were all really into it," Mirko assures me. "Just about every day that we didn't have to work we'd head downstairs and work on the record. I thought that we'd fight a lot but we didn't - we were all on the same page all along. It all came together nicely.
"I think we'll start working on a new album in the next couple of months and stick to doing it all ourselves. Now that we know we can do it, we can just keep making records. And maybe be a little more prolific than we have been," he laughs. "One album every couple of years is bullshit."
Ryan Smith
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Sekiden play at the Enigma Bar with Spod and I Heart Hiroshima on Thurs 30 March, and 'Sound Instincts' is out through Valve.
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