Miracle Hat

Adelaide's a strange little place, for me, anyway - you get to the point where you feel like you have a rough idea of the bands that are out there. However, I've been proven wrong twice in the last month. The relevance of that last statement lies in the fact that I had never heard of Adelaide grunge/rock outfit, Miracle Hat, though my editor seemed genuinely surprised when I said it. Rest assured, I do now - I even have a copy of their CD.

One of the influences they cite are The Smashing Pumpkins and, after a cursory listen to their new EP 'Do You See?', I latched onto an awesome piece of musicianship which had the same feel as material from an album like 'Siamese Dream'.

"Dave [Bills/guitar, piano] and I really love The Smashing Pumpkins," frontman Paul Blunden explains, "It's not that we're trying to emulate them, it's really difficult to get that feeling that they get in their songs."

Others they list as big influences are older rock bands like Led Zeppelin, but as well as The Smashing Pumpkins, I hear a lot of 'grunge' to use a loaded phrase.

"Matt [Beshara], our drummer, absolutely loves Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, so I guess that would come through a lot in our music. I mean we all love all those bands, so it's obviously going to come through in the music."

Grunge music and barn dances don't often dwell in the same house, but that's not the case for Miracle Hat, as Blunden recalls their first gig.

"That was before Beshara had even joined the band and we had just been using MIDI drums from a computer. It was cool for us because that was everyone's first band, none of us had done anything before. Everyone just steadily purchased their instruments one by one and we just started jamming using a computer drum machine. That was the beginning of Miracle Hat," Blunden explains.

"My mum's birthday was coming up and she said she wanted us to play, it was a first for all of us so we said we would. We put together a couple of covers and a couple of originals including Bryan Adams' Summer Of 69. It sounded awful, so terrible," Blunden almost recoils at the memory, "I've still got it on video at home. It's not good. But it was good for us because it was all family and friends, so it was pretty comfortable.

"There was another band playing that night because it was a barn dance theme, so there were all tables around the outside of the dance floor. Then it was dinnertime and everyone sat down to eat while we played. We got applause at the end of the songs and people said 'oh that was cool, man'. I don't know whether they were just being nice, but it was a confidence builder for us."

I ask Blunden about their live shows, because my initial impression was that the guitars could have been even grungier.

"Live, we're pretty loud, we try to get into the whole feedback thing, especially our older songs. We always think about it when we watch bands. Mellow's alright, but when you go out you want to be engaged and get people going away feeling like they hadn't wasted their time and had seen something worth it. So we try for that and just hope we get it. I mean we jump around and try and keep the energy as well as the noise level up."

At my prompting, Blunden tells me how the band feels about the new release, as well as the recording process.

"We're really surprised, we're really happy with it because it was relatively cheap to record, we did it in a week. But then the mixing took ages," Blunden pauses before continuing, "I think that's what really made it stand out for us. We'd let our producer mix on his own for a while and then we'd all come in and we'd see what he'd done and then we'd go away again and let him do some more. But in the end we sat down and finished it off together. It drives you crazy because it's such a long process. We could never agree on a lot of stuff, but I think that with a lot of the disagreements we really all had the same thing in mind but just couldn't explain it to each other."

Sam Vinall

Miracle Hat launch 'Do You See' at the Enigma Bar on Fri 1 September.