Officer Down

A local metal band who have just released their self-titled debut four-track EP, Officer Down, have always adopted a fairly informal approach to their craft. While this has generally worked well for them, vocalist Rob Holmes admits that it has had one big drawback.

"Because we never took ourselves too seriously over the years, we haven't gotten around to putting a proper recording out until now," he says, "though we did a pretty average demo a few years ago when we started, but didn't circulate it very much. We never held a launch or anything like that for it either."

One thing that motivated the band to finally put out their first proper release was pressure from their many fans.

"People would come up to us at shows and say, 'have you got a CD?'," Holmes recalls, "and we'd always go, 'nah, sorry man. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming.' We just mucked around about it for too long; we didn't just sit down, put the money to do it together and just go and record it. People would have heard of us, but they wouldn't be able to tell you the name of any of our songs; we really underestimated the importance of that."

"In the end," guitarist Leigh Van Der Hoek adds, "a couple of mates of ours from Terracorp Records said, 'dudes, we're going to pay for your shit if you don't get it together because we're sick of you not having a release!' And they did give us the cash for it, which was pretty cool."

Obviously, then, that was one instance when procrastination actually paid off?

"Yeah, that helps for sure!" Holmes laughs.

The individuals from Terracorp Records who helped make the recording happen were producer Thomas O'Connor - whose other work consists largely of beat tracks that get a lot of airplay on English pirate radio stations - and promoter and manager Luke McLaren. "Thomas is a bit of a recluse," Van Der Hoek informs me, "he's not really in it for the money and he's very good at what he does; in the end he was the one who recorded us. Unfortunately, I think he's going to London at the end of the year, so it might be the last time he can help us out."

"As for McLaren," Holmes says, "he always does our posters when we need them. He also did the artwork on the CD cover, we appreciate all the stuff he does for us."

One popular technique that the band have used on the EP is the incorporation of samples, which feature in the opening track, Juggernaut, as well as a piece called Above All Else. "Thomas did those," Van Der Hoek explains, "we'd already mentioned to him what we wanted to have in Juggernaut. Because of the other stuff he does - the beat tracks and that - he has so much material; we just sat down and suggested a few things that we thought would work. He had some George W. Bush stuff that he chopped and changed to make it sound as though the guy was at some bloody conference or something. The guy in the sample for Above All Else is Hunter S. Thomson."

The aforementioned Juggernaut revolves around the brainwashing effects of television, while a couple of other pieces on the EP (Evolve and Above All Else) are about greed, something that a message on the disc itself warns "Will be the death of us all..." The last track, In Vein, is about drug addiction, a subject that unfortunately has a lot of relevance in the music scene. While the band members themselves haven't had any personal struggles in that area, Van Der Hoek recalls someone he knew who had a meth addiction that ended up screwing up a lot of people's lives.

"He was this dude who was going out with a girl I knew," he recalls. "He was very violent and intimidating and she was too scared to break up with him. In the end, the gear fucked him up so much that his teeth and hair were falling out and he became really weak. She used the last thing as an opportunity to get away from him, but he still rocked up at her house with guns, waiting to kick the door in and shit. He was a nasty, nasty person."

James Brazel

Officer Down play at the Bridgeway Hotel on Sat 2 September with Diatribe, Sydonia, A Red Dawn and UCD. 'Officer Down' is out now through Terracorp Records.