No Through Road

"It's pretty fancy," No Through Road's Matt Banham's says of his band's latest album, 'Too Much Or Not Enough'. "It's the most time I've ever spent on one recording in my life and probably the most time I will ever spend on a recording. The amount of problems we had on this one, with me trying to make it hi-fi, was just a pain in the arse. Next time we'll do it in a studio and get someone to do everything for us."

"Live," adds Banham's trusty sidekick, guitarist/drummer Steph Crase.

"It was really good doing [the drums] with Matt [Hills, increasingly renowned Adelaide engineer]," Banham begins, "[but] then we did all the guitars at one house and all the rest of it at my house. And we used different computers as well, PCs and Macs, and they don't really work as well together as I thought they would. We were using different programs and different things, it was painstaking with the Macintosh stuff."

Crase adds, "And because Matt mixed it on his computer at home, most of the time he'd just mix it after work, if he had some spare time, do a little bit...It took months to mix it alone, you lazy man."

For the uninitiated, No Through Road started as an entertainment industry pseudonym for Banham's low-fidelity acoustic guitar musings. After seeing The Strokes play, Banham decided that, just like Julian Casablancas, he wanted to be so slothenly as to front a band without even needing to play an instrument on stage. These days, a six-piece No Through Road stage show, with its three-guitar drone and unfettered frontman enthusiasm, is pretty darn freakin' huge.

Crase, for one, never saw it coming. "No way, when Matt said, 'Oh, I've got a couple of friends and we're going to do some band stuff of my songs,' I thought there'd be four acoustic guitars and a tambourine."

And though 'Too Much...' is by far the most hi-fi thing Banham's ever done, it's still, well, an album recorded mostly in his bedroom.

"There's live and then there's recorded stuff," Banham explains. "I've never been that interested in recording exactly what we sound live, it's fun to mess shit up. Guided By Voices - when they play live there's like this huge sound but then you listen to the recordings of the same songs and, because they recorded them so badly, they're these tinny little sounds. But when they play live it's just this huge, huge sound. And I kind of like that. But I think the next recording's going to be in a studio, if we can afford it."

Around twelve months ago, as Banham was releasing one of those bedroom recordings ('Lo-Fi Sandwich') onto the Internet, where it is still freely available, he told me that he already had a distinct plan for 'Too Much...' Unlike most best-laid plans, this one seems to have slotted into reality unscathed.

"He wouldn't budge," exclaims Crase. "We all liked the stuff from 'Lo-Fi Sandwich'. We wanted it."

Again, Banham provides a more pensive response. "There were a few songs that everybody likes when we play it live," - like, for example, 'The Next Bob Dylan' - "and they say, 'Will that be on the album?' and we say, 'Nah...But it will be on the next one.' We're planning to record an EP which might turn into an album, hopefully all in the studio and all live, so it won't take long, of all of the songs that we have that we don't have recorded."

Twelve months ago Banham told me his great concern was that, like many of his favourite artists, he would leave his best material behind when he turns 30. Edging ever closer to that date, he's not so worried now.

"No," he states simply. "I'll go through a Bob Dylan '80s phase, where I release five bad albums, and then I'll have some major disaster and be interesting again. I only worry about being too content, when I'm happy I write less. At the moment I'm experiencing a good bout of happiness and there's a desire to make that not work and throw a spanner into it."

Crase divulges, "We were going to pay his girlfriend to break up with him for a month, but she wouldn't do it. We weren't offering her enough."

Ben Revi

No Through Road launch 'Too Much Or Not Enough' at Jive on Sat 14 October.