|
|
 |
Plastic Palace Alice
 I have no trouble in admitting that I am one of those narrow-minded people who judge a band by their name, before even listening to any of their music, so I didn't really know what to expect from Plastic Palace Alice at first glance. Luckily, Empire Falls, the first single off their debut album has taught me not to judge a book by its cover. While this Melbournian six-piece may have flown under the radar over the last few years, drummer Jeremy Furze managed to convince me that we have a lot to look forward to in the near future.
"The whole recording process went smoothly I guess. There were times though when we would be stressing out saying 'oh shit we don't have enough time or money to finish this'... For financial reasons we recorded it in two halves, six months apart. But yeah it went smoothly, and no one killed anyone else in the band at the time, so that's always a plus," Furze laughs.
"None of us had really stepped into a professional recording studio to take on anything this big before, so we were all new to the experience and we were all very innocent and na•ve. I think we were prepared and took our time with everything though, and our producer John Burnside guided us through really well. John's a really particular kind of character, and he wanted to gauge what we were about, rather than bring in his own kind of style and take hold of everything."
The band's debut album 'The Great Depression' is receiving its fair share of attention throughout Australia at the moment. A national tour and an article in dB should be all that a band can ask for, right?
"So far all of the publicity has been really good. There was a photo of us in today's 'Melbourne Age' which was a bit weird. We're getting a bit of attention about the album which is sort of unexpected given that we haven't been around for that long and it's not a huge release compared to some of the other things coming out at the moment. 'Who Magazine' liked it though, and that's all that mattered to me," laughs Furze.
"We're really pumped for this tour. We're doing five shows around Australia and we've put together a really good line up at each show. In Adelaide we've got Special Patrol, who we've played with a few times before, and they're great. Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! will be there too. We really wanted to make a night of it. People want to go out and see a whole night of music, not just the one band, and hopefully we can put it together well and create that."
Furze speaks a lot about writing and recording during our chat. Despite a few hiccups, he seems happy with the way everything had come together.
"We started recording a song at one point, and within ten minutes of starting to record it we just all walked into the control room of the studio and said 'this is not going to work', so we basically ditched it and haven't come back to it since then. There's this demo sitting on my desk at home, and I reckon it's going to be a real corker some day, but we just left it behind. When you're recording you've just got to roll with it, and things just ended up different to what we had imagined. Not that that's a bad thing, because I couldn't be happier with the final product of the album. I'd love to say that we had special guest appearances by some crazy international rock star, but it was all pretty low-key when we were recording."
"A lot of bands can sit on an album for a couple of years, but we've put it out now and I think it'll stand up on it's own to some degree, but we've still got a lot left to say so we're pretty keen to move on and do that. With the album that we've just released there was a lot of genre-hopping, for lack of a better word. With the new material that we have floating around at the moment I think that there's a much more defined and directed method to our madness and it'll be really awesome to be able to put out something over the course of the next year or two and have that really stamp our authority."
Ashley Prigent
Plastic Palace Alice play at Rocket Bar on Fri 2 May with Special Patrol and Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
