YOUR WEEKLY GUIDE TO WHAT’S ON
Saddle up and hear something completely different when Aussie band The Rubens perform at the Hobart Cup on Sunday, writes Kane Young
AFTER months of writing and recording demos, alt-rock band of brothers The Rubens figured they had the bulk of their forthcoming third album — which is set for release some time this year — in the bag.
But the group — brothers Sam (vocals), Elliott (keyboards) and Izaac (guitar) Margin plus Scott Baldwin (drums) and William Zeglis (bass) — changed tack completely when they wrote what turned out to be the album’s lead single, Million Man, which was released in October and voted into Triple J’s recent Hottest 100.
“When Million Man came around, we realised it was the direction we wanted to go with this album,” Eliott Margin told Pulse yesterday.
“[We were excited by] the energy of it, and the big gospel element to it. There’s a rawness and fatness to the rhythm — it was a direction we hadn’t explored as much in our earlier stuff, and three albums in you want to push yourself a little more and explore new ideas.
“The sound of that song was an indicator that a lot of the demos we’d written for this album before Million
Man maybe didn’t really fit the bill any more. There were tracks that didn’t fit in line with this new sound that we were excited by, so it made more sense for us to follow that direction a little more.
“So we decided to scrap them and move on.”
Million Man is The Rubens’ first new music since the 2015 release of their second album Hoops, which reached No.2 on the ARIA chart. It also spawned their biggest hit to date, with title track
Hoops topping the Hottest 100 and cracking the top 10 of the ARIA chart.
But The Rubens decided to take an entirely different approach to recording their new album, bringing US producers Wilder Zoby and Lil’ Shalimar — best known for their work with hip-hop duo Run The Jewels — out to the New South Wales town of Camden to record in a makeshift studio set up “in a friend’s bunker”.
“It was a completely new approach to every single part of it,” Margin explained, “and we were lucky that it worked really because it was a big risk on our part — recording in a studio that had never been used before, and bringing these guys out from New York and hoping that we’d all gel. In the end it was just so much fun.
“They’re great producers in that they listen to what it is you’re trying to do, and just help you do that, then add their flavours where they can.
“Through working with Run The Jewels and hip-hop, they’re really good at bringing good rhythm and bottomend to tracks, and keeping the energy up in a track.
“But they’re also jazz-trained multiinstrumentalists, so there’s all these other elements that they helped bring to the recording and production of the tracks, which was really useful for us to have in the studio.”
Fans can hear some of The Rubens’ new material when they play on the main stage at the 2018 Hobart Cup at Elwick on Sunday, with Asta to also perform. Gates open at 10am. General admission tickets are $20 pre-sale from www.goracingtasmania.com.au, or $25 at the gate, with children under 16 admitted free.