Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

IN CELEBRATING FAMILIARITY ON THEIR RIPPING SECOND ALBUM, SIDEWAYS TO NEW ITALY, MELBOURNE POST-PUNKS ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER HAVE BREWED UP THEIR BIGGEST, BRIGHTEST AND MOST EXPERIMENTAL EFFORT YET.

New Italy is a town straight out of some rural Australian kid’s archive of Twilight Zone fan-fiction. You’ll be driving up the New South Wales coast for a much-needed getaway and suddenly, out of nowhere – some 700 kilometres North of Sydney, amidst a sprawling nirvana of absolutely f*** all – appears a small, yet ever-so-bustling village of shops and Italian restaurants, entirely unfazed by its remoteness or peculiarity. And though it’s largely unknown to those who haven’t passed through (or visited) it, New Italy has been thriving since 1882, when it was established by homesick immigrants determined to recapture the unique spirit of their motherland.

Such makes New Italy the perfect locale to base the conceptual framework for Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’ s new album, Side ways To New Italy.

The Melbourne-native indie-rockers have personal ties to the area – it’s close to where drummer Marcel Tussie grew up, and remains a must-visit pitstop on the band’s Australian tours – but its the story behind New Italy, that of homesickness and perseverance, that they most closely relate to.

Following up their debut album Hope Downs, which introduced them to the mainstream, took them around the world and sent them on a journey that packed a decade’s worth of experiences into a tight two years, Side ways To New Italy sees Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever beg for normalcy. They have a nostalgia for the days where they wouldn’t wake up to a phone screen blaring with an endless stream of notifications. They’re grateful for their fame – otherwise they wouldn’t be releasing a second album, or pushing it as fervently as they currently are – but they appreciate the more passive, mundane moments of life a bit more right now; they long for the next time they can shoot the shit and kill some time worry-free in New Italy.

Before embarking on another life-changing journey in support of Side ways To New Italy, we caught up with guitarist Tom Russo to dive a little deeper into it.

I think it goes without saying that Hope Downs was a pretty monumental release for the band. Did the experiences you all had making and touring that record feed into the creative process for this one?

I think so. We had a very specific window of time to work on[ Side ways To New Italy ], whereas I think that a lot of first albums are an accumulation of a lot of sprawling time – everything you do kind of leads up to that record. But then for the follow-up, all of a sudden you’ve got three months to write a record.

And so we went into this album’s writing process really excitedly – I think it was about August last year, and we’d already written a bunch of songs, but we went into the studio and came up with a whole new batch that we immediately felt were more exciting. It was just more of a focussed approach, I guess, that led us to where we are now with this record.

How did you want this album to kick Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever to the next level, or build upon what you’d established creatively with Hope Downs?

Initially, we went in with a very ambitious and conceptual idea. With the first record, we wrote a lot of fairly airtight pop structures – y’know, that’s what we set out to do. But with this record, we want to try stretching out a little bit more and getting a little bit more adventurous with our songwriting – which we did! We really blew these songs apart and gave them every chance they could to be some big, adventurous epic.

And then in the process of doing that, we came back around to the idea of doing a few classic pop structures – because in the end, that’s what feels good and that’s what works. So as a result, we’ve ended up with this strange mix of very ambitious, grandiose and weird songs, and then a bunch of straightforward pop tunes. And they all come together in this very heartfelt, weird album that I think we’re all quite proud of.

I know that yourself, Joe and Fran are all very staunchly involved in the songwriting process. What’s the creative dynamic like between the three of you as guitarists? Are you trading ideas around all the time?

That’s exactly what it is. It’s a really collaborative process. Another thing we tried to do [with Sideways To New Italy] was make a real effort to have these be more like ‘band’ songs. We’ve always collaborated and bounced ideas back and forth, but on some of those older songs, it might have been that one of us would just bring a fully formed idea to the group, and we’d play with it and work it out as a band, but the song was already there.

What we really wanted to do with this album was come in with no set ideas, and let the songs, in the practise room, just go wherever they wanted to. And that worked for a lot of them – we got some really weird and unexpected, jammy parts out of that.

This record was a lot more collaborative as a whole, to be honest – all five of us were working hard together, and we took turns to share our ideas for each song. We just tried to put ideas on top of ideas. It took longer, and it was probably a more labour-intensive process, but I think it made the songs really strong in the end.

Do you find that you all work on the same wavelength as guitarists, or are you constantly challenging yourselves creatively and trying to introduce new directions for the band to head in?

I think we’ve got a pretty set language that we speak with each other, in terms of guitar playing. We’ve been playing with each other for so long that we understand what we’re all trying to say with our fretboards. We can almost hear who’s going to do what and who’s going to take which sort of role, and I think that we really solidified that over this album – this language that we speak together is really quite solid in our minds.

We’ve learned and developed that language over quite a long period of time. It’s hard to describe, because y’know, the only way you can really understand it is by hearing it, I guess. But as guitarists that work together, there’s not a lot of talking that needs to be done with words, y’know? There’s a fair bit of just jamming it out, and then at the end, saying, “That’s good, let’s keep that,” or, “Let’s work on that bit a little more.”