Was absolutely humbled several months ago to interview Munaf Rayani, guitarist for Explosions In The Sky, about their latest album, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. This man was one of the most eloquent people I’ve ever had the fortune of interviewing, and I got off the phone feeling thoroughly enriched. Beautiful, just like the band’s wordless, but amazingly affecting, music. The album is out now on Spunk, and we can only cross our fingers that a tour might follow.

What are you up to at the moment?

We just got home a few days ago from doing a couple shows out west in California. We just did a couple of opening slots for the Arcade Fire. We’re taking off tomorrow morning to head over to Europe.

That’s incredible! How were those shows?

With the Arcade Fire? It was amazing, I think it was a great match and it usually makes for some of the best shows when there’s two bands that aren’t, you know, anything alike but hopefully offer a strong sound and a strong show. To double up on that I think makes for a great show. We felt very lucky that we got the opportunity to play with them.

Your songs are very intricate. How do you usually begin the writing process?

Right, well usually we start with one of us will work out a melody in our room and make sure that whoever is writing it is into it and then we present it to each other and if everybody’s liking from then we’ll expand on it, but a lot of times you can bring a melody to the table and you might get ‘oh I dunno, I’m not into it’ and it gets lost in the shuffle. It’s all very working together and hashing out melodies and working around different parts and seeing what we can do, but definitely a collective effort.

So how long does a song normally take?

I think the quickest we’ve ever written a song is two weeks and the longest we’ve taken to write a song has been two years, so it can just vary anywhere in there, you know. It’s just about patching the certain stride. There are times when we are so hyper critical of what it is we’re trying to write that it’s hard for anything to get through, so whatever does get through is only the best.

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I used to be strictly a winter person. Summer was my idea of hell – semi-naked brown bodies everywhere, sweat, singlet-clad bogans and beer spilled all over me? Yeah, I don’t think so.

Maybe it’s because this year’s winter has been particularly cold, but I find myself more and more disenchanted with the cold season and, inexplicably, craving the summer warmth. I was okay with this until I heard the new Memory Tapes album, Player Piano – this track in particular. It’s a lovely little slice of electro-pop with a dazzlingly infectious chorus and synth-led ostinato that makes me want to dust off my bikini and drive to the beach with it on repeat. When have I ever wanted to go to the beach before? THIS IS NUTS!

Player Piano is an album that’s got cuts suitable for summer, like this one, but also some that are perfect against the chilly backdrop of the current season with their experimentation and generally chilled out sound. A lot of it sounds like The Postal Service in their poppier moments, and it’s got a real air of continuity about it, whether that’s the almost-bookends Musicbox (In) and Musicbox (Out) or the similarity in vocal inflections between tracks.

It’s out now through Pod/Inertia, and is a serious forerunner for my top ten albums of 2011.

No Sleep/Shock

In a world where ‘emo’ is a dirty word, the sound of Balance & Composure is incredibly refreshing. While Jon Simmons’ voice and introspective lyrics don’t completely nullify the genre, their debut album is startingly mature – as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover. Or a band by its members’ fringes, glasses and flannel shirts.

“Found out everyone is shallow,” Simmons croons against a simplistic electric line on opener Void, before carefully added vocals and drums allow the song to steadily peak. Separation is an exercise in meticulous control – while I Tore You Apart In My Head is direct in its blistering anger, tracks like Stonehands and Echo show the band’s proficiency at penning effective slow burners, the latter focusing on vocals with minimalistic accompaniment. Simmons’ voice is often doubled and restrained, offering space to the guitars so carefully constructed around it as they screech and meander in equal measure. The guitars appear in so many guises, rapidly down-stroking throughout Galena and taking on a post-rock lilt as More To Me slides into being, the voice gliding in a lower register before raising into a focused guttural high. Even when Simmons is screaming about hatred and hurt, behind it there’s emotion so palpable that angsty teenagers won’t be the only ones to relate.

This album is heavier than anything the young Pennsylvanians have recorded before, but they’ve kept their penchant for melody and topped it with infectious energy. Don’t be put off by the E word – this is one of the best alternative releases this year, and that’s coming from someone who put the black eyeliner away years ago.

I first saw sleepmakeswaves a few years back at the Excelsior (rest in peace, buddy) and was blown away by their ferocious live show and passion. Last week they finally released their debut album, …and so we destroyed everything, and it’s everything I could have hoped for – a perfect mix of insightful post rock and massive riffs. I’ll have a review of that up soon enough, but before that, I had a chat with bassist/synth player Alex Wilson and guitarist Jonathan Khor ahead of their show at Tone on Thursday.

So how’s everything going?

J: Yeah, pretty good, we just put the album out for pre-order today and picked it up, was it yesterday?

A: Yep.

J: Picked it up from the printing thing and sent out all of the promo stuff to sort of radio stations and street press and all that kind of thing, and we’re about to go out on tour next week so I suppose it’s been pretty busy.

How busy has this year been in terms of tours?

A: We’ve mainly spent the last few months just focusing on this album, and all the stuff that goes into doing that. We recorded it in February and since then we haven’t actually played a whole lot, we’ve got this hardcore stretch of rehearsal that we’re about to do before we head out on tour again. But one of our guys went overseas, so we’ve had to record the album, mix the album, get the artwork together, all that kind of stuff to do. We’ve been laying low and hoping to come back in a bigger way than before, I suppose.

How far back does the process for this album go?

A: Some of the songs have actually been kicking around for some years. I think one of the songs on the record, we would’ve written back in 2009 or something like that, just after our last release, and some of them, there’s probably two songs we’ve never played before that we’ll be doing in the set, but some of the stuff people will be hearing they would’ve heard us earlier in the year playing that maybe in a modified form.

J: All the stuff on the album’s never been recorded before, so we’re stoked to finally be able to put it out on a record. They’re the kind of songs that maybe our hardcore fans that come to a lot of shows have known about them for a while, but for most people it’ll all seem pretty new, I think.

A: Yeah, I was just thinking about it a couple of days ago and I remember the first time I talked to our producer about doing this record it would be the end of 2009, I would’ve started playing the demos then and we were recording demos all throughout 2010, making sure that the record, making sure all the songs were good and we knew them, and just really going hard and trying to do it right.

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On the back of their second album Keep Calm, Carry The Monkey, Mark Lang – frontman of Melbournites Skipping Girl Vinegar – jumped on the phone for a chat. The album is a fantastic one, full of quirks and surprises, and is out now on MGM.

How has the response to the album been so far?

It’s been amazing, yeah. We don’t really know, we just kind of work away and put it out and yeah, it’s been overwhelming actually, the response we’ve been getting about it all. The media has been particularly full on about it and it’s starting to happen around the country as well, it’s being reviewed. It’s been great.

What are the differences between the making of this album and your last?

Well our first record we made over four years, we took a long time making it or writing it, particularly, and then making it. I guess no one knew who we were then so we just kind of worked at it as we could, and then this one I guess we had the pressure of trying to make it in a month touring and there’s sort of expectations and pressure to try and get something out reasonably after the last one, not that we did that quickly. All of that. But we sort of repeated the same idea that we kind of recorded in unconventional spaces, like we were going to record along the coastline and in a beach house and things like that. So that was similar, but the actual process of recording was quite different.

On the first album, it was an album where we were growing up and working out what we were doing and we sort of developed the sound of Skipping Girl Vinegar, and then on this particular album we really wanted to sort of push the boundaries and sort of come at it from a different angle. So we deconstructed everything we did from the instruments that we used right through to the way in which we played them and building things up – so for example with the drums and stuff, we started by using sort of conventional kits and then it sounded a bit vanilla so we found this old marching drum in a dumpster and it’s sort of become a bit of a theme that we’d start using sort of recycled or discarded instruments and there’s just all this kind of life and character in this old kick drum. It rattled and it was sort of imperfect, and all those kind of things that I sort of love about old things. And then we’d do things like get a huge group of our friends together and smash garbage cans…bash on benches and things like that, and kind of construct kits and rhythmical patterns around those kinds of things. We took that idea or feeling to everything, from the way we played the guitars to everything.

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