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LAKE PERRIS, CA- Perth, Australia, maybe the de facto breeding ground for the world’s preeminent psych bands. Perhaps it’s the isolation of the city creating community, or the allure of a big city with a small beach town feel, or just a lot of LSD, but the remote city has been producing some of the most celebrated cerebral acts of the last few decades. Tame Impala may be Perth’s favorite sons, a group whose roots formed from mind-bending jam sessions in a horse barn is quickly taking the scene by storm with a name that will make your grammy blush — Psychedelic Porn Crumpets. We caught up with the band before their main stage performance Friday to talk about their latest record, “Night Gnomes,” and why Desert Daze just may be the best festival of its kind.
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It’s your second time playing Desert Daze. You weren’t at the fateful year of the lightning storm that shut everything down, were you?
Jack McEwan: No, I heard about that though, when Tame [Impala had to cut their set short].
Chris Young: Actually, our last North American festival was Desert Daze 2019.
And who could’ve predicted what would happen after 2019?
Chris: What happened? I went away for a couple years.
Luke: Everybody was on holiday.
Jack: I had a COVID nap.
How does this festival compare to other psych festivals?
Luke: It’s the best. It’s the No. 1. The lineups are the biggest in the world for alternative music.
Chris: We had our best festival punter day during our last Desert Daze.
Jack: The best three days, really. The best three days we’ve ever had at a festival, starting with the Flaming Lips on Friday, and then we saw Flying Lotus on Saturday. It was next-level. Didn’t Wu-Tang play?
Chris: With Khruangbin, yeah.
Jack: Khruangbin came onto the Wu-Tang set! They came onstage. Temples played one of the best sets I’ve ever seen. And everything in between, though. Wand, W.I.T.C.H., Crumb, Connan Mockasin.
The moral is that you always need to catch the smaller-print bands.
All: Yes!
Jack: You need to spend the whole three days here, I think.
So it’s as exciting for you guys to watch as it is to play.
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Always. We prefer to watch. We don’t want to play! [laughter] You can relax. You’re not stressed.
Chris: You can take drugs. [laughter]
Well, we are at a psych festival. It’s like the chicken and the egg — which came first: the music or the drugs?
Jack: That’s quite a good question. Someone could do a Ph.D on that. Well, drugs probably did come first. But music’s pretty primitive.
Chris: Well, think back to the best jazz music. When jazz was hitting it hard, that was all drug-fueled.
Was a lot of the new music held over through the pandemic?
Jack: Yeah, it’s probably the first time since the first record that you could actually go spend a good chunk of time inside and write. Before that, we did the first record, and then the second, and then it was on and off tour. Everything was very rushed. You’ve got to put out this record now, and then this record has to come out. With “Night,” we actually had a bit of time to write an entire record, record it the way we wanted it and get it to sound good, and that is what it sounds like. Whereas with “Shyga!” it was like doing bits and pieces, and even with the second record, “Ah, yeah, we can tweak bits.” So it seemed like coiled up in the pandemic gave us a bunch of time to be able to sit down and produce something hopefully notable that would boost us on.
You notably have a diverse sound. Bubblegum Infinity (off 2022’s “Night Gnomes”) has been in my head the last few days. But what I noticed about this record is it feels a lot heavier. There’s a lot more fuzz elements.
Chris: It’s a bit darker.
Jack: It kind of started with “Terminus, the Creator,” where you [Chris Young] had given me some sub-synth notes.
Chris: It was like glitchy, feedbacking, sub-moog, gritty gross sounds.
Jack: And we worked on that track until I had a bit of a weird, delay guitar thing. Then you (Chris) put some synth notes to it. From there, “Lava Lamp Pisco” came out and it was almost like, which song goes in next? But there was a lot that was left out, too. It would have been a bigger record. But I also think there’s a lot more pretty songs on it too. It does feel like, if we wanted to create something nice, that’s probably the record you want to listen to for depth. And maybe that’s because we were inside. It felt like, where do we go from here? But now, after seeing the crowds from Europe with the heavier kind of stuff, I want to head that way and be like, how do we get dirtier, a bit heavier? I think that’s the sort of way to go for us at the moment
Chris: It’s funny you say “Bubblegum Infinity.” We’ve only played it a couple of times live. We definitely land on the heavier, darker tracks for the live set.
If you have to curate your own festival, who would you want to see top the list?
Luke: I think this tops everything.
Chris: This really is the greatest.
Jack: There isn’t a band in the lineup that I would say isn’t justified.
Luke: This festival is almost curated for us anyway.
Jack: Even with an endless budget, it would still be this. And it sounds like they [Desert Daze] don’t want the people who will just sell tickets, it’s bands that are fucking amazing. Now, if they had the Mars Volta here…
Chris: If this festival lineup was in Australia, you wouldn’t be able to buy tickets. It would be the biggest festival Australia has ever had.
On the flip side of that, what’s a band that you love that deserves to be there that’s not on the bill?
Chris: Igor!
Jack: Yeah, Igor!
Luke: Motorcycle!
Jack: A band we played with in the Netherlands is called Bongloard. They were sick, like a really great band. There’s a lot of European bands that can’t get out of the country, if that makes sense. They do a little tour around. There seems to be a very American and Australian kind of scene. No one is going, ‘What’s going on in Austria?’ But we played with Mother’s Cake, and they were incredible. Absolutely insane.
Luke: Mother’s Cake is great, man.
Chris: We met so many good European bands just on this last run that would be great for this festival, for sure.
Speaking of getting bands out from Europe, I know Iggy Pop says the official story is he couldn’t make it to Desert Daze because he couldn’t get a visa out of France for his band. We think someone must have peed on the Louvre or something. What’s your theory?
Jack: I literally didn’t even realize he was playing until we got here!
Chris: Yeah, we just found out today.
Jack: I mean, I’m happy, because we can’t be at the festival all three days, at least no one can see Iggy Pop!
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