Virgin

“I think it’s a bit of a junkie mentality in a way. You’re constantly chasing a high.”

That’s not really as incriminating as it sounds. King Farook are toying with metaphors as they attempt to describe their enthusiasm for touring.

“Man you know what it’s all about? This is our dream, what we’re doing right now is our dream. We all work day jobs and to be able to just get on the road and play to a whole bunch of new people who have never heard us before is what I live for. I love it.”

Chasing the highs from gig to gig has even left these musical junkies unaffected by the inevitable lows that accompany them.

“You’re in a van with three other smelly guys for ten hours, but it all disappears the minute you hit the stage and you rock it. It’s about constantly trying to feel that way. It keeps you going. So far so good. Hopefully that’s what keeps happening.”

Besides touring manically, King Farook recently released the Four Piece Feed Ep.

“It’s available in all record stores actually. If they don’t have it they’ll order it in. We’ve got distribution through MGM. We’re selling it at gigs as well and just pumping it. A couple of stations have given it a bit of a run so it’s been alright, slowly but surely.”

While only out for five months, it seems this release is already starting to show its age as the band develops.

“Kinda looking forward to some new stuff but the Four Piece Feed is our thing for a little bit. To be honest, it’s not really the sound we’re going for at the moment because we’ve changed members again.”

Line up changes in the band have seen them shift from a five piece to a four, losing and gaining different members along the way. The Four Piece Feed even includes some guitar tracks, when no one in the band plays one any more.

“The reason it was a bit of a dead end is because we actually included guitar. I played guitar on there as well as the bass but tried to keep the guitar to a minimum so it wouldn’t be missed live and it’s something that I’m trying to produce on the bass as well as guitar.”

“So we kind of sound like that, but I think in the future it’s not gonna sound like that because we’re gonna steer away from that kind of sound. We’re gonna write more in terms of what we do on stage. We wanna try to get what we do on stage on to a record. That’s obviously become the forte of what we do as a band. The more people tell us that the more it makes it obvious that’s what we should do on the next album. Not necessarily a live album, but cater the album more to the dynamic of what we do.”

Translating the raw energy of a live show to record successfully is not without its difficulties.

“It is really hard to capture that in the studio. That energy level isn’t necessarily there that you get from a crowd being in front of you all dancing and losing their fuckin’ minds. That’s the challenge for us: to get that energy, that liveness while still having the polish of a nice studio recording.”

With this challenging new direction, King Farook have a positive outlook on their next release.

“We feel pretty confident that the next batch of songs, the next batch of Farookness is gonna be the real shit. Not that the other stuff wasn’t, but we feel a lot more comfortable now.”

“In saying that, I don’t think we’ve hit our stride yet. It’s gonna get harder and we’re gonna be harder working in time to come.”

The next couple of months will see the band working hard on finishing their tour before taking some time off to write and record. There’s no question as to their most anticipated gig in Sydney.

“Romp is the big one for the Sydney market. It’s the 5th December at the Factory theatre. It’s a mini-festival with nine bands on two stages. We’re gonna headline that.”

For more info, check out http://www.myspace.com/kingfarook

Words: Dan Clarke, Interview: Mikey Carr. Musicfeeds - Spanish for awesome!

The most interesting music is often the most diverse. Some bands might be content to pigeonhole themselves in one genre, one style of music but that only really works if they can pull it off well. The true virtue of much music is the ability for it to be created and shaped as artists adopt, assimilate and experiment with different ideas to create something they can truly call their own.The vocal harmonies of New Zealand band Kora bring a uniquely Pacific feel to their music, but as lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Laughton Kora explains, it’s not easy to attempt to classify their sound.

“I couldn’t even begin to tell you. It doesn’t really matter what genre it is as long as it’s sick, and heavy. We haven’t tried to fuse them together, we just try out an idea and we go ‘oy yeah man, that sounds fat.”

“We’ve got five heads bouncing ideas together and I think that’s what makes the sound of Kora, you got five guys who all like different genres of music but at the same time we know what sounds fat and what sounds heavy and we just pick that out.”

It’s that kind of fluidity, that free-form thinking that has seen the guys try some pretty ballsy moves on stage.

“What we used to do was come up with a riff before we started playing. Never even rehearsed it before and we’d just get on stage and do it. If the audience moved to it, we’d go’ oh yeah it works’, and if it didn’t we’d go through and change things add new parts and stuff and try it again. An audience is a great way to sort of reference if something is working or not.”

Their traditional reggae influences flow through notably sometimes, while other times they scream more of a modern rock sound fused with spacey samples and a harsher, experimental edge. On stage, they have an eclectic mix of instruments and musicians.

“We got, a synth, a keyboard and MPC sample, drums, two guitars and bass and our drummer has sampling stuff as well, and yeah five vocals. There are so many instruments in certain songs we just swap. Just mix it around a bit and make it entertaining for ourselves you know.”

Two of the four related members of the band, Laughton and brother Brad began playing together in the early 1990s in a band called Aunty Beatrice.

“It was my dads fault, we didn’t really have a choice you know. He’d just crack the whip. We started playing pubs when we were really young you know, hiding behind the speakers and stuff, those were the real young days.”

It wasn’t until 2001 that Laughton began collaborating with the ‘token white guy’ in the band, Dan McGruer. By the next year, remaining brothers Francis and Stu were recruited to form the band proper but Laughton credits his performing origins as a strong influence on the bands sound.

“My dad was a real driving force about that, the way he saw it he didn’t want to limit us by just playing one genre. And growing up, getting work playing we had to play in a bunch of different venues. So you’d have to play at weddings, you’d have to play at pubs and every different venue had a different genre.”

The boys have had a pretty successful touring schedule as of late, travelling as far afield as the UK, although the first time around they had some trouble getting the locals to attend.

“The last trip we did our goal was to play to as many English people, people not from New Zealand as possible. It’s really easy to go over there and just play to a bunch of Kiwis. You know in London 80 – 90 percent of the audiences is from New Zealand. You know you don’t want to travel all that way and not play to English people.”

“But this trip was really good, we played to like crowds that were 80-85 percent English. And they’d never seen us before so that was a really good reason for us to go back in November and do the same thing all through Europe again.”

Their eclectic sound seems to have taken off with their newly found European fans.

“It’s been a really good response over there. The sound is so versatile you know, there’s something in it for a whole bunch of different people you know, people can just pick and choose what they like best.”

“I think it was the show itself that really blew a lot of people away. And these were people who’d never seen us before and by the end of the show they were sold.”

Their debut album shot straight to the top of the New Zealand charts upon its release in October last year, and the boys show no signs of slowing down.

“We’re going over to Bali on Monday for a little surf trip over there and then we’re coming over to see you guys [in Australia].”

For more info on the band, head over to their official site @ Kora.co.nz (where the band has been re-invented as Superheroes for the cover of their new album, among other things…)

For this and plenty more on the live music scene in Sydney, head on over to musicfeeds.com.au. Just when you thought Drum Media was the be all and end all of the independent street press in Sydney… (btw it isn’t… check the link, you’ll see what I mean)

Words: Dan Clarke, Interview: Michael Carr

With the X-Files franchise riding a revival of sorts it re-awakens the speculation of life on other planets and little green martians with big elbows. I can’t help being suckered into the idea of extra-terrestrial life, but I refuse to entertain the thought of bogey-coloured midgets with enlarged arm joints. If there are indeed folk out there I reckon they’re exactly like you and I, living on an identikit Earth, and dosed to the tits on a popular culture parallel to ours. However, what passes for popular there is - like themselves - out of this world.

In space, their Metallica have been the one to beat for the past decade. ‘Load’, ‘ReLoad’ and ‘S&M’ courted brand new critical highs, and the band’s meteoric rise in importance was celebrated by the free dissemination of their work on the internet - much to Lars Ulrich’s pleasure. ‘St. Anger’ went platinum a billion times and the ‘Some Kind of Monster’ flick did anything but display Metallica as whinging wotsits. Outer space domination was theirs, though that all went arse over tit this year when they decided to return to a pre-’Load’ era. Thankfully for our own Metallica this translates to a turn in good fortune.

So the word is out: Metallica have returned to their hairier roots. The shredding solos, the proper drums, the big instrumentals and the heavy thrashings stain ‘Death Magnetic’ as it did the first four records. However, this is less a case of money for old rope (which was no bad thing, hairy metallers love a good piece of old rope) and more a break for freedom. Be it the southern blues, Bob Rock or whatever it was holding them back, they’ve absolutely bloody legged it and made a lot of old skool racket on the way.

A heartbeat opens the album, mimicking the chest activity of your frantically hopeful Metallica fan, before blowing like Apocalypse Now all the way til the appropriately-titled closer ‘My Apocalypse’. Sufficed to say, the fan worry gets doused in petrol and set aflame - right along with your eardrums. You’ll walk away from this record wanting to buy yourself new decibels; ‘The Judas Kiss’ alludes to a severe aural battering by dragging in ‘Suicide & Redemption’ at such a low volume you’re checking your ears for blood.

There are a couple of links to ‘The Black Album’ littered around - the most obvious being ‘The Unforgiven III’. Sequels are often unnecessary (don’t get me started on that X-Files film) but trilogies always have the eyes rolling back to the wrong parts of the skull. In print ‘The Unforgiven III’ does just that, but the song itself lends new levels of mood, calm and darkness to both the track’s series and ‘Death Magnetic’. A pretty essential addition, also for those ears.

‘Death Magnetic’ has Metallica riding the lightning once again, however the outer space Metallica don’t have Scotland’s Glasvegas pulling the plug on things. The palms at Mercury Records got a bit sweaty this week and pushed the UK release date of ‘Death Magnetic’ ahead of today’s worldwide release, creating a near-comical battle of indie versus metal in the musical blogosphere. In all dramatic-ness, both bands are out to prove a heck of a lot this week - Glasvegas are making a mark, whereas Metallica are trying to reclaim theirs. Metallica arguably need this more, and to win would really be justice for all.