FEATURE: Spotlight: A. Swayze & the Ghosts

FEATURE:

Spotlight

A. Swayze & the Ghosts

___________

WHEN looking around for a great new band…

to cling onto, there are plenty of good choices! I am excited by the variety and quality of bands coming through, and a new discovery of mine is Hobart’s A. Swayze & the Ghosts. Offering a terrific and straight-ahead sound with direct and honest lyrics, they are receiving quite a lot of buzz and attention! I think the last fairly similar band from Australia I featured was Royal Headache a few years back – their album, High, was one of the best of 2015. In this country, we have bands like IDLES who deliver a Post-Punk symphony, and I wonder whether they will get A. Swayze & the Ghosts to support them if they play Australia next year?! Anyway, the Hobart band are brilliant, and their new album, Paid Salvation, is getting some brilliant reviews! If you, like me, are a bit new to the band, then they gave an interview to So Young Magazine last year and talked about their formation – and what they want to achieve in the next year (through to 2020):

“How did you find each other?

Zac (drums) found me at a cafe we worked at by the waterfront of Hobart. I probably looked like shit when he first saw me due to my lifestyle back then. I found our guitarist Hendrik sitting on a vertical bar outside our graphic design class during one of the first weeks of college. We didn’t talk. He was a shy guy and I was boisterous – I think he was scared. I don’t remember finding Ben (bass). Perhaps it was at one of his gigs the night before Zac found me at work looking like shit?

What led you to form a band? A particular happening or mutual love for a record or sound?

I wanted to start a band of my own after both groups I played guitar in split up within a month of each other. I lived with Zac and Hendrik and had written a few songs in my bedroom in our shitty share house. We still play some of those songs today. I coerced the two of them to start a three piece that I would front and we rehearsed in Zac’s few times and then went out and started gigging. It became apparent pretty quickly that we would be far better off writing as a collective as I can be a lazy prick and enjoy intoxication a bit too much. We gained a bit of a reputation for being quite a wild live band and played heaps. Six months had passed and we saved some money and went in to track a record locally. We asked Ben to play some synth over a couple of tracks, though the album was a drug-fuelled mess and we threw it out (but kept Ben). After that episode is when we really became serious about this band and we’ve been slogging it out ever since both in the studio and across Australia.

What can we be excited for (from you) over the next 12 months?

We’ve just finished tracking our debut full length record and it’s going to be fire. We worked with a phenomenal Australian producer named Dean Tuza. The guy understands our direction perfectly and held forth our integrity to make a record that is the perfect reflection of our attitude and opinions, and we are all proud and elated to release it. Otherwise we’re spending most of the year playing shows, including our first trip to the UK this May/June as a part of The Great Escape festival. Bring on the Zingers, Britain”.

Fast-forward to this year and, whilst it has not been an ideal backdrop for a talented young band to flex their muscles, they have released their album…and it is a blinder! I want to bring in a couple of interviews from this year, as it is important to ‘catch up’ with them and see where they are now. I can’t recommend the band highly enough and, in a year when we need truth and direction, A. Swayze & the Ghosts offer this in spades! Their lead, Andrew Swayze, spoke with DIY last month and he talked about his path into music:

“Hailing from Hobart - the capital of Australia’s island state of Tasmania - Andrew Swayze spent his formative years increasingly feeling like the walls were narrowing in. “[Tasmania] is isolated by physical distance from the mainland and it really felt like that when we were growing up, that we were so separate and always getting things last,” he recalls. “The education rate here is really low, the poverty rate is really high, the obesity rate is one of the highest in the country, the employment rate is low. Things have changed recently, but when I was a kid it was really depressing.”

However, when he stumbled upon Kurt Cobain, vocally exorcising his demons and expressing the same frustration and angst that he was feeling too, the young musician found something that felt like a way out. “That was the turning point where it really became evident that music was this really fucking ravenous thing within me,” he remembers. And from then, first seeking out the small, underground local scene and then, five years ago, stepping out and forming his own group, making music became an absolute necessity. “I always wanted more than just to live on this little island and be depressed, so music was always this avenue to be like, I don’t want to be normal. I want to express myself and be big and loud and not be one of these run of the mill people that I felt like I was surrounded by,” he continues.

“I despise lyricists who just mess with irony. I’ve got a lot to say. I’m a heavily opinionated person,” he confirms. “I hope [the album] pisses the right people off - people who should be pissed off. I spent months and hundred of iterations of these songs getting everything right, so I’m really proud of every track on here - if people love it that’s awesome, but if people hate it I don’t really care because I’m sure I’ve said the things I want to say”.

There is a lot of great music around at the moment, and some of it offer escape and a great deal of fun. When it comes to A. Swayze and the Ghosts, the business plan and main objective is to be direct and highlight themes that are important. Bands like A. Swayze & the Ghosts, IDLES, and The Murder Capital are providing a blend of Punk sounds and affecting lyrics, with some heart thrown into the mix. I wonder what the scene is like in Hobart and whether there are legions of artists like A. Swayze & the Ghosts who are ready to strike. I would encourage the media to further investigate the area, as Australia has always been a fervent and fertile landscape for great and innovative music! In an NME interview, Andrew Swayze discussed his lyrical approach and why the band won’t be selling out their music:

“Music is so influential. I want to talk about important things,” says frontman Andrew Swayze via Zoom. “If you look through history, you’ll see all these cultural changes that have been inspired by art. I know I’ve had my life drastically changed by songs or what an artist has said, so I know the great power that music holds.”

Across ‘Paid Salvation’, A. Swayze & The Ghosts use theirs with great responsibility. But the band haven’t always been this socially conscious and self-aware about using their rapidly growing platform. “We never intended on doing anything ultra important and we definitely had no intentions of touring the world,” says Swayze. The band started in their shared house a few years ago as a way for these wild party boys – Swayze, Hendrik Wipprecht (guitar), Zackary Blain (drums) and Ben Simms (bass) – to pass the time.

A. Swayze won’t let their music soundtrack any old rubbish, though. As more people start paying attention, there are more opportunities for the gang. “We get offered a lot of things and asked if we, for lack of a better phrase, want to sell out,” Swayze tells NME. It doesn’t take the band long to tell these suits exactly where they can fuck off to. “It seems a lot of people would rather take that quick sell than keep their integrity, but you owe it to your listeners to stay true. Your integrity is all you’ve got”.

This sort of takes us to Paid Salvation. You can buy the album now, and I think (the album) is one of the best underground, lesser-known releases of this year so far. The album has been courting affection from Australia and the U.K., and I bet the band are keen to get the songs on the road. The situation regarding COVID-19 is better in Australia than the U.K., so they might be able to tour Australia soon enough. I have my fingers crossed that the group can get over to the U.K. soon, but enjoy their album in the meantime. I want to source from a review in Louder Than War - who were more than blown away by Paid Salvation:

“You’ll get people – young people – young men – jumping around to this record like they jump around to Idles. And that’s all well and fine. So long as they know why. “I especially want young men to hear songs like Suddenly and It’s Not Alright and think about what they’re saying rather than just listening to them and going, ‘Yeah I’m all jacked up on this rock song!’”

Recorded over only a handful of days with producer Dean Tuza in a converted warehouse space in inner-city Melbourne, the aim was to present the band as raw and honestly as possible. No frills. No extra fat. Four guys in a room, plugging in, playing their music, warts and all, hiding behind nothing. If you want guitar solos, forget about it. If you’re looking for string arrangements, you’re in the wrong place

“The thing with Dean is that he’s more than capable of getting a really polished sound going,” Swayze adds. “But he was like, ‘I don’t want it to sound like you have a producer in the room. I don’t want it to sound polished. I want it to sound like you’re a live band’ – and I think we achieved that.”

Within its seemingly straightforward framework of drums, bass and guitar, there are nods to Krautrock (the motorik rhythm that drives the sarcastic Rich), synth-punk (the drum machine in Paid Salvation and Cancer), and classic rock – and even a hint of disco deep within the bassline of that opener, It’s Alright.

The album includes both singles, 2018’s Suddenly and this year’s Mess Of Me, but sadly nothing from their 2015 debut EP, with its brave but curious choice of debut single – the spacey slow-burning ten-minute jam Reciprocation, with its repetitive groove and spoken lyric.

They seem to have abandoned that side of their music in favour of a more cohesive mood, but it’s one I would certainly like to see them explore further; and the album might have benefited from its change of pace”.

Make sure you are tuned into A. Swayze & the Ghosts, as they are a band that are going to go a long way! With a terrific album out in the world, many more listeners will discover them, and it will be exciting to see the band grow. Check out their socials, listen to the music, buy Paid Salvation, and show some appreciation for…