FEATURE: Spotlight: The Goon Sax — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Lance Bangs

The Goon Sax

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BEFORE I bring in…

a couple of reviews for the trio’s new album, Mirror II, It is worth sourcing interviews with Brisbane’s The Goon Sax. I discovered them fairly recently, but I have been listening back to their earlier work – I especially love 2016’s Up to Anything. I think that Mirror II is the most impressive album from The Goon Sax. Before coming to a more recent interview, Rolling Stone published a spotlight feature of the band. It is interesting how the trio found one another:

“Louis Forster of the excellent Australian indie-pop band the Goon Sax started writing songs when he was seven years old, right after he got his grade-school-aged mind blown by Green Day’s American Idiot. He kept at it for years, but he never really felt comfortable sharing his work with anyone else — even his uniquely musical parents. His father, Robert Forster, was co-frontman of the Go-Betweens, one of the Eighties’ most acclaimed indie-pop bands; his mother, Karin Bäumler, was in the German group Baby You Know. “Songwriting is such a personal thing,” he says. “Only in the last year or so has it been that I could ever share that with anybody else. Doing that with any member of my family just seems so awkward.”

His hesitance fell away around the time he met another fledgling songwriter, James Harrison, in high school. “When I first showed James my songs, he didn’t really say anything,” Forster recalls. “He just started playing along. He wasn’t picking it apart, and that made me feel all right about it. We just played the song twice, and said nothing, and then we had a sandwich and went to the creek and got high or something.”

The two recruited drummer Riley Jones, an intimidatingly cool girl who also wrote songs and was already in a band despite having only mastered, by her count, two drum beats. The bandmates’ fragility and shyness — a sense that intimacy is something you earn, sometimes the hard way — remains an engine to the fantastic songs the trio have written since forming the Goon Sax. “You don’t have to hold my sweaty hands/I completely understand,” Forster sang on the band’s 2016 debut, Up For Anything, an album that often recalled the spare, naive guitar-pop of Jonathan Richman, Half Japanese or Television Personalities. On another Up to Anything standout, “Boyfriend,” Forster and Jones sweetly sang, “I need a boyfriend/Or just anything real/And we can break your heart/So you see how I feel.”

The Goon Sax just released their second album, We’re Not Talking, one of this year’s most charming indie releases. On its devastatingly great single “Make Time 4 Love,” a jumpy cowbell beat and taught guitar churn unfold into a gushing melody and summery strings as Forster sings, “Let’s get nervous in your room again,” with the florid charisma and old-world charm of a cardigan-clad Bryan Ferry. “All of our lyrics are a little bit self-indulgent,” says Harrison, “and maybe that’s great.”

The band were still teenagers when they started playing shows, so young they were often hustled out of clubs right after their sets because they were under drinking age”.

I would advise anyone who has not discovered The Goon Sax to check out the Australian trio. Earlier this month, Under the Radar spent some time with the group. It is interesting hearing about the origins of the album title, Mirror II:

“The Australian trio (which also features Riley Jones, and James Harrison) released a new album, Mirror II, today via Matador, their first for the label. Mirror II is the band’s third album and the follow-up to 2018’s We’re Not Talking, which was released by Wichita. John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) produced the album, which was recorded in Bristol, England at Invada Studios (which is owned by Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak>). Since their last album, Forster moved to Berlin and worked in a cinema, while Jones and Harrison formed a post-punk side-project, Soot.

“The first two albums are inherently linked,” said Forster in a press release announcing the album. “They had three-word titles; they went together. This one definitely felt like going back to square one and starting again, and that was really freeing.”

“We lived in a shared house together, this tiny little Queenslander we called ‘Fantasy Planet,’ where we wrote the album,” Jones explained of the album’s genesis. “We were able to go to each other’s rooms and say anything that came to mind and go to the practice room three times a week. It was pretty intense.”

Of the album title, Jones added: “I was reading The Philosophy of Andy Warhol the other day. He said something so perfect… ‘I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing. People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?’ The name [Mirror II] was totally arbitrary to begin with, but it became about reflecting on reflection: we all get so influenced by each other. You find other people who show you yourself, who you are”.

I really love the bond between the members of The Goon Sax. They are a remarkable group who have such energy and chemistry. I feel we will be getting albums from them for a very long time. One cannot hear any sense of them tiring or lacking inspiration. Conversely, they seem to be hitting a new peak. Before coming to some reviews, Our Culture Mag ran a deep and extensive interview with the trio this month. There are some sections of the interview I was keen to include:

“Brisbane trio The Goon Sax – Louis Forster, James Harrison, and Riley Jones – were in high school when their debut album, 2016’s Up to Anything, was released, and they were still in their teens when its follow-up came out two years later. All three members take turns writing, singing, and playing each instrument, and 2018’s We’re Not Talking saw them honing in their endearingly raw brand of guitar-pop as well as their conversational style of songwriting and delivery – in conversation with each other and the listener, certainly, but also with the greater lineage of alternative and pop music that they both are influenced by and belong to. Their new album and first for Matador, Mirror II – out today – is a marvel of craft, dynamism, and emotion: aided by producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding, Dry Cleaning), they’ve managed to expand on the eclecticism of its predecessor while delivering their most infectiously catchy collection of songs yet, a record as mature as it is playful and as relatable as it is surreal and larger-than-life. Despite the group’s diverse sensibilities and idiosyncratic taste, they’ve come through sounding more confident and in sync than ever.

PHOTO CREDIT: Hugo Nobay

It took you three years to write and record this album, and you spent quite a bit of time apart during that period. I’m wondering if that affected your creative process in any way compared to your previous releases.

Louis Forster: Yeah, I think it did. When we’re together, we kind of share what we’re listening to and what we’re experiencing constantly, and I think that was the first time that all three of us went off entirely in our own directions and spent some time alone, just discovering new things independently of each other. And I think it was important for us all to do that alone and it gave us more of a personal identity within the record, but also changed the way that we play together and slot in together, in that we maybe have more of an idea about ourselves – not just the band as a whole, but the parts that make it up, and how we can be the strongest and push each other the furthest.

How do you choose which perspective or moment to try and capture, then? Because there is a kind of selective process, and in some ways it seems like you have chosen the songs or the moments that do take an almost transcendental quality.

James: I think a lot of the songs are quite transcendental. Even in the live show we’ve tried to make it really epic and bigger than maybe ourselves, or larger than life. And that’s kind of how I felt in some of my lyrics, just observing when I feel out of my body because of the things around me or the thoughts in me.

You obviously went into these songs with different perspectives, but was there something that after the fact you realized was kind of a common through-line in your writing?

Louis: It’s something we talked about a lot throughout the process of making the record, was the supernatural and love as this supernatural and powerful idea. We express it in very very different ways, but I think it’s definitely there for all of us. And I think our songs are very genuine and emotional, but there’s also a silliness and a playfulness to them. We all like pop music and rock and roll when it’s silly, in the way that T Rex is silly or in the way that Kylie Minogue is silly. And it’s so genuine at the same time, it’s completely heartfelt, but I think you can almost be more genuine and more emotional when you don’t constantly take yourself too seriously and you’re hung up on some really truthful, honest essence of yourself, but you allow yourself to go into the more far-flung corners of your personality that you maybe don’t feel all the time that are at times, you know, exuberant or whatever.

Riley: I think that a big part of it is filtered through the part where we come together at the end. It’s like you’re bringing your idea to the tribunal, in a way, and then some things stick because they feel good in the context of playing it together. We all have so many ideas for songs – Louis writes hundreds of songs; James writes hundreds of parts. And I – I don’t write songs very often, actually, but I play music a lot [laughter]. But when we come together, that’s when you know what works.

To bring things together, I wanted to relate this to the album title – I hope it was Riley this time who said this, but you’ve talked about how it started as something almost arbitrary and then became about “reflecting on reflection,” and how we find ourselves through other people. In what ways would you say that you’re influenced by each other, and beyond that, also see yourselves more through each other and working with each other?

Riley: It’s very… complex. We’ve known each other for so long now, we’ve spent so much time together. It’s kind of like beyond friendship. It’s more like family, but it’s also something else. Like, I wonder sometimes how I how I exist outside of this context, because it’s such a huge part of my life. And I think that I maybe lean on James and Louis just as I go about, you know, doing my thing in the world. I kind of always know that they’re there in some way. And I think that they’re a huge part of how I present myself too, not because I always say, “Yeah, I’m in this band” to everybody I meet. Which, actually, I kind of do. [laughter] But just in terms of their demeanors; it’s something that I definitely carry with me. Like, the people that you get to understand first kind of inform your understanding of everybody else in the world.

Louis: I totally second that. Sometimes the clothes I wear are informed by the fact that I’ll be standing next to Jim and Riley and what they’re wearing. It’s a conversation where we’re responding to each other in every element of ourselves. And recently, Riley’s been in the UK for a while and we haven’t been doing so much band stuff physically, and I noticed – I don’t know, it’s different when you’re not existing in the context of each other. But at the same time, I completely agree with what Riley says, it is always there”.

I want to move on to the reception that has been afforded to Mirror II. It is a remarkable album that has been met with acclaim and huge interest. In their review of the album, The Guardian discuss how the writing credits and balance has changed in the group:

“With Mirror II, the label appears to have inherited a different band to the authors of We’re Not Talking. After a layoff in which their members variously moved to Berlin, took up free jazz drumming and dabbled in noise rock, the Goon Sax are now more expansive, ambitious and confident, their efforts aided by producer John Parish, best known as PJ Harvey’s primary musical foil. In the Stone and Psychic take a sound that started life as resolutely unvarnished and small scale – part of the appeal of the Goon Sax’s debut album was how listening to it felt like covertly reading someone’s teenage diary – and shift it on to a bigger stage without losing any of the idiosyncratic charm. There’s a muscular power-chord chug underpinning In the Stone, but it’s topped off with disjointed, needling lead guitar and weird spatters of ghostly electronics; Psychic’s sound is built out of an odd combination of drum machine, rumbling distorted guitar and bright, poppy synthesiser. Both songs are superbly written, their sweet melodies carrying lyrics that depict people arguing, frequently at cross purposes – “you said that we were psychic,” protests the latter, “like I’d find some comfort in that” – their drollness amplified by Forster’s doleful, conversational delivery.

Forster was initially the Goon Sax’s primary writer, and he’s still the provider of their most immediate songs – not just In the Stone and Psychic, but the spectacular chorus of The Chance, and Bathwater, which starts out rackety and nervous then suddenly picks up speed, breaking into an assured sprint. But a lot of Mirror II’s strength lies in the fact they now contain three distinct writing voices. Riley Jones deals in songs that bear the melodic influence of 60s girl groups alongside more left-field concerns. She’s apparently a fan of Throbbing Gristle and avant garde 70s Japanese psych-rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés, and you can tell: the chaotic mesh of guitar and synth on Tag keeps spiralling out of tune, at odds with her airy vocal, and the track concludes with a keyboard line that would sound poppy were it not in a completely different key to the other instruments.

James Harrison’s writing, meanwhile, is the toughest sell, equal parts Syd Barrett-ish strangeness and the shambolic 80s indie of Television Personalities or the Pastels: his voice is wayward, his chord sequences lurch at odd angles, the lyrics tend to quirky imagery and non-sequiturs (“let me educate you, you clearly don’t understand – and nor do I”). It’s a hard thing to pull off without sounding faintly annoying and contrived, a trap he falls into on Carpetry, but when it clicks – as it does on the sprawling melody of Temples, or the closing Caterpillars, which abruptly jumps from whimsy to a majestic synthesiser coda – the results are really striking.

The diversity of the writing means that Mirror II occasionally feels more like a hugely enjoyable compilation than a single artist album: whether one trio can successfully contain three writers with such diverse approaches indefinitely is an interesting question. Hopefully yes – in a world filled with artists who present themselves as a perfectly finished product, their notion of themselves already set in stone, there’s something intriguing about hearing a band so clearly in a state of flux, pulling what they do in different directions, developing before your ears. It makes growing up in public seem fascinating rather than arduous”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Elliott Lauren

I am interested seeing where The Goon Sax head. There is so much great music coming out of Australia at the moment. Brisbane has always been a real hub – if an underrated one – for innovative and original music. NME provided their take on Mirror II when they sat down to review it:

“A lot can happen in five years. The group’s latest album, ‘Mirror II’, sometimes feels like the work of a different band altogether. Their first record with indie giant Matador Records (though released on Chapter Music in Australia and New Zealand), it marks a sharp pivot in direction. The Goon Sax has taken cues from new wave and electronica, most evidently on ‘Desire’, a dreamy, fuzzy track overlaid with a sparkly sheen that takes the listener on a five-minute sonic journey. ‘Desire’ floats from a wall of noise to quieter, more contemplative moments, stillness used in a way that the band hasn’t attempted before: creating space for the ideas to make maximum impact.

Jones takes the front seat on ‘Tag’, her gentle vocals swimming over a delicious bed of synthesisers as the band tackles modulations with ease. ‘The Chance’ brings in keys and distortion, with Forster and Jones’ voices combining in the chorus to create an epic, expansive atmosphere. A saxophone punctuates ‘Bathwater’, adding a woozy new element before exploding back into angular guitar pop. These are assured, mature songs bursting with creativity.

That’s not to say that the trademark Goon Sax attitude has vanished: that same propulsive simplicity underpins many of the songs, layered as they are with new ideas. Driven by Harrison’s slacker drawl, ‘Carpetry’ could be lifted from either of the band’s first two albums, and ‘Caterpillars’ begins in the same way before leaking into an extended outro, voices used wordlessly as instruments.

Perhaps the most touching thing about listening to ‘Mirror II’ is noticing little connections with The Goon Sax’s early teenage songs: on 2016’s ‘Telephone’ they sang, “I hate those telephones / they hurt me everyday,” and on 2021’s ‘In the Stone’ they sing, “Didn’t have to sound so disappointed when I called / if you had ever saved my number in your phone”. So much can change in five years, especially in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, but some things will always be the same”.

I shall wrap up. Go and explore the work of The Goon Sax. It is hard to compare them to anyone else. They very much have their own niche and groove. Mirror II is one of the best albums of the year, and it signals a trio with fresh intent and inspiration. It seems like a lot of people are discovering The Goon Sax fresh or have been with them a while but can see them evolved and strengthened. I hope that they can tour worldwide soon enough and bring their music to the U.K. I have not seen them live, though I can imagine their work sounds amazing on the stage. Seeing The Goon Sax take to the stage would be…