Beaches Myspace

MP3: The Sky Was White

BEACHES US TOUR DATES

9 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Sunset Tavern	Seattle, Washington
10 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Holocene	Portland, Oregon
12 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Hemlock Tavern	San Fransisco, California
13 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Amnesia	San Fransisco, California
14 Mar 2010 8:00 P	TBC	Los Angeles, California
17 Mar 2010 8:00 P	SXSW	Austin, Texas
17 Mar 2010 8:00 P	SXSW	Austin, Texas
18 Mar 2010 8:00 P	SXSW	Austin, Texas
19 Mar 2010 8:00 P	SXSW	Austin, Texas
20 Mar 2010 8:00 P	SXSW	Austin, Texas
25 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Bellhouse	New York, New York
26 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Cameo	Brooklyn, New York
27 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Death By Audio	Brooklyn, New York
31 Mar 2010 8:00 P	Black Cat	Washington DC

Beaches vinyl available on mail order and at the following stores:

MELBOURNE
Missing Link 405 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Polyester 288 Flinders Lane, Melbourne and 387 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
Greville Records 152 Greville Street, Prahran
Round & Round 513 Sydney Road, Brunswick
Licorice Pie 249A High Street, Prahran
Pure Pop 221 Barkly Street, St Kilda
Record Paradise 100 Chapel Street, St Kilda

SYDNEY
Red Eye 66 King Street, Sydney
Repressed Records 356 King Street, Newtown
Egg Records 3 Wilson Street, Newtown
Beatdisc Records Shop 11 Queensland Arcade 181 Church Street, Parramatta

PERTH
78s 914 Hay Street, Perth
Planet Music 636-646 Beaufort Street, Mt Lawley

BRISBANE
Rockinghorse Records 245 Albert St, Brisbane
Egg Records Level 1, 121 Queen Street, Brisbane

SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUSTRALIAN MUSIC PRIZE 2008

“It’s fuzz, it’s savage wah wah, it’s ripping beats, kinda 60s but with a progressive punk vibe and a little wigged-out Crazy Horse action. It’s a lot of things but most importantly it’s their own unique thing… a beautiful searching sound.”
- RHYTHMS MAGAZINE

“A paean to freedom and knowing its truth, Beaches’ debut is a powerful, sex-driven record smacking of Stooges greatness… Full points.”
- THREE THOUSAND

“Spectral harmonies and guitar drones subverting southern rock and pretty 1960s melodies”
- THE AGE

“They are the wind beneath your mood swings… an excellent, genre-defying album”
- SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (four stars)

“(Beaches) eschew self-conscious pop culture references and posturing in favour of simplicity and the pure joy of creating music that is timeless and uplifting.”
- MESS + NOISE

“When Beaches lock into place, they’ve all the grace of Electrelane and the fire of those roughshod, metronomic instrumentals the Swell Maps used to trade in.”
- UNCUT

“Beaches’ self-titled album is awash with exotic styling… from bong-laden bass odysseys, to spiralling guitar lines, cyclic psychedelic riffing and multiple vocals”
- J MAG

“A gimmick-free, pretension-free bunch of awesome songs by a bunch of awesome musicians who are fighting free”
- INPRESS

“Beaches craft psychedelic music in its prototypical jamming guise; lush kaleidoscopic aural landscapes where every glance reveals something old, something new, something weird and something pretty fucking fantastic.”
- BEAT (Album of the Week)

“Beaches is an album that’s constantly in motion, driven by surging riffs that shimmer and glisten as they swell around the group’s rock solid rhythm section.”
- DRUM MEDIA (CD of the Week)

The debut self titled album by Beaches is a journey into the sublime. Twelve songs born out of sprawling jams, chiselled into rough-diamond perfection, laden with cosmic guitar stretches, vast textures, conjuring voices and phantom frequencies. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, the five women of Beaches have created a psych-rock epic, steeped in the imagery of the natural and temporal world.

Beaches was born of humble intentions, an unmeditated dialogue between friends fuelled by the joy of playing together. After nine months of occasional jams, the band played their first show in October 2007 and have since built an avid following for their trancelike, sonic overdrive live shows. Beaches have played festivals such as All Tomorrows Parties, Big Day Out, Flip Out, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Laneway and Meredith Music Festival, with support slots for the likes of Mogwai, Deerhunter and Ten East.

Beaches are Antonia Sellbach (Love of Diagrams) on guitar and vocals, Alison Bolger (Panel of Judges) on guitar and vocals, Ali McCann on guitar and vocals, Gill Tucker (Spider Vomit) on bass and vocals and Karla Way on drums and vocals. The album was recorded by Jack Farley in Melbourne and mastered by Bob Weston in Chicago and features songwriting by all five band members.

The band’s communal creative processes are collaborative and intuitive, a shared stream of consciousness and subconsciousness which allows each member’s textural layers and sonic harmonics to emerge and merge into the whole. The stylistic shades reflect the shared musical loves of Beaches, from 1960s hit parades to 1970s psychedelia, shoegaze to prog, southern boogie to krautrock. Yet Beaches transcend their influences to create something wholly new. Partly inspired by naturist poetry, the lyrics are almost entirely based in nature; the only manmade objects appearing on the album are a mansion, a car, and an arrow.

The music of Beaches swells. It ebbs. It is already swept away on the next high tide.

From jmag:

From Mountain Fold Music Journal:

Inpress live review:

From Time Off: BEACHED AS

MELBOURNE PSYCHED OUT QUINTET BEACHES MAY NEVER ADORN THE COVERS OF MAGAZINES OR HIT THE TOP OF THE CHARTS, BUT GUITARIST AND VOCALIST ALI MCCANN TALKS DAN CONDON THROUGH THE BAND’S METEORIC RISE IN CREDIBILITY

While commercial success may pay the bills for a little while, the quest for respect from your peers and your idols is often the most common inspiration for the continuation of a musical career. It will not bring the glamour that is apparently associated with chart-topping, fad-pillaging superstars, but this kind of respect from the right places will not only encourage artists that they’re doing the right thing, the band and their music are more likely to remain relevant well after the brightest stars have faded away.

If kudos earned dollars, Melbourne quintet Beaches would shake the shit out of the next BRW Rich List. It seems that everywhere you look right now, the band are being given major props from some of the world’s best-respected artists and some of our country’s most renowned members of the music industry. But guitarist and vocalist Ali McCann says that winning the respect of the band’s close personal friends has been encouraging enough.

“When we first started playing we were just playing to our friends, and a lot of our immediate friends are in some pretty amazing bands that have been playing for years and years and years in Melbourne,” she says. “And they’re honest; our friends who play in bands wouldn’t say that they liked us just to be nice, everyone’s pretty honest about their tastes and how they feel about music that’s going around these days. But also people who are a part of the music community who have good taste, it’s really flattering that they are really into the record and into the band. I think it’s really important to receive those sorts of compliments whose opinions and taste we respect.”

Who are these people? Well for starters, the band were asked to play at this year’s inaugural Australian All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, curated by none other than Mr Nick Cave.

“It was incredible,” McCann states. “I was just going to go anyway – the line-up was too good to miss – but a lot of us were quite skint at that time so when we heard we’d been asked to play we were pretty bloody ecstatic, we couldn’t believe it. Because of course I’m sure there are a lot of other bands who would have loved the opportunity to play such an amazing festival; we just felt so bloody grateful.”

Given the prestigious nature of the festival and the fierce competition the band would have had to contend with to earn themselves a spot on the bill, it’s understandable that they were a little more nervous than usual leading up to the event.

“When we heard we were like, ‘Right, we’ve got to really knuckle down and just rehearse and rehearse and rehearse’,” McCann recalls. “Even with Meredith as well – not that we didn’t rehearse heaps, because we pretty much rehearse every week – but we really felt a bit more pressure to play a good show. We can’t just screw it up and take it for granted.”

If an ATP invitation isn’t enough kudos for you, then perhaps a spot on the final shortlist for the upcoming Australian Music Prize might tip it over the edge. McCann is definitely taken aback by the nomination.

“Yeah,” she says, sounding as if the reality of this fact hasn’t set in. “That’s crazy. We don’t think that we’ll take it out but it’s just great to be shortlisted.” 

From Mess + Noise:

Kick Out The Jams

Melbourne’s most talked about band Beaches tell TIM SCOTT they’re more Slayer than Judas Priest.

As far as promo shots go, it’s one of the more interesting you’ll see. Five young women sitting in a circle by the banks of the Yarra. Dressed in a style that could be described as Amish/inner-city cool. All but one is blonde. A eucalypt branch hangs overhead. It’s all very serene in a Virgin Suicides/All the Rivers Run kind of way. But it’s their distant stares off camera that draw you in. Much like Beaches’ sound, the photograph is beautiful yet mysterious.

“There is a bit of mystery about that shot but that’s the concept we were going for,” explains Ali McCann, one of the band’s three guitarists. “Our friend Lauren Bamford shot it down near the Fairfield boat sheds. We wanted it to be very Australian, kind of like a Norman Lindsay painting only with ladies with their clothes on.”

Not that the band really needs a promo shot. In their short time together, Beaches — McCann, Antonia Sellbach, Alison Bolger, Gill Tucker and Karla Way — have attracted loads of interest in the Melbourne music scene with their sprawling guitar jams that take on elements of psych rock, ragged reverb and free-flowing fuzz.

While Beaches’ formation is not all that unusual — mates getting together for a jam — the speed and impact of their rise has been meteoric. From their first show in October 2007, they have generated the kind of local buzz not seen since Eddy Current Suppression Ring.

“The first show was at a party at my house that we do every year called Rocktober,” says Tucker. “So we played in my lounge room and it was awesome. It was so good for our first show to play at a party in front of our friends.”

Beaches are a supergroup of sorts, with members hailing from such revered local bands as Love of Diagrams, Panel of Judges and Spider Vomit. ”Pretty much everyone we know plays in a band so it’s a pretty vibrant community really,” Sellbach says of her hometown.

“Melbourne is a good place to be in a band because you can play shows every week and still get enough people to come along,” adds Bolger. “There are enough venues and enough bands to play with. There is also a good variety of shows. You can play a party and then do a small pub, then a festival or a bigger gig.”

Sitting in the Northcote Social Club’s beer garden, it’s evident these ladies are first and foremost friends. They finish each other’s sentences and laugh while rolling cigarettes and drinking Coopers. You gather it’s this same sense of intuition, relaxed familiarity and understanding that makes their music so special; a shared stream of consciousness and sub-consciousness that allows a song like ‘The Sky Was White’ to move on its own.

“It has always been about getting together as friends and socialising and having fun,” says Bolger. “Antonia went away for almost three months. We jam pretty much weekly and even when she went away we occasionally got together to play.”

When describing Beaches’ sound, the word “jam” is often used. But you can leave your Hacky Sack at home because this ain’t no Phish or “The Dead”. Songs like ‘Eternal Sphere’ and ‘Horizon’ are sprawling, yes, but also deliberate and precise.

“The songs do start from jams but there is definitely structure there,” Sellbach says.

“When we were showing each other the lyrics we realised that a lot of it related in some sense to nature. There wasn’t anything really about, ‘Oh my boyfriend left me’, or anything like that.”

“It’s not like anyone comes to practice with a full song layed out,” Way adds. “We build the song in the jam room. We might have a bass line or whatever and then it slowly builds up. There will be these long songs and then we look back and work out what parts we like about parts of that, so we kind of make a song by picking the best bits. So it may have a bit of a jam sound, but the songs are actually thought out.”

Beaches’ live show is semi-instrumental. While all members contribute vocals, it’s the three guitars that weave the magic. Theirs is a sound of vastness, with reverb celebrated in all its swirling glory. On their self-titled debut, the vocals don’t arrive until the third song ‘Sandy’, and then it’s only in the title’s refrain. “The vocals are sometimes just more of a texture,” Tucker explains. “Sometimes we try vocals for some songs and then ditch them and decide that it sounds better as an instrumental.

“The words fit with the music in a more natural sense. There is a nature kind of theme but it wasn’t really intentional. When we were showing each other the lyrics we realised that a lot of it related in some sense to nature. There wasn’t anything really about, ‘Oh my boyfriend left me’, or anything like that.”

While not exactly a bidding war, interest in the band from various labels had been strong. They eventually signed with local indie Mistletone, home to Kes, Pikelet and international acts such Beach House and High Places. While most of their labelmates delve in pop and light electro, Beaches are definitely a rock band. The Judas Priest of the Mistletone roster, perhaps?

“No, we are more like Slayer,” laughs Tucker.

Experimentation plays a large part in the band’s approach to music, both writing and recording. The opening song ‘Two Days Passed By’, is slowed down and used again for the final track ‘Field of Dreams’, bookending a truly awesome record.

“I’m really happy with the way ‘Field of Dreams’ turned out,” says Way. “It was the beginning of one of our jams that we really liked the sound quality of.”

Recorded by Jack Farley in Melbourne and mastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston in Chicago, the album has a very natural feel that sits well with the songs’ themes.

“Jack’s awesome. He’s very sensitive to the music. He’s a sensitive guy and he knows our sound and what we want. He mixed us live a bunch of times before we recorded which I think helped. He did the demo of ‘Sandy’ and he’s also recorded our other bands,” says Sellbach.

“I really liked the way he would go, ‘Okay girls, that was good but I think we can do it better’. It was his way of saying, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” jokes McCann.

As good as the new album is, however, it’s the live setting where the band truly shines. An air of excitement wafts over the table when I mention their upcoming slot at the Meredith Music Festival in December.

“It’s going to be awesome,” says McCann. “We are playing on Friday night at 7pm which will be the perfect time. Everyone will have arrived and settled by then. It’s gonna be pretty cool.”

Listening to a song like ‘The Sky Was White’ while sitting outside at dusk with a beer in your hand sure is a tantalising prospect.

“Yeah, it’s going to be pretty special,” Bolger adds.

From The Age:

Life’s easy for Beaches
by Craig Mathieson

A GREAT majority of bands crave attention, a well-financed minority have it manufactured for them and a distinctive handful effortlessly earn it. Beaches, the much praised part-time Melbourne group that has gone from first rehearsal to highly anticipated self-titled debut album in less than two years, are in the latter category. You could call the five-piece outfit a buzz band, but then drummer Karla Way would be deeply embarrassed.

“We’ve heard that and it’s kind of scary, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” concedes the percussionist. “We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing and possibly some people will lose interest down the track. We’ll just stay true to the work and the group dynamic.”

Beaches began as a creative adjunct to a strong friendship. Five women — guitarists Antonia Sellbach, Alison Bolger and Ali McCann, bassist Gill Tucker and Way — who had a shared interest in local music decided that as well as seeing bands and listening to records when they got together, they should make their own sounds. Several were already in notable bands, such as Sellbach in Love of Diagrams, but hierarchies and expectations were of minimal concern.

“We wanted a collaborative creative process, because we’re all engaged in other artistic practices,” explains Way. “We work a lot on our own, so it was great to join together on something different.”

The five have a mutual background in the visual arts: they are also photographers, illustrators and graphic designers. Way, fittingly, has just finished her honours year in gold and silversmithing at RMIT.

Hour upon hour spent in “the hammer room”, her faculty’s shared workspace, prepared her well for taking up the drums in Beaches.

In February of 2007 they plugged in for the first time, crowding into a bungalow behind Sellbach’s Northcote home on a brutally hot day to jam together. Nobody knew what to expect, but their diverse influences clicked. Two pieces conceived that day — the luminous guitar textures of Sandy and the doom-laden primal psychedelia of The Rip — are now part of the group’s excellent self-titled debut album.

“We didn’t think anything was going to come from this,” Way says. “We didn’t know what to expect — we assumed it would be a shambles. Anyone making crazy mistakes was met with nothing but laughter.”

On Beaches you can hear spectral harmonies and guitar drones subverting southern rock and pretty 1960s melodies, while the vocals are more concerned with texture than narrative. If it sounds like they’re not trying, it’s because these friends aren’t. Instinct is favoured over analysis.

“Because everyone has other things in their lives, including bands, it’s not like we’re concentrating on Beaches and getting too serious about it,” explains Way. “It’s rare that we get together, so it’s still about friends creating together and it’s still exciting.”

As such there are no rules and few guidelines. “We’d never go new country — my parents would be very disappointed — and we don’t want our music to have anything to do with football,” Way suggests. “I guess we are a little gang, but everyone’s welcome to join the gang.”

From Inpress magazine:THE TEACHES OF BEACHES
Melbourne psych garage fivesome BEACHES meet ADAM CURLEY at the pub to talk power ballads, truckin’ songs and their wave-making debut record.

It’s nearing 5pm on a Wednesday, and a gettin’-things-done community-rag photographer is squatting down in front of a whitewashed wall outside the Northcote Social Club, five women in dark-lensed Ray-Bans and mixed whatta-find opp shop wear slouching in a line before her. “Can I get one of you to do something whacky?” the photog instructs her subjects hopefully. They look at each other uneasily, one awkwardly stepping forward and faux-obnoxiously folding her arms, eliciting a sling of laughs from the others, before stepping back into her casual slouching pose for the duration of the shoot. “Hey!” the gettin’-things-done photog yells my way as they wrap up. “These girls are in a band called Beaches. They’re launching their album here on the 29th; you should come see ‘em.”

Ten minutes later, the five, still in their shades, are seated around a table in the venue’s beer garden, listing off their media duties on the lead up to the mini launch tour for their debut self-titled record, which has just been released through Melbourne’s Mistletone Records. There’re a few interviews tonight for street press and online media, followed by a photo shoot for a major commuter-friendly tabloid in the morning, as well as some radio. This, of course, is on the back of an already-printed piece in one of the main dailies and a string of favourable album reviews. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Beaches, the Melbourne group made up of Love Of Diagrams’ Antonia Sellbach, Spider Vomit’s Gill Tucker, Panel Of Judges’ Alison Bolger and relative musical newcomers Karla Way and Ali McCann.

Formed as a reason to jam together in 2007, the band’s rhythmic, reverb’d, three-guitar garage psych-trading has seen them move from muck-around project to band with humble ambition. While Sellbach has just returned from the US, where Love Of Diagrams have now finished laying down their next LP, and Bolger is also gearing up for the launch of Panel Of Judges’ new record, the Beaches project is, suddenly, holding its own, on par with its brother and sister outfits. “I don’t think any of us thought that Beaches would be this way; it was just something else to do with friends,” Bolger says. Sellbach nods, “It was interesting because really early on we got attention from Mistletone, and we hadn’t recorded yet; they’d just seen us play and they were already keen to put it out. So it’s kind of just evolved that way, like, ‘Oh, okay, we’ve got this opportunity…’. We’ve been really lucky like that.”

In recording the album with Jack Farley, who has also helmed LOD, Spider Vomit, POJ and St Helens’ work (sometime Mission Of Burma member Bob Weston mastered it in Chicago), the band had to chop their practise-room jams into songs friendly to the 45-minute vinyl format they wanted for the release. “Some of the songs were like 11 minutes or 15 minutes long and we had to pare that down – you know, still wanting to maintain that jam vibe,” Way informs. Sellbach takes over: “We generally tape our jams, as well, and one of the jams made it onto the record. Jack, who engineered the album, did this fancy thing where the song starts out with just us jamming [from a practise tape], and he fused it with us in the studio playing along. That was a really good jam that day and it was a really good sound, so it was cool to get that on the record.”

“We’ve got heaps and heaps of jam tapes,” Bolger says, Tucker cutting in, “Yeah, we’ve got like ten records of B-sides now!”

As well as their jam tapes adding to the album’s layers, a saxophone and recorders were enlisted to give their sandy-stringed sounds a woodwind invasion, the latter coming in on mid-album track Horizons. “There’s two recorders on there, and we played them,” Tucker enthuses, motioning to herself and Bolger. “It was really hard! You couldn’t get any breath; it was like doo doo doo doo… We nearly passed out. At least, I nearly lost consciousness by the end.” Bolger laughs, “Yeah, it’s a long song and the recorders go the whole way through.”

Were there many hours spent in the rehearsal room getting their twin-recorder assault perfect? “No,” Tucker and Bolger crack up in unison. “We’d never even practised playing it once before, I don’t think,” Bolger, who wrote that particular track, says. McCann adds, “She wrote all the parts for the song and we jammed it a week before we went into the studio – once, I think.” The band reveal there will be recorders added to the line-up for the launches.

While they all agree they can now listen back to the album and hear alliances with certain other bands, none are willing to link any direct influences to the Beaches sound. “We’ve always just done our own thing, individually, and then come together, and maybe later you listen to a song and go, ‘Oh, that sounds a bit like this or that’,” Sellbach says. Bolger smiles, “Sometimes when we’ve all DJed on the same night we’ve all brought the same records, though.” Tucker sparks up in Bolger’s direction, “Yeah, you’re like, ‘Gill, I wanna play that Wipers song!’, and it’s like, ‘Too bad, I’m gonna play it’.” Bolger rallies, “You always have to listen out to what’s being played really closely when that happens – sometimes what you’re about to put on has been played like half an hour ago.”

Way adds, “We’ve always kind of shared records and that sort of thing, but there’s been no conscious… We’re tryin’ to find a new sound.” Tucker again pipes up: “Power ballads! The next album’s going to be power ballads!” Way jibes for clarification: “Now, with you, what does ‘power ballad’ actually mean? Because I don’t think that Roxette song can be called a power balled…”

“It is! It is a power ballad!” Um, which Roxette song? Sellbach breaks into the chorus: “‘Hold on tight, you know she’s a little bit dangerous’… It’s a pop song.” Tucker concedes defeat: “Okay, what about that Cher song – If I Could Turn Back Time?” They all burst into laughter.

Another round of beers is ordered and talk turns to the publicised ‘nature theme’ of the album. “That’s just by chance,” McCann says of the fact that all the record’s songs have some ‘new-age’ lyrical connection. Sellbach laughs, “It was more when we were recording and doing vocals that we realised they were all sort of nature themes.” Tucker groans, “Yeah, it was more a realisation later that, ‘Oh my god, we’re hippies!’.”

“Yeah, damn, why didn’t anyone tell us?” Bolger giggles. “We would have put a song about trucks on there.” Tucker agrees, “I wouldn’t have minded getting a truck song on there. Oh, we do have a car song…” Way shakes her head: “But it’s about driving through nature…”

Music Australia Guide:

From Rhythms magazine:

From Groupie magazine:

From the Herald Sun: