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 Two albums in, Brisbane garage-rock stalwarts MEXICO CITY are spreading their wings above our great, dusty land. DENIS SEMCHENKO avoids mentioning swine flu during his conversation with guitarist SIMON RADICH.
Prior to talking to one-fourth of Mexico City, I promised myself I wasn’t going to bring up jalapenos, but tacos and burritos were fair game. Ah, the delicious, meaty wraps. Anyhow … In an undying Burrito Deluxe fashion, the local quartet have been perfecting their blend of country-rock swing and ballsy garage barnstormers since their birth during the days of the "rock revival" boom of the early ‘00s.
"We formed six-seven … maybe even eight-nine years ago," string-bender Simon Radich struggles to recall. "Our singer Adam [Toole] is my best friend from school; I played guitar and we always talked about forming a band after school and shared the same love of music – I think my girlfriend got sick of me always saying ‘When do I get a band?’, so I put an ad in the paper, got a fair few calls and it rolled on from there."
An organic live force from the start, Mexico City have notched up countless gigs but it wasn’t until 2006 when their first album Black Comedy came out. Forward another three years, and the band’s sophomore full-length Brown Bird has been amassing shouts of approval from all corners. Featuring a fuller, crunchier sound than its predecessor, the album also boasts diverse lyrical themes and a few mordant, Nick Cave-style poetic twists.
"I guess we take a bit of what we see every day, the people we know and then… embellish it immensely and end up with songs," Simon laughs. "A lot of it is lifted from newspapers, books, movies – it all goes into the melting pot and out comes … what you hear on the record; you’re drawn to certain topics as a writer and certain themes reappear in your lyrics, like dissatisfaction with the modern society, but I don’t think there’s a certain area that has proved more inspirational than the other – it could be something someone said to you that triggers an idea that you link with something else you’re thinking and, lo and behold, you’ve got a song there."
As well as containing scorching rockers like Damn Shame, Brown Bird also leans toward the storytelling, piano-ballad territory, most prominently with the deft R U Spiritual. "It was written pretty quickly; I wrote those lyrics a little while ago and gave the page to Adam, who basically put the music to it," Simon reflects. "I played those chords on the piano and gave the song a lot of shape, but when we practiced it a couple of times, it was never really quite right – yet we all thought it had a lot of potential and when we recorded it at Mt Nebo, it came together really quickly."
Having recently signed to Plus One, Mexico City’s name is now in Brisbane’s rock books with the help of an enterprise stemming from an iconic, now-defunct city music store.
"We’ve known Simon Homer, the head of Plus One, for years and years when he was running Skinny’s record store," Simon says. "He’s always been a fan of the band –
we’re good friends with similar tastes in music and songwriting and when we were looking for a record label to release this album, he seemed really keen, so we couldn’t have asked for a better outcome."
MEXICO CITY play the Plus One records Showcase at The Zoo on Saturday Jul 11 with Rollerball, Blackwater Fever and Black Mustang. BROWN BIRD is out now through Plus One Records. www.myspace.com/mexicocitytheband
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