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 There aren’t too many bands like Melbourne duo FABULOUS DIAMONDS. Drummer and vocalist NISA VENEROSA talks to MICHAEL PINCOTT about new record Fabulous Diamonds Ii, the art of repetition and why they don’t name any of their songs.
“Jarrod likes to call it a sandwich,” Venerosa laughs, referring both to other Fabulous Diamonds member Jarrod Zlatic (keyboard/synths) and the structure of their second full-length record, Fabulous Diamonds II. Its five tracks are set out symmetrically, with three short pop tracks bookended by two ten-minute-plus mind-bending epics. The band’s first record, Seven Songs, was comprised of only shorter tracks, and I ask whether this gravitation towards long-form jams was a new trend for the band.
“We’ve always done that, swapping to and from. We’ve got some new long songs, but the songs we’ve been writing recently have been shorter again. We just go in and out of phases where we feel like jamming out or just writing a shorter pop song – it’s just the vibe at the time.”
One trend that did carry over from Seven Songs to the new record was that none of the tracks are named. It’s not that they’re called Untitled, they just don’t have names (at least none the band will share). Venerosa explains their reasoning.
“The songs don’t contain that many lyrics in comparison to other songs, so if we were to name our songs it would usually just be the one line from the song … we always find that a bit boring, and we can’t agree on names for the songs, so we just decided to not name them.”
Venerosa mentions that the band actually recorded Fabulous Diamonds II around a year ago, and that they’ve mostly moved on to new material when playing live, which will eventually become their as yet unrecorded third LP. But what caused the delay in the first place?
“It just takes us a long time to do things, to decide artwork and mixing. We got Jarrod’s girlfriend’s mother to paint the album cover, and she took ages to do that, we had to really pressure her to hurry up.”
Though Fabulous Diamond’s sound is dense and detailed, it really boils down to the simple elements of drums, vocals and synths. Where the synths create tension, even agitation, the drums provide a primitive stability. Vocals lend a humane and organic element to the music, which by its composition is quite mechanical. These elements constantly rub against one another, resulting in kinetic, interesting music.
“It’s all just through jamming, mostly,” Venerosa says. “Sometimes Jarrod will come up with a keyboard line and I’ll start drumming along to that, or sometimes I’ll have a beat and he’ll jam around that, and then we’ll come up with a melody and the lyrics. We often scrap things as well, come up with songs and then not use them.”
Both of the long tracks on Fabulous Diamonds II are built on repetition. The same melody and beat circles around and around hypnotically, undergoing gradual changes, sometimes subtle and sometimes overt. I ask Venerosa what the key is to making repetition engaging.
“Repetitiveness can be either boring or exciting … it can be certain things to different people … It’s interesting to see how people take it, but for us it’s kind of like … we enjoy that, there’s nothing boring about it for us. I’m sure for other people it would be very boring, but that’s fine.”
You can catch FABULOUS DIAMONDS at Burst City on Friday Sep 3 (AA, alongside Slug Guts, Blank Realm and Feathers), and as part of the Frankly! Pop Festival at The Powerhouse on Saturday Sep 4. FABULOUS DIAMONDS II is out now through Chapter Music. www.myspace.com/fabulousdiamonds
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