“We didn’t find it too hard, just because of the connections we had and people asking us to do everything from art galleries to actual clubs and what not,” says Thomas.

Already with a pair of EPs under their belts – 2004’s cassette-only Taste The Rainbow on Adelaide indie F’ken Stoner and last year’s three-inch CD/EP Some Songs For Shame on Perth label Eerie Stratum – the quartet has now delivered a full-length album, Cockroaches, with an accompanying EP Roaches to be released on the band’s own Sabbatical label.

“The EP’s a 26-minute improvisational piece that centres around piano and various electronic noises,” summarises Thomas over the phone. “We made it really sparse, almost like Keith Jarrett and those chin-stroking piano players but with lots of weird noises and guitar pick-ups being scraped with metal spoons and that sort of stuff.

“We did it in the same studio time as the actual album because we wanted to get these little thirty second to a minute pieces to break up the record but we liked them so much we decided to put them out as an EP on their own. We’d paid for the studio time and we had about four hours left and there was a grand piano in the room so we just set up and we had some really great engineers in Neil Thomason (ex-Ricaine) and Sloth (Magic Dirt live sound).”

TRM’s sonic stew may, as the cliché goes, be tough on the ears but it’s good for the soul. Hardly surprising, Thomas admits to being musically swayed by ‘80s noise-rock acts The Birthday Party, Big Black and Scratch Acid – sounds rarely heard in 2006.

“I sort of reference that period in music as influences on the group. Grover and I came from these pisstake screaming hardcore bands that were all a bit of a gag. And Scotty is just the personification of grunge, especially with his guitar playing. I think he and Grover really make the band stand out on their own. Scotty’s not a technical riff master, finger-tapping guitar solo type of player, it’s a much more textured sound and more about the feel I guess. If you listen to the album, it’s not centred around guitar riffs. What I do on bass is probably more where the actual anchoring of the songs comes from.”

Having penned almost 30 songs in two short years, it seems True Radical Miracle have sucked dry their creative well on Cockroaches. With Scotty’s recent return to Adelaide and a lack of rehearsal opportunities, the band’s highly collaborative methods means new material may be a while coming.

“We don’t have a songwriter per se,” Thomas confides. “If I or Scotty was the songwriter then we could keep moving forward at the rapid rate that we have been. It all just comes out of jamming; we don’t come in say ‘okay, I’ve got this riff and I want the bass to sound like this and the guitar and drums to do this’. This is the only band I’ve ever been in where I can say the end result is the sum total of everyone’s contributions.”


True Radical Miracle play the Whitehouse Gallery on Friday July 28, Ric’s on Saturday (afternoon) July 29 and The Depot on Saturday (evening) July 29. Cockroaches is out through Missing Link.
 

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