Words by Natalie Smith
Photos by Pedro Ramos

Songs are lead singer Max Doyle, keyboardist Ela Stiles, drummer Steve Uren and guitarist Jeff Burch. They live in Sydney, Australia and they’ve been making music together for almost three years now. I thought maybe the informality of my interview with Max and Jeff was because I’ve known Jeff for a while. In retrospect, I don’t think it was that at all. I think it was more that at the crux of their music is a comfortable meeting of the everyday (washing machines, dogs, phone calls) with something verging on ethereal, and something quite thoughtful and considered.

Max’s deceptively simple pop hooks and lyrics are tempered with a thoughtful, stripped back musical repetition, the vocals hovering almost incantatory at times, Ela’s delicate inflection weaving with Max’s voice. There’s a friendly, almost comfortable sense of the ominous quietly everpresent in of a lot of their music, well I think so anyway. Stylistically, Songs dovetail neatly into the meeting place between pop, minimalism and no wave, all shimmering, sprawling guitar drone against stark, mechanical rhythm.

The band just released their first album. It’s self-titled, and it’s pretty damn good.

Whose dog is that? It’s cute.
Max: It’s my dog.

What’s its name?
Max: Mazzy Star.

Max gets a phone call.

I think my favourite description of your sound is Cameron McKean’s, who said ‘it’s the friendliest we don’t care I’ve heard’…
Jeff: He wrote in an email to me one time, after I’d sent him the record.

General conversation as the man who’s come to fix the washing machine arrives. Jeff leaves, I’m left with Max.

I wanted to ask about how you’d describe your sound to those who haven’t heard your record or seen you play.
Max: Jeff, come back now! No. Well, it’s funny cause all the reviews you know, when they try to describe the sound, they’ll talk about how lo-fi and very off the cuff it is as a starting point. Another will talk about how polished and produced it is. So, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s like our sound…because I hear it differently…when I hear our band I just hear me. I don’t get an overall picture. It’s not a complicated sound. It’s very simple, but we’ve used all those simple elements and pushed them as far as they can go. I’m a really unaccomplished guitarist, but within that I get as much as possible out of what I play. So I don’t just bash a chord or, within my limited repertoire. Simple elements but we’ve thought about them a lot.

Jeff returns.

Max: Jeff, how would you describe our sound?
Jeff: Ah, I don’t know. Max writes really good pop songs, so that’s always at the centre of it really. But, what that can be, is anyone’s guess. I don’t know. It’s so lame that a band can’t answer that question.
Max: It’s not really free, or spontaneous…
Jeff: It’s restrained pop, most of the time. It’s always about the song. We listen to a lot of different music. Old, 60s pop to 80s pop to minimalist stuff, to more recent stuff.

What bands? I mean, and I’m stealing this question from an interview I read the other day, but, if you were to curate All Tomorrow’s Parties, what bands would play?
Jeff: Probably some weird stuff.
Max: Jeff would be deliberately obscure. I’d get Fleetwood Mac. No, that’s a joke.

So deadpan…
Jeff: We’d get The Bats to play.
Max: Or The Clean.

Yeah, there’s a definite Dunedin Sound (a cluster of musicians based in New Zealand in the 1980s) to Songs, shall we talk about that?
Jeff: Well, they’re our friends now. I guess we’d just get our friends to play.
Max: Kill Surf City. They could come over.
Natalie: Do the songs change a lot, I mean, have they changed a lot since you started playing them?
Max: I think with our songs, they’ve had a lot of thought, a lot of stripping back, a lot of thinking in how to do it. We’re all quite…constrained, in our playing, quite simple musicians, but we work on it a lot, to arrive at that point.

Thoughtful…
Jeff: I think the kind of pop songs that we play, as long as the melodies are there and the chords are there it doesn’t really matter… they can be played a million different ways but they’re still going to be catchy pop songs. I mean, they might turn out quite simple but you do try various ways of playing before you arrive at something. I think a lot of it does have to do with playing live. I mean when we first started they were quite simple pop songs.
Max: I’m not saying we’re a genius live band by any sense, but we think a lot about how to arrange the songs live now. We’re very aware of playing live and making it dynamic.
Jeff: We don’t have a lot of stage presence, probably, so we work on getting people’s attention through what we’re playing. And, a lot of people haven’t heard us. We’re doing more improvisational stuff, where we just jam. That’s informed it. And being loud. Yeah, just being really fucking loud. Sometimes.

Did touring with Deerhunter have anything to do with that?
Max: We haven’t done any big supports since Deerhunter. I mean that was really interesting, because they’ve got such a massive sound. Working with the same sort of resources, that was quite an education. After Deerhunter we’ve got bigger, louder. I think as soon as you’ve played in a bigger venue, you see how it makes sense to have those dynamics.
Jeff: Running loops and samples to fill everything out a bit, on this last tour we had extra musicians as well. We had Guy Blackman playing with us in Melbourne and Sydney, and Ian Wadley on third guitar as well. So it’s not just the four of us on stage anymore.

You know, Guy used to write for Max’s magazine (Doingbird), and Ian used to be in one of my favourite Australian bands, the Bird Blobs and now he plays in St. Helens. He’s a really amazing guitarist, really idiosyncratic. No one else plays like him and no one else could.
Max: We’ve never rehearsed with him, he just…plugs in and you just hope.
Jeff: Yeah, he’ll just play…he’s really incredible.

Hey, I was thinking we should talk about how the band came to be, and how you all met. I mean, I kind of know, but…
Max: I met Jeff cause he came to help out with my magazine. So, and then, we were talking about music and got interested in having a jam or something, which we did. And then Jeff knew Steve (Uren, the band’s drummer) from his previous band (This Night Creeps), so he got him along to a rehearsal. And I met Ela through work as well. I didn’t really know her, but I asked if she could play an instrument, and she could.
Jeff: The first practise was a disaster.
Max: It’s amazing…
Jeff: It’s amazing that we persisted…

Jeff you and Steve were in This Night Creeps together, is that the band you met in?
Jeff: We went to high school together, so we’ve been friends for a long time. But, Ela comes from more of a folk background, she likes a lot of country music, not bad country, good country. So she kind of pulled it one direction, and then Steve was drumming like he did in our old band, which was really fucking loud so, he was bashing the shit out of his kit…It was pretty funny. But after a couple of weeks it came together.

Songs‘ new full length album is out now on Popfrenzy. They play Sydney’s Big Day Out January 23rd.