Mere Women

When thinking outside the box means recording your sophomore album in a cold-storage warehouse in the height of a rural New South Wales summer, there’s bound to be some questions. Questions that Mere Women axe-man and co-vocalist Flyn McKinnirey is only too happy to shed some light on when discussing Your Town.

“Our engineer’s brother, who owns the place, wanted to record something in there and he thought we were the perfect band to do it,” McKinnirey explains. “It was in Orange, which was probably 35 degrees, but it must have been about four degrees inside the place. We were completely rugged up the whole time!”

The sound that they exited Orange with, however, was nowhere near as freezing as their toes were.

“We wanted to get a lot of natural reverb from where we recorded, we love [that] effect,” he says. “But it’s strange because we recorded in such a cold environment, yet we were trying to make it the opposite. We wanted a really warm-sounding record. So in that sense, it’s strange to think [about].”

The warmth of the record isn’t the only thing that leaps out at listeners who trawl through the 10 enigmatic tracks of Your Town. In comparison to their debut release, Old Life, the most recent release is what McKinnirey describes as ‘cohesive’.

“There is a lot more song structure, which we have never actually worked with before. We were pretty happy with it,” he says. “Some of our more popular songs on the new album have that structure and I think that’s what people like with constant rhythms. Not everyone likes that constant chopping and changing that we did on Old Life.

“Those songs sound like they’re going on a journey and different paths, which is because sometimes it was two ideas completely mashed together,” he continues. “Particularly on Old Life we didn’t write each song all in one go, it was more like a bunch of ideas put together and we made it work.”

With a brand new Korean and Japanese themed clip for their next single, Heave Ho, due to surface in a few weeks, things in the Mere Women camp are definitely becoming more defined. Their previous single Our Street focused on their perceptions of home and upbringing, which makes this next video stand in stark contrast. Catch them in all of their live glory as they support US noise punksters Pity Sex. (CD)

Aug 28, Newtown Social Club, 387 King St, Newtown, $25+bf, newtownsocialclub.com