Melbourne band Beans share new single & video "Dreaming Daisy" taken from their new album 'Boots N Cats' due March 15th via Fuzz Club.
The Melbourne band, fronted by The Murlocs drummer Matt Blach, are set to release their new album Boots N Cats on March 15th via Fuzz Club Records & they are sharing their new single "Dreaming Daisy".
On the track, the band said
""Dreaming Daisy is a song for the devil on ya shoulder. It's basically about being an airhead/alcoholism, and the way addiction can work, speaking on differential sides, It’s about people wanting to live their life to prove right to others or their parents rather than themselves.”
Serving up eleven tracks of rhythmic garage-psych goodness, ‘Boots N Cats’ is the third full-length from Melbourne outfit Beans and the first of two albums set for release in 2024. The long-awaited follow-up to 2018’s ‘Babble’ and 2020’s ‘All Together Now’, it’s a record that finds Beans frontman (and The Murlocs drummer) Matt Blach putting percussion at centre-stage.
“I’ve always wanted to make a drum-based album, dedicated around the beat first and then everything else follows”,
Blach says, explaining his desire to explore
“different production approaches, like hip-hop and crunched drums, and show an admiration and appreciation for the likes of The Meters, Wu-Tang and James Brown”
as much as the acid-soaked 60s/70s rock you’d expect.
What emerges from the beat-first approach on ‘Boots N Cats’ charts mutant garage-rock boogies and festival tent psychedelia, by way of blissed-out funk instrumentals. The line is constantly skirted between a loose, carefree vibe and interesting, meticulous musicianship – never falling into the trap of taking itself too seriously. It’s a sunny kaleidoscope of chugging guitars, driving bass-lines, soaring organs and warm, echo-soaked vocals – driven always by the tightly-wound rhythms and grooves that Blach has been in pursuit of since he was a kid:
“The title of the album comes from me learning drums from my dad. He had a background of German heritage and during lessons would jokingly say ‘nein, boot’n’cats’n’ like a simple 1,2,3,4.”
The songs themselves, Blach says, are
“mostly based on a state of mind or place of consciousness, intended to be open to the audience’s own interpretation as well as for my own self-release.”
Hence, “life’s ups and downs” are placed under the microscope on tracks like the aptly-titled opener ‘Groove’ (based on not wanting to let loose/be yourself and dance in a crowd) and lead single ‘Haunted’ (about that near-universal sense of being ‘Haunted by the fear of failure’).
‘Dreaming Daisy’ is a song for the devil on your shoulder, tackling addiction/alcoholism and
“people wanting to live their life to prove right to others rather than themselves”. Elsewhere, songs like ‘Calling’ take on the paranoia of the times they were made in.
It’s a suitably wonky soundtrack to “that period of Covid time where everyone, including myself, felt like they were going insane.
When people were being really sensitive and reactive, calling people out over pure boredom – obviously sometimes worthy, sometimes far-fetched.”
Beyond its drum focus, ‘Boots N Cats’ also marks another first for Beans, in that it was entirely written and recorded by Blach himself. Setting up a DIY studio in the garage of his North Melbourne home over the pandemic, Blach began working on the record in lieu of the full band (Jack Kong, Lachlan McKiernan, Vincent Clemenston and Mitch Rice) that he’d been jamming and tearing up Melbourne stages with under a number of different monikers since they were all 16.
Making the most of the enforced isolation to venture down new creative roads, Blach came out the other side of the pandemic with two new Beans records in the bag (“Just you wait for the next one, we will go much more folky and chill on lockdown session 2…”). Mixed and mastered by John Lee (“a master from Melbourne who actually became a true friend”), those recordings are now ready to start seeing the light of day. ‘Boots N Cats’, the first of those two records, will be released March 1st 2024 via London-based label Fuzz Club.