Following up last year’s track ‘Adelaide’, antipodean jingle jangle exponents Sand Brothers are back with ‘The Usual Things’. Burnished with a Hammond organ filigree, this is an expansive cinematic track that seems to exude from every sonic pore a dusty Australiana that reflects long endless road trips across red deserts under clear blue skies.
The impassioned vocals exhorts like an urging preacher – genetic elements of The Triffids cannot be ignored with the declamatory exposition – and the chorus soars skywards with harmonies and passion. This is a compelling track that is threaded with a melancholy and urgency.
Rick Sands says of the track:
The bulk of the verses were written about 20 years ago, when I’d become itinerant and living out of my old van in Far North Queensland. It languished in a notebook incomplete, but in the weeks leading up to our last recording session, I happened upon it and knew it deserved further work.
The day before recording, the chorus dropped in out of the ether and I trimmed it all down to a tight, core feeling. The band was introduced to the arrangement on the day and it was the last song of the session. This is the third and final take. We were beat: soaked in summer heat and sweat. We rewound the tape and knew we’d captured what we were after.
The result is something quintessentially antipodean but with a universal appeal:
‘The Usual Things’ is out now and available through all the usual download and streaming sites. It comes ahead of the band’s new album entitled ‘Too Much Sky’ due for release in May on Summer Storm Records, Australia.
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