FEATURE: Spotlight: The Lazy Eyes — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

The Lazy Eyes

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THERE is quite a lot to get through…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Moran

when converting the great young band, The Lazy Eyes. The Australian group might not be a name that you recognise. You are going to want to check them out. I am going to put in a few interviews with the band, so that we can get a clearer picture and impression. Despite the lack of imagination when it came to naming their two E.P.s so far – EP1 and EP2 -, the music on them is extraordinary! Before getting to the interviews, the band’s official website provides some biography:

“EP2 BIO The Lazy Eyes have cemented their position as a key emerging act in the golden age of Australian psychedelic music. Hailing from Sydney, the band are frontman Harvey Geraghty, guitarist Itay Sasha, bassist Leon Karagic and drummer Noah Martin.

Their sophomore EP, EP2 follows what under traditional circumstances would have been a breakout year for The Lazy Eyes, spent showcasing at a would-be SXSW (US), The Great Escape (UK) and Splendour In The Grass (AUS). Instead, they regrouped to Lindfield Studios, revitalised and focused on bringing their recordings to life.

The new single, ‘The Island’ was written about an imaginary utopia and acts as a sequel to ‘The Seaside’ (EP1). The mysterious Island embodies the escapism the band so often draw their inspiration from. ‘Where’s My Brain???’ is their most distorted release to date, with hypnotic drums and bass and countless polymetric duelling guitar solos on top. 'Nobody Taught Me' was written about Harvey’s trips to visit his grandparents in England and the friends he made while living there as a young boy.

The Lazy Eyes met at a performing arts high school at the tender age of 15. In the time since, they have built a cult following with their magnetic live set. Their debut EP, EP1 saw the band sell out headline shows, amass millions of streams and receive praise from the BBC’s Jack Saunders, Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson, Bandcamp, NME, triple j, DIY Mag, The Line of Best Fit, i-D, Clash and many more”.

Before I get to more recent interviews and a look at EP2, I want to source Atwood Magazine’s interview with The Lazy Eyes. Back in April last year, they were asked how they were dealing with the quarantine situation:

“Tangerine” opens with a simple, yet driving bass line that stands on its own until the rest of the band pops in. At this point, the song highlights a tight bond between the rhythm section while a springy guitar mimics the vocal line highlighting the band’s eye for melody and structural balance. While this approach frames the first verse and chorus of the song, a motif that generally sticks around for the entire first half of the song, the second verse shows the band expanding their sound further. Where once there was a guitar that sounded like a spring being flicked back and forth, the band opts for the shimmering tones of a glockenspiel while the bass takes on a notably thicker, and fuzzier tone sounding something like sub-sonic Velcro being pulled apart.

As the song approaches the final leg, the rhythm section takes over once again, droning only momentarily on repetition until the drums turn the groove and the lead guitar enters with a bursting solo. From here on out is a collage of tight grooves, bombastic drums, and fuzzed guitars phasing in and out across the mix. “Tangerine” is a composite of sounds and ideas that work well right from the start, never sounding out of place or questionable.

Though times are a bit uncertain, The Lazy Eyes are certainly heading in the right direction and Atwood Magazine is excited to see what’s down the line for them. Stream “Tangerine” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and dive deeper into the Australian band in our interview below!

HOW ARE YOU DEALING WITH THE CURRENT QUARANTINE SITUATION, WHAT’S IT LIKE BY YOU?

Blake: It’s not too bad, I guess. I mean, our stats of patients and people suffering from it is pretty low so we’re still going pretty good but, it is still a crazy time.

Harvey: Seems like other places have it a lot more severe, but yeah, I think we’re all just quarantining. Obviously a lot of our friends have lost their jobs and stuff which sucks, but luckily me and Blake teach guitar and piano, We’re keeping the work coming.

GIVEN THE ZOOM AND SKYPE BOOM OF 2020 ARE YOU ALL STILL ABLE TO WRITE AND RECORD OVER THE INTERNET? HOW HAS YOUR PROCESS BEEN AFFECTED?

Itay: Well, usually the writing process is like pretty solo anyway. Me and Harvey write the songs and sometimes we write together but, like what we’re doing these days, we have a lot of material written, so we’re just chipping through and recording it. Til a couple days ago, because the recording process is also me and Harvey, just in our home studio kind of layering stuff one by one. Hopefully, we can still continue to do that, I think there’s a restriction of two people if it’s for work. That’s what we’re doing.

Harvey: The lag is too much if you want to record over Zoom. You have to play a beat ahead to get in time.

SOMETHING THAT I’VE REALLY LIKED ABOUT THESE TWO SONGS, “TANGERINES” AND YOUR OTHER SINGLE, “CHEESY LOVE SONG” IS THE ATTENTION TO DETAIL AND SOUND. ALL THE EXTRA STUFF THAT’S COLORING IN THE SONG. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT ADDING THOSE DETAILS IN?

Harvey: Like Itay said before, the way we approach recording is we lay down the drum track and then just one-by-one record each next layer. That really lets us keep listening through and lets us hear if a certain part needs a certain layer, know what I mean? It really lets us take our time within each section.

Itay: I think in terms of our recordings, there’s definitely two ways bands approach recording: from a live setting or from a stacking process. For us, it’s me and Harvey just layering lots of stuff. The recordings we like have a lot of those extra sprinkles and that’s what gets the attention. That’s what we try and aim for.

Blake: I think each recording takes a long time, but for good reason. A lot of the time is taken to just listen through and to give time before we change things or add another layer because the more you listen the more you might like it. It’s a long process for each song, it’s not a matter of just smashing it out. Like, I think we just want to make sure that it’s the best it can possibly be because when it’s out, it’s out forever. We want to give it the attention it deserves, I guess”.

There is a lot to discover and explore when it comes to The Lazy Eyes. They are such an interesting band with a sound that is hard to resist! Far Out Magazine spoke with the band back in February. They noted how there is a small group of Psychedelic bands coming out of their native Australia:

“The Lazy Eyes are the latest enchanting psychedelic band to emerge from Australia and are a group that needs to immediately be on your radar. Last year was both positive and negative for the group. On the one hand, they released EP1 in June. This debut was a statement of intent from The Lazy Eyes. They suddenly found an international fanbase who devoured the mesmerising sounds that bleed out of every pore of their first EP. On the other hand, there was a global pandemic that obliterated all of their touring plans.

The spine-tingling four-piece met when they were 16-years-old, and all were attending the same performing arts high school. This breeding ground allowed them to cut their teeth, and soon enough, they became one of the leading lights in the Sydney music scene with their jaw-dropping live shows.

Although 2020 wasn’t the perfect way they would have envisioned their ‘breakout year, as gigs were nearly impossible and the fans they were accruing internationally had no chance of seeing their new favourite band as the pandemic struck. The Aussies still used this time wisely to get their heads down and hone their craft even further, with their latest single, ‘Where’s My Brain?’.

The track is hypnotic and leaves you pining to hear more from the band, who look sure to endure an unforgettable year. Gigs are now back up and running in Australia, their EP2 is on the horizon, and things are looking up for The Lazy Eyes.

“It’s had its ups and downs, that’s for sure,” guitarist Itay Shachar says, reflecting to Far Out about their last twelve months. “We’ve been able to find the silver lining in it though, since it’s given us time to chip away at our recordings which we haven’t been able to get to for a long time. We had some exciting overseas travel lined up for last year, hopefully we’ll be able to tick off some of those bucket list moments in the near future.

“We’re really excited to get it out there,” Shachar optimistically notes about the upcoming release. “Kinda like the first EP, it’s been sitting around for a while. We definitely improved our mixing and producing skills when we were working on this EP. I remember that we did the bulk of it just as Covid first hit, so we had all the time in the world to focus, and so Harvey and I worked together for a month or two on it pretty tirelessly. That was our process, the two of us sat in my little home studio in Lindfield and layered parts on one by one. It gives some songs the feeling of a tapestry.”

Those months spent tirelessly working on the upcoming release have allowed The Lazy Eyes to develop their sound even further from their first release. Having nothing else to do apart from being in the studio has only helped enhance their sound. It’s not just a new EP that they’ve got lined-up, however. Next month sees the band headline the inaugural, Lazyfest at Sydney’s Mary’s Underground on March 27th.

“It’s surreal being able to play shows again,” Shachar says about returning to the stage. “It’s definitely a weird vibe playing to a seated audience too, because that’s what we enjoyed the most about playing in the past, the sweating and the moshing! We’re really grateful to be able to take our music back onto the road and get the ball rolling again. Lazyfest is a mini-fest we are hosting with the help of the ‘Play The City’ music grant. Basically, we are trying to create something that would get our past-selves really excited. It’s all-ages friendly and we’re gonna rock out with our friends Stevan and MAY-A.”

Australia’s psychedelic heritage is genuinely second to none, with groups like Pond, Tame Impala, King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard and The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets all having a decade to remember in the 2010s. Shachar says the reason why the country goes hand in hand with the genre so fittingly is that “we feel isolated from the rest of the world down here, or because of the subconscious influence of the beautiful nature, we’ll never know! We are always inspired by those great psychedelic acts that have come from Australia”.

In a little musical/technical detour, I am interested in the guitar sound The Lazy Eyes summon and weave. I found an interview with Guitar. The group revealed details about their set-up and gear:

“Tell us about your current guitar and pedal set up…

“Our current setups have been worked through a million renditions over the course of a few years. We’ve had the same setup for quite a while now, and we get everything we need. We’re not necessarily the type to dish out money and buy the newest, coolest pedal just ‘because’. Most of our purchases, both instrument and pedal-wise, are to fulfil a very specific niche that we hear in our heads or to recreate from the recordings. The three pedalboards between us were very much a collaborative endeavour.”

Of all the music you have released so far, do you have any standout guitar moments?

“At the end of Cheesy Love Song, there’s a bit where the guitar ascends into the sky like a raging siren or a motorbike zooming past in slow motion. We’re proud of that moment and enjoy that the end of that song in general sounds like it has nothing at all to do with the start. Halfway through the take we twist the knobs on the pedal to make the ascending line rush by even faster. In a live sense, we love ripping into the Brain solos. If the vibrations are right and our muscles relax, it can really feel like we’re really playing together… Sometimes, definitely not! In the next part of that song there’s a Shepard tone which plays underneath this slowly ascending and descending ostinato.

Tell us about your most interesting piece of gear…

“We really enjoy nerding out about weird gear. It would probably have to be one of my pedals, called a Maestro Phaser. There was a period where my favourite pastime would be jumping on YouTube and exploring videos of bizarre and wonderful guitar pedals. One night, I stumbled across this pedal and its sound was so beautiful and open. We’re really picky with the way phasers sound, we like when the range is really full, and it can sound wonky if you need it to. Harvey has a vintage pearl phaser on his board, too. But the coolest thing about the Maestro is its functionality. You have to kick the entire front face to turn the thing on and there are huge circular knobs placed on either side of the box so you can roll them under your feet like tennis balls to adjust the settings on the fly”.

I am going to finish with a positive review of EP2. Before that, NME spoke with the guys in the summer. It seems that they put out their second E.P. very quickly. Keen to make up for lost time where they were static in the pandemic:

“By comparison, their second EP (out July 16) is being released at breakneck speed. It offers a more confident, expansive take on the psychedelic rock of ‘Cheesy Love Song’ or the hip-shaking groove of ‘Tangerine’, so it’s not a stretch to assume ‘EP2’ was created following the global attention that ‘EP1’ earned. Besides an outpouring of local support, the band were booked at taste-making festivals like SXSW in America and England’s The Great Escape. “We didn’t feel worthy,” says Geraghty.

Turns out ‘EP2’ was also written years ago while the band were still in school, and their upcoming but unfinished debut album was written around the same time as well. “It’s almost done,” beams Geraghty – though maybe take that with a pinch of salt. “Personally, something that I’ve taken away from this band is how shit always changes,” chimes in guitarist Itay Shachar.

“They’re all good songs,” says drummer Noah Martin of their decision to still release those early tracks, even though they haven’t stopped writing in the three years since graduation. “It makes sense to let them see the light of day. Eventually we’ll get to the stuff we’re writing now.” The leap in quality, they say, comes from the band upgrading their production toolkit from Garageband to Ableton. “We just got the hang of how to record things. We know how to get what we want onto the tracks,” says Shachar.

“We don’t want the songs to ever fall on deaf ears. There’s not really any rush anyway,” he adds. “It doesn’t feel like we’re taking our time. We just want to do things right”.

It has been a strange yet busy last year or so for The Lazy Eyes. They emerged and captured attention before being tipped as a band to watch. The pandemic was a blow for a band located in a country remote and detached from nations like the U.K. and U.S. SPIN spotlighted them. The band were asked about their recent success and rise to critical focus:

“What does your typical songwriting/production process look like? Is there a set formula or does it consistently evolve and shape-shift along with your ideas?

Harvey and I write the songs for the band, sometimes together sometimes separately. The recording process really changes up based on the song, we used to do all the layers just Harvey and I, now we’re experimenting with live band recording which has been so fun and rewarding. In any sense, playing the songs live gives fertile ground for each of us to speak our own musical voice through our instruments and let that seep into the arrangement. Usually over time things just mutate until they reach their final form.

How do you define and perceive success? What’s your journey been like this year in the pursuit towards it?

Yeah, it’s been super confusing this year! It’s hard to gauge your own success when suddenly a lot of the things that you thought would lead you there are no longer a viable option. I guess you just have to find happiness in other places. For us, lockdown has brought us really close as friends and with our close team, too. It’s super lucky to always feel like you have someone to talk to who’s in your boat, and in a little way, isn’t cultivating that feeling with another person already the biggest success of them all?

You’ve just released your second EP, EP2, which presents a collection of pure psych-rock/pop singles – what track challenged you the most to record? Which one was the most enjoyable? Which had the most to say?

Thank you! I think EP2 centres around the recording of ‘The Island’. It’s the first track Harvey and I started producing when we went into the project. We really wanted to challenge ourselves to be really creatively open to any ideas or sounds that we thought would work in a recording, so it ended up sounding a bit like a tapestry where one thing could come in for a few bars and then vanish forever, or the scenery would suddenly change. ‘Bon Voyage’ by Melody’s Echo Chamber really influenced us to think that way. ‘Nobody Taught Me’ was the most straight ahead to get down, just a simple little Grandaddy-esque rock number! ‘Where’s My Brain???’ on the other hand, was not, haha! We really struggled to capture the bashy yet precise feel of the guitar solos. So we ended up recording them together in the room and head banging to nail the vibe down.

Psychedelic music and the psychedelia/counter-culture movement can be known as an era of exploring existential curiosities – what are some existential questions you think about? Have any been explored in your music?

Oh man, now that’s a question! Lemme get my bong out real quick, just joking. To be really honest, we’re just like any other friend group of young guys going through this weird world. We deal with the same existential doubts as everyone else! “Will I find true love?”, “Will the band make it?”, “Will I ever be able to smooth out the air bubble I trapped under my phone’s screen protector?” The truth is, nobody knows the answer to these questions, and that is the beautiful thing, that at least we’re all in awe together.

Definitely I think that there are a lot of themes of love that come out in Harvey and my songs, and we chat about the occasional Tinder swipes and stuff in practice. It’s just natural to vent about, right?”

Just before ending the feature, it is worth highlighting a review for the fantastic EP2. Another fantastically inventive and memorable release from the Australian crew, there were some positive reviews a-plenty. This is what ALT CITIZEN wrote in their review of EP2:

“EP2 opens with the chugging sci-fi psych anthem “Where’s My Brain???,” a motorik driven headtrip of nonstop forward momentum bristling with nervous energy and borderline unhinged mania. Spiky guitar peaks up amongst the rhythm, trading places with spacey synth in a psychedelic call-and-answer that refuses to let up over the track’s nearly seven-minute runtime. The only reprieve takes the form of a guitar riff that shines as bright as a polished chrome bumper on a vintage VW bus, pitted with tiny pockmarks of rust from warm saline ocean breezes for the perfect amount of timeworn patina.

“Nobody Taught Me” sports some of the most intricate and truly personal lyrics on EP2, pivoting away from ambiguous psychedelic motifs to focus on genuine feelings of loneliness with clear-eyed sobriety that serves as a welcome palate cleanser between the swirling double vision quests that bookend this release. The relative instrumental simplicity allows the lyrics to take center stage. The standout rhyme “there was nothing more fun than that, and as sure as that, now I really want it back. Please don’t go, go home” is delivered with a dynamic cadence that flirts with radio-ready pop, adapting the band’s established sonic palette into adjacent forms that underscore the secret of The Lazy Eyes’ wide-ranging appeal.

“The Island” opens with lilting motif that feels lifted almost wholesale from some forgotten mid-1960s British invasion band, gentle acoustic guitar lulling the listener into a false sense of easy complacency before abruptly shifting focus, dropping into a slinky groove that underpins the remainder of the track. Bass and drums undulate and flex with rubbery dynamism as a thick layer of guitar-forward Innerspeaker-era Tame Impala is slathered on top like psychedelic jam on hearty Britpop toast.

The simple, childlike lyrics are delivered with a remarkable air of nursery rhyme innocence, describing the features and topography of an idyllic island refuge replete with casual intrigue. The lyrics serve as connective tissue between sonic vignettes that interpret the core musical theme in varying shades of wonder and anxiety, ebbing and flowing against white sand beaches with the frothy unpredictability and hypnotic rhythm of surf tinted golden in the sunset. As the sun sets behind the horizon line shadows begin to stretch across the final minute dropping “The Island” into a brief but disorienting gloaming, summoning amorphous phantoms with a rat-tat-tat to dance among the palms before snapping out of existence as the track ends, swallowed by the night.

Stylized under a heavy layer of sepia tinted film grain accented with perfectly executed lens flares, the video for “The Island” follows the band as they venture from the coast deep into the jungles of the mind, indulging in forbidden fruit and stalked by mysterious masked figures lurking amongst the fronds. As the long, strange trip progresses the band begin to lose their grip on reality, ultimately joining their masked stalkers in a Lord Of The Flies inspired ceremony in the dead of night, human eyes flashing behind grotesque visages. The skillful juxtaposition of marvelous innocence and spellbinding paranoia are the heart of darkness buried deep within “The Island,” a potent combination that stands as The Lazy Eyes’ most compelling quality”.

A great band that should be on your radar, ensure you listen to the amazing The Lazy Eyes! With things opening up, they can take their music internationally. I feel we will get more music from them next year. With everything they record, they get more assured and outstanding. With clear vision and a building fanbase, The Lazy Eyes are…