It’s become strange to think about A Laughing Death in Meatspace as the anomaly it was when it dropped back in 2018, now that Tropical Fuck Storm has consistently fleshed out that debut’s titular flesh-void in the seven years since its release. Much like the all-too-familiar conspiracies that often materialize in the band’s lyrics, each successive TFS release ventures further down a psychedelic rabbit hole initially opened by the blues-punk sound heard in lead vocalist Gareth Liddiard’s prior band The Drones, presenting listeners with further-warped versions of that project’s vision. Maybe Liddiard puts it best when he tells us of their shared living space during the recording of their fourth and latest album, Fairyland Codex, that they “live like rich rockstar playboys who only own a bunch of broken, leaky old shit and pay really cheap rent.”
The woozy guitars, genre detours, and epic lyrical sagas only intensify on this latest release from the Australian psych-rock Norma Desmonds, its title perfectly encapsulating the fantastical world their music inhabits—as well as the all-too-real world we all inhabit, which seems increasingly shaped by a fatal misreading of Biblical passages every day. In fact it’s these broader ideological themes that Liddiard points to when breaking down the band’s non-musical influences on the project rather than merely the media he and his bandmates—Fiona “FiFi” Kitschin, Lauren “Hammer” Hammel, Erica “RKO” Dunn—consumed during the period of Fairyland Codex’s creation. He may be the first artist to admit to us that neurosis and delusion played significant roles in the project’s creation, though, as he points out, TFS are likely not the first artists for whom that was true.
With the record out today via the band’s new label home of Fire Records, check out each of the non-musical influences he cites below. You can also listen to Fairyland Codex here or stream it below.
Climate
I don’t mean climate change, per se, but more that we recorded during summer. We rent a huge property in the Australian bush by a big river. It’s not Mississippi big, but it’s big. There’s a swampland, a lagoon, and a pretty large creek. There are lots of swimming spots. We moved here about 15 years ago. Fiona and I left Melbourne in 2007 because it was too expensive and we were poor musicians—but we did make a living from music, so that meant we didn’t have to live in a city to work. So we moved to the mountains for a while, and then here. It gets really hot, but we have aircon in the two big old demountable classrooms we put here. That’s our studio. It’s a wreck, but a very nice wreck. So we always record in summer because we spend our winter touring the northern hemisphere during the summer up there. And we swim and drink beer and take our little 1957 speed boat into town to go shopping or to the wineries to buy wine then record a bit. The boat is also a wreck, but a very nice wreck. You can actually see it on the video for our song “You Let My Tyres Down.” We live like rich rockstar playboys who only own a bunch of broken, leaky old shit and pay really cheap rent.
Necessity
Like I said, everything at TFS HQ is breaking or already broken. You have to learn to fix shit, or you can’t live here. After living in the bush for 17 or 18 years I’ve learned to fix big farm pumps, diesel generators, 4WDs, buses, air conditioners, chainsaws, outboards, plumbing, water heaters, washers, dryers—you name it. I’m a jack of all trades and master of none. Our recording studio is the same. I fix microphones, Martins, amps, electronics...whatever. You just have to do it or you’re fucked, because no one is coming to help you. Everyone else in the bush is too busy experiencing too much broken shit, also. We approach music the same way: Like we need a new record. Our agents and managers and record people are like, “Let’s work!” so we need a record to start out. We hit play on our record player and there’s just silence, because we haven’t made a record yet. That’s a problem that necessitates a solution. No album means no work and no food, so we solve that shit like pros.
Neurosis
This helps a lot. Psychosis no, neurosis yes. I honestly don’t know any excellent musicians or artists in general that are not neurotic. I can imagine some semi-pro guitarist or pianist reading this thinking, “That’s not really true, in my professional experience which spans decades, etc. etc.,” but that person is probably just neurotic or psychotic or working for a musician who’s neurotic and who makes up all the songs and pushes all that music biz shit uphill with their neurotic intensity. Everyone in TFS is neurotic to a degree. And everyone pushes things along, hoping for a better state of being that—thankfully for our agents, managers, and record companies—never eventuates.
Delusion
There’s that old adage “too many cooks spoil the broth”—which is true in my experience, but not so much when we’re talking about a band that skews heavily to the female side. The “cooks” mentioned in said adage are almost certainly men, seeing as it’s probably about 400 years old. TFS has me, a straight white male destroyer of the universe and all Peace on Earth, and then Fiona, Erica, and Hammer, our drummer extraordinaire who’s a queer chick who is a motorcycle mechanic, construction worker, and a fire engine driver. So the band consists mainly of feminine energy (emotions, white wine, and party—though it’s not as cut and dried as 75 percent versus 25 percent) and less so the masculine (beer, morning grumpiness, the world is populated by cock-heads and let’s buy fireworks and a gun and some drugs and listen to Deep Purple and talk about the great tragedies of our lives). But what I’m getting at here is that as a collective of cooks who don’t spoil the broth, we inevitably share the delusion of grandeur that’s normally reserved for the main individual driving force of the band. Although I am generally that main driving force.
Not being dead yet
We’re like the kids in the back seat of the family car on a road trip to the holidays: “Are we there yet?” No, we are not. “Are we dead yet?” is the adult version of that question. No, we are not dead yet. So let’s make an album and give it to our record company, agents, management, and publicist and go on tour and see what weird shit happens. That’s pretty much it.
