Queensland is a funny place.
Look!Pond is a three-piece; they live in Brisbane. Their singer and main songwriter Matt Kennedy lives down the road from SunCorp stadium. It’s not hugely surprising then, that they sound the way they do: noisy, dissonant; hints of Big Black, Slug Fuckers and Primitive Calculators, there’s a little residue of sprayed blood on guitars that squeal wildly. You could describe them as aggressive, this has been done. Matt is timid; certainly not the aggressive or violent type, but there’s only so much you can bottle up growing up in suburban Queensland.
“It’s confronting music. I guess I would agree that it’s pretty aggressive music. When I wrote those songs I was living on the Gold Coast and feeling very isolated. I felt kind of stuck; I never learned how to be properly angry about it, so that’s where a lot of the songs came to exist. The songs were all written in a space under my Dad’s house and I think maybe you can feel that frustration and isolation of being stuck there in the songs; a house next to a highway, the ultimate Gold Coast suburban sort of location. It was a pretty depressing place to live there; there really isn’t much there at all. Music probably would’ve stopped me from going insane. I spent my high school years there and then after that I couldn’t seem to get it together enough to move out when I really didn’t want to be there.”
Furthermore, for a culture driven by sports, XXXX beer, beaches and Big Brother it’s unsurprising to see the small pockets of musical enthusiasm consistently popping up. Here, kids make their own fun. Thankfully, fun for them comes in the form of music; some of the most inventive and passionate stuff that you’re likely to hear right now in Australia.
“Brisbane’s pretty small and insular,” Matt explains. “I guess because it’s a very cluttered city, everyone lives kind of really close together; everyone knows each other, if not directly then through another person. There’s definitely a sense of community. It seems like there’s one large sort of scene without very many particular niches. It’s basically just friends making music for friends. The shows here are very small and it’s often the same people coming to shows each week, the same faces every show.”
A strong ethos of DIY runs throughout this scene. It’s easy to be drawn to this sort of music as opposed to the next-big-thing on some major label. Somehow it’s more authentic, more sincere. Matt himself is more drawn to the local aspects, friends making music for friends.
“We’ve been independent from the very beginning. We funded our whole [debut, self-titled] album, paying for everything ourselves: the recording, mastering, getting the CDs done and everything. That cost us a lot of money that we haven’t really made back, but it’s been good; everything seems in our reach and we have complete control over everything we do. I don’t think I would want to change that anytime soon. We don’t really have anyone to distribute the album, we had to do it ourselves. When the album came out we never really did interviews or anything; there were only a few reviews that came out, that was basically it. It was more word of mouth I guess. But I’m not sure how many we’ve even sold, or what sort of effect it’s had, or how much it’s been heard. It ‘s sort of puzzling in that way.”
“The band that does everything for themselves and comes from the ground up, I feel like I respect that more. The same goes with venues and things like that, Chooch-a-bahn and Yvonne Ruve. The bands that frequent these sorts of things seem more meaningful to me, compared to a band like The Arcade Fire who are at that level of success and they’ve got a big record label and it’s not quite as personal or accessible as a band that comes from your area and just do everything themselves. I haven’t bought music in a long time; I can’t really afford it. A lot of my friends are making really really good music at the moment. I really like the music my friends do; it’s really good being surrounded by this.”
Rather than just shows in pubs or music venues, Brisbane’s culture of house shows bolsters a music scene that it seems fair to say is positively thriving. A lot of these bands will never leave the walls of these lounges and kitchens and laundrettes, but maybe it’s for the best; a well kept secret of completely unabashed creation.
“It’s hard to see if a band is sincere or not; it’s really hard to tell,” Matt suggests. “But if you do realise that a band truly is for real, then that’s an amazing feeling, it’s really special, I think.”
Brisbane is an undeniably small place, though; possibly too insulated for some. Matt feels this sensation; sometimes there’s too much of a bubble surrounding it all, begging the sort of existential music questions like whether or not anyone else is hearing this music and paying attention. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter. It’s the nature of a scene; sharing and supporting.
“At a house shows it’s always going to just be people you know, but playing somewhere like Ric’s there’ll be people who’ve just wandered off the street, some fresh faces. But I don’t really get sick of house shows, just because they’re usually pretty fun. If someone can put on a house show on a weekend where there are no other shows on or nothing else to do, then people are really going to appreciate that. Instead of a big town like Sydney that is so spread out and where there are so many things happening and there’s no real focus.”
Look!Pond frequently play live at all sorts of venues, from the cosier to the more constructed. They’ve been playing material from their album a lot over the past year, but are now taking time to focus on making new songs. They’re “creeping in slowly,” says Matt.
For some reason I kept thinking about the film Repo Man from 1984. Matt is no Emilio Estevez; nor is he a punk rocker, but there’s certainly some level of alienation that comes from growing up in Queensland. Without playing up the notions of suburban frustration, I thought that punk music really makes sense in this sort of context. Look!Pond are not a punk band, but there’s an important catharsis in their music and performance that makes it a necessary outlet for all in the band.
“It’s not something I consciously think about. I mean, I do listen to a fair bit of punk,” Matt responds. “But it also depends what you classify as punk; people always have different ideas about that. The whole ‘post-punk’ term might be a bit overused now, to the point where if I saw a band described as post-punk now, it probably wouldn’t interest me as much because it’s just a buzzword. All those bands that were post-punk 25 years ago, that seems to make sense. But being in the now, it’s really shifted.”
Yes, it’s easy but reductive to blab about ‘post-punk’ in terms of loud guitar music like Look!Pond, but the label is certainly something that is frequently attached to the band. There’s a lot of real influences that these three have taken cues from.
“Out of Brisbane, bands like The Saints seem to me the biggest part of the musical history,” says Matt. “There seems to have been a really good post-punk scene going on there, bands like those on the Cant Stop It compilations; those bands are amazing. It feels like something to be proud of and bands like that have influenced us and a lot of other people that I know; a lot of people seem proud of it in Brisbane.”
