Stumbling upon gems in the world of music is not entirely surprising, but you can set your watch and warrant on Art Of Sleeping’s debut, Shake Shiver, being one of the year’s best albums.
Added to that are Caleb Hodges’ open lyrics; the singer-songwriter isn’t one to shy from wearing his heart on an album sleeve. Better still, we’re about to see a whole lot more of the Brisbane indie rockers.
“It really feels like everything is just winding up now,” Hodges says. “We’ve just announced a support tour with Jungle Giants, and then we’ll have the album tour following that, which will be huge. We’ve been sitting on this record for over six months, burning holes in our pockets. It’s great, because by then people will have heard the record and – ha – might actually know most of the songs in our set. It’s been a lot of hard work and fingernail-biting, but man, this is such an exciting time.”
The anticipation for the album is deserved. Due out this Friday, it rarely puts a foot wrong, and should raise Art Of Sleeping to a well-earned new level. Part of this is the quality of the production, the instrumentation and Hodges’ voice, but what keeps you engaged is the strength of each song’s lyrics. There is a good deal of darkness on the record, as exemplified in tracks like the lovelorn ‘I Could Make You Happy’ and the spectacular ‘Jefferson’, whose lyrics lament, “I fall apart / I come undone / I know I’m not the only one / But lately I’ve been feeling like I’m always on the road.”
“A lot of people would see me as a happy-go-lucky, extroverted person, but it’s quite the opposite on the inside,” Hodges says. “You learn to just bottle it all up and keep it there and never really let it out. But songwriting is my chance to say these things without being weird or awkward. That’s what [‘Jefferson’] is really about – that constant unhappiness, where you’re always being told that you want something else and you’re not where you want to be. Success, recognition, money, whatever. One of my favourite songs of all time is ‘Simple Man’ by Graham Nash. It’s such a concise song that has this vulnerability, you feel like he could just fall apart while singing it. He just nails it, and I’ve always wanted to achieve something like that in the kind of lyricism I work on. That’s my hope. Something that is vulnerable and real, not some made-up story with a drum beat and guitar solo.”
That vulnerability is certainly present on Shake Shiver, but make no mistake; this is about as far from a brooding, self-conscious album as you can get. The tunes are catchy as hell, and if it sounds like I’m gushing, it’s because I am – this is a seriously good record, made all the more affecting for Hodges’ raw and earnest songwriting.
“In all honesty, I can’t do the whole imaginary life writing thing. You hear a lot of people finding a character and writing something entirely fictional, and one day it would be nice to do that. But at the moment, the writing I’m trying to do is translating something that’s real, to say something true that might mean something important to other people. That’s how I do it at the moment, but that’s not really a conscious effort. It’s just how they all come out.”
Shake Shiver is out Friday July 17 through Dew Process/Universal. Art Of Sleeping play at1:45pm on Saturday in the GW McLennan Tent at Splendour 2015.
